The funny thing about fame is that most people flirt with her for an eternity – musos especially – and then, when they finally bed her, she fucks them up the ass in a lot of ways.
Celebrity comes with just as many lows as it does highs: there are the heightened expectations, more free drugs / sex / booze than one person can say ‘no’ to and, often, a shitload of money just begging to be spent irresponsibly… all while the world watches.
Flume aka Harley Streten aka our biggest electro expert possibly ever has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame over the last couple of years, and opened up about the different ways it’s affected him in an interview for Rolling Stone Australia’s July issue (on sale now).
The now 24-year-old admits he got a head the size of a watermelon after EP ‘Flume’ blew up in late 2012-2013, resulting in what he refers to as his “dickhead phase”.
“My dreams were coming true,” he says. “There was a while there when I thought I was king shit. I definitely remember having a huge ego. I was on a cool label, I had lots of fans and I had people telling me how amazing I was all the time.”
The interviewer not-so-subtly hints at the free pussy and coke stuff that was more than likely handed to Harley on a silver platter as his star rose, of which he admits to dabbling in (as if you wouldn’t tbh).
“There was a lot that was on offer and there was a lot that was taken advantage of. But I don’t really want to tell you about it. I was 20, 21 years old. It was fun times… fortunately I had my manager and good friends to slap me and get me to pull my head in.”
He also went deep on the heavy burden of being expected to produce a stellar follow-up album to ‘Flume’ – which we now know as ‘Skin’, currently killing it on charts the world over – and how the pressure from not just those around him but himself resulted in a nasty case of writer’s block.
“There were months and months where I couldn’t write because I was too stressed out,” he says. “Not so much expectations of other people as much as expectations for myself. I hold myself to a really high standard. Now that I’ve put out the first record I can’t put out anything else that’s less than that. It has to be as good or better now. It was a massive struggle and that’s why I took a while.”
He says he’s “grown up a lot” since then, but that it’s been “a turbulent time” to get where he is now.
“I was dropped in the deep end, dealing with having money for the first time, having independence for the first time, going through the dickhead phase. There were all these firsts and it was a mental time. I’m through it now.”
Keep killing it, boi.
Source: Rolling Stone Australia.
Photo: Instagram / @flumemusic.
