By India Block

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Lola Young, 24, was supposed to be in the thick of promoting her new album, I’m Only F**king Myself, which landed last month. The young star had a tightly packed schedule, with 31 shows to play before the end of the year and tickets on sale for gigs planned up until June 2 2026.

But after collapsing on stage in New York, Young and her team have pulled the plug.

“I’m going away for a while,” Young said in a statement. “It pains me to say I have to cancel everything for the foreseeable future.” The south London singer promised refunds for all the cancelled appearances and thanked her fans for their messages of support. “I really hope you’ll give me a second chance once I’ve had some time to work on myself and come back stronger,” she added.

Fans were left in shock after Young got into difficulty on stage at All Things Go Festival in New York. She appeared to be trying to attract someone’s attention before she keeled over backwards during a performance of her song Conceited.

“I just watched Lola Young collapse mid song and get dragged off stage like a corpse,” one audience member posted on X. “I’m in a stadium full of frightened lesbians wondering if we just watched someone die and When Did You Get Hot by Sabrina is being blasted at us full volume.”

Prior to the collapse, Young told the audience that she had been going through “a tricky couple of days” due to a “sensitive matter”.

Young’s team had cancelled her performance the day prior at the Prudential Centre in New Jersey citing her “mental health”. “There are very occasionally days when myself and my team have to take protective measures to keep her safe,” said her manager Nick Shymansky.

It’s not the first time that Young has had a health or technical emergency during a performance. While performing in 40C degree heat at Coachella music festival in April she had to run off stage to be sick. “Not me doing my first Coachella & gagging & throwing up all the way through the set,” she captioned a video of the incident she posted on Instagram.

Her in-ear monitor failed during her performance at Capital’s Summertime Ball in June. With both incidents, Young pushed through to finish her set despite the discomfort.

Fans expressed concern that Young’s album rollout schedule appeared so packed in the lead-up to her collapse. She was due to start her tour of the UK, with 10 performances in eight cities in back-to-back pairs in October, before heading back across the Atlantic in November to perform 21 gigs in 18 cities across Canada, North America, and Mexico in the lead-up to Christmas.

It would be a gruelling schedule for any artist, but Young has multiple mental health issues to manage.

Young was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder at 17, a condition that combines the mood symptoms of mania and depression of bipolar disorder, with the psychosis symptoms of schizophrenia. She has previously been sectioned during episodes. The Brit school alumni has drawn a connection between her diagnosis and heavy cannabis use in the wake of an undisclosed childhood trauma.

“I don’t think it’s helpful for me to explain what that trauma was, because it’s very heavy, and very unusual,” Young told the Telegraph in 2022. “But weed is psychoactive, and when you already have an underlying health condition, it can trigger the brain.” She was later diagnosed with ADHD, and has been an outspoken advocate for people seeking diagnosis and medication to manage their symptoms.

Young recently revealed that she spent a period in rehab for cocaine “dependence” in the lead up to recording her third album. In November 2024 she did a five-week stint at an inpatient treatment facility, according to a recent profile in the New York Times. She relapsed after returning to London over this summer and returned to rehab.

Shymansky has previously stated that he has made it clear to Young that she can cancel performances at any time to prioritise her mental and physical wellbeing.

The last artist Shymanksy managed was Amy Winehouse, from 1999 to 2006, working on her 2003 debut Frank. He quit after she refused his attempt to get her to go to rehab, an incident immortalised in her hit song Rehab from Back to Black, which she released under new management.

Shymanksy has said he hoped quitting as her manager would galvanise Winehouse to get clean. “I was so sure – being young and green – that I could make this huge statement for Amy, and within two months max she’d be in rehab, sorting things out,” he told the Guardian in 2015. “The huge mistake I made was I thought nothing could continue without me: Amy had missed half a dozen planes in the past two years.”

Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning at just 27 years old in 2011, the day before Shymansky’s wedding. He refused to manage another artist again, until Young insisted he manage her after he approached the singer about appearing in his documentary, Amy.

Shymanksy told the Times the parallel’s between his work with Young and Winehouse are “uncanny”. “We’ve got to be really careful,” he said. “No one really knows the depths of what she is dealing with.”

He said he grappled with the ethics of helping such a talented yet vulnerable young woman achieve fame, offering Young the chance to cancel the UK and US tour ahead of time (she refused) and hiring a sober coach to support her backstage.

“I think I’ve come to the conclusion that within success, there’s some form of structure and revenue and support system,” he added.

Young also has the support of Elton John, who presented her with the keys to his house last month after losing a bet he made that her song d3aler, which touches on her substance issues, would go to number one. The megastar, 78, has battled his own substance abuse issues in the past and has offered his mentorship to many young artists in the industry, including Dua Lipa and Chappell Roan.

With a crack team around her, hopefully Young can access the support and treatment she needs while she takes a step back from the spotlight.