Nick Carter

The chart places four planets in air signs and only one in fire, with three in earth and two in water. Air keeps a working distance from a situation and describes it, and the element that would simply go at a thing is almost absent. Carter sang in the Backstreet Boys, joining as a child, which means a working life that began before any of the choices about it could have been his to make.

The Sun sits at eight degrees of Aquarius with Mercury in the sign as well, the sign that belongs to a group while standing a deliberate step outside it. That is a precise description of being one of five people sold as a unit, and of what happens afterwards when the unit is the thing people recognise rather than any member of it. His Moon is at the very end of Gemini at noon, close enough to the next sign that it may have reached Cancer. A singer sold as one fifth of a brand finds that the brand is what people recognise, and that is an Aquarian predicament before it is a commercial one.

Mars, Jupiter and Saturn group across eighteen degrees of Virgo, all three of them retrograde, which puts drive, scale and limit together in the sign of correction and faces the whole group backwards. Four of the ten planets were running in reverse at his birth. Venus sits directly opposite Mars at nine tenths of a degree, taste against drive, which is a long standing internal argument rather than a passing one. In a performer who has spent forty years inside the same group, an argument between taste and drive is not an episode but the terms of employment.

Jupiter worked its way back to its opening Virgo degree on 19 September 2015, at thirty five, running backwards as it had been at the start. Virgo inspects rather than expands, and what it asks of the planet of reach is whether the thing holds up to examination. Three circuits sit behind that date, and a group that re-formed and kept touring decades on had already supplied an answer. For somebody whose first circuit closed before he was old enough to sign his own contract, the later laps are the ones that belong to him.