ONCE he started the music—flinging up his right arm, while his left hand worked the decks to bring it flooding, then crashing in—the crowd in the hall could not resist. Caught up with him, they would shudder, pulse, sway, dance, then go “completely apeshit”, pumping their arms, buckling their half-naked bodies. He usually viewed it from above, a seething mass of sweaty shoulders, whiplashing hair and imploring hands, cut into sections by laser lights or masked by drifting dry ice. Relentlessly the oontz-oontz-oontz-oontz of a bass beat, Avicii’s signature, took them over. Wildly happy, his mostly millennial worshippers left the world behind.

“Taking them on a journey” was what he felt he did—a skill that led him to perform for gatherings of thousands all over the globe, headlining the festivals of electronic dance music in Europe, America and Australia, becoming a staple in the glitzy EDM nightclubs of Las Vegas, playing the Hollywood Bowl and electrifying the close of the World Cup. The energy of his music could carry ravers anywhere. Like the nerdy clerk in the video for “Levels” (2011), his breakthrough hit, his fans could dance crazily round the office in a perfect storm of paper. Or like the plump, fed-up girl in the video for “I Could be the One” (2013), they could be wafted to a paradise island full of feasting, fun sex and rides on white horses along the beach. Forget desk-drudgery, crashing banks, Middle Eastern wars. They could be there.

And they all looked to him to perform this miracle. The DJ was once a figure on the side, half-hidden behind the decks, just a means to the beats. But he, though in jeans and T-shirt and backwards baseball cap like some technician, was a superstar of the club scene. He could earn $250,000 a night, and in 2014 Forbes estimated his earnings at $28m. The perks were good, too. Girls threw their bras at him, adoring his snub nose and platinum hair. The partying was continuous. Every time he flashed a “C” sign to his bodyman, Felix, during a show, another glass of champagne would be put into his hand.

Lowest hell

It was not bad for a quiet, shy boy from Stockholm who would have been happy just making remixes in his bedroom, posting them online and doing the odd small gig. But at 18 he fell in with Ash Pournouri, a club promoter, who said he could turn him into “the biggest artist”. Together they made about 100 tracks, mostly riffs on tunes by other writers, underpinned with that mesmerising four-chord beat of deep house, the sound he loved, and layered with synthesiser effects. He also wrote his own songs, such as “Wake Me Up”, borrowing from whatever interested him, even folk, country and bluegrass. Cool inspirations came almost organically. To him, all music was there for the mixing.

Yet learning to DJ confidently in public took 18 months, and his stage-name was the Buddhist term for lowest hell, as if he recoiled from the start. He didn’t enjoy people looking at him, with the acne marks on his face. Before shows he was almost unbearably nervous, smoking one cigarillo after another. Online stuff hurt. Critics accused him of doing nothing on stage but fiddling with the volume on prerecorded playlists, otherwise just jiggling and smiling. How was that difficult?

He admitted to Jessica Pressler of GQ magazine that yes, volume control was a lot of it. And yes, the playlist was planned, not adjusted moment by moment in the old style. He then scrambled to defend his art, explaining how carefully he had to work out beforehand how to build up energy in a set, how to fade expertly out and in, how to keep the crowd so into it that they wouldn’t, couldn’t leave. It was good; stars like Madonna and Coldplay lined up to work with him. Nonetheless, doubts pricked. He felt only reasonably happy, confessing that when that stupid bright light was on him, it felt so awkward.

Lucid moments became rarer as he jetted from city to city and club to club. His diet became Bloody Marys at the airport, wine on the plane, Dom Pérignon during the shows. In 2016, after severe pancreatitis and the removal of his gall bladder and appendix, he gave up performing live. But the hints were already there in the lyrics for “Wake Me Up”, which he had played at Earl’s Court in 2014 in a whirl of eight layers of lasers and a diamond-shaped screen that reflected light as fractals:

I tried carrying the weight of the world

But I only have two hands.

The hints were also there in the video for “Feeling Good” in 2015, his version of a song recorded by Nina Simone, in which Volvo used him to drive a new car to places where he could wander at sunset, gloomy in a woolly hat, among sand dunes and wintry fields. This, said the voice-over, was “the chance to be just—Tim”. Most of the time, he turned away from the camera.

He had too little left for the life of a real person, he wrote in an online letter to his fans. He wanted to go back to creating music in his studio, where it all made sense. Meanwhile, as 2018 began, he posted pictures on Instagram of himself playing with his dog, exploring flea markets and contemplating empty, leafy lanes. Every photo shouted happy escape, but never so loudly—never so persuasively—as his beats had shouted it, not all that long ago.