The accounts of the specific experience of pop stardom at his level of visibility in the late 1980s are useful as context. The promotional circuit for a global pop star in 1987 and 1988 involved a specific kind of sustained performance of the self that is exhausting in ways that are hard to communicate to people who haven’t experienced it. It was not merely the physical travel, though the travel was constant — Tokyo, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Sydney, New York, Stockholm, all in the course of a promotional cycle. It was the performance of the pop-star persona in every public context: the interviews in which the same questions received the same practiced answers, the television appearances in which the energy had to be projected convincingly regardless of what was happening in the interior life, the constant maintenance of the version of himself that the industry needed him to be.
He had watched what this sustained performance requirement did to people who didn’t have the personal stability or the financial resources to step away from it when it became unsustainable. His manager’s consistent sobriety — he has cited this as a specific stabilizing influence during the period — was evidence that it was possible to move through the industry without being consumed by its most destructive tendencies. But the stabilizing influence of a sober manager was not the same as the absence of the tendencies themselves.
The question of what would have happened if he had stayed is, of course, unanswerable. But the available evidence suggests that the decision to leave when he did was calibrated correctly for the person he actually was: someone who needed creative control, who needed to be present for his family, who needed to build something genuine rather than perform something constructed. The decade in Surrey was the foundation on which the genuine creative work of the later years became possible.