The awesomely successful young pop star, Adele, announced this week that she was going to take five years off to focus on her personal life. She has since backtracked on the idea, but such talk of withdrawal from the limelight does invite comparison with the hopefully temporary retirement of another lauded singer-songwriter, Lily Allen.

Never has it been more apparent that great success in popular culture can carry great burdens, too. Allen is to be admired for having the confidence to step off the merry-go-round. For her, the spotlight felt particularly harsh. She told me in an interview that the relentless media attention made her feel "like a caged animal".

Mass-market success now brings with it such avid attention that, to bowdlerise the phrase coined by David Quantick in the mid-1980s, pop really is beginning to eat itself. Words such as "goose", "killing" and "golden eggs" spring to mind. It seems a shame that stars who bring so much pleasure to so many people can find that wonderfully creative activities, such as writing lovely songs and singing them perfectly, are sometimes rewarded so overwhelmingly that the rewards can seem almost like punishments. The price of fame, like the price of so many other things, has been unsustainably inflated.