Blurred sidelines: meet the musicians who are doctors, gardeners and authors

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/feb/12/musicians-doctors-gardeners-authors

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“If you’ve got a busy brain that needs to be stimulated, you’re going to go crazy just being a musician,” says Catherine Anne Davies, part of a new generation of performers taking a more varied approach to her career. As well as making music as the Anchoress and being a part-time member of Simple Minds, she’s a university lecturer, a social media consultant to the stars and the author of a book on gay poetry titled Whitman’s Queer Children: America’s Homosexual Epics.

“Sitting on a tour bus all day doing nothing, then playing for a few hours every evening – that’s my idea of hell,” she says. “You’ve got to keep your mind busy. Maybe that’s why so many musicians use drugs or alcohol – you’ve got to fill that void with something. I’d rather get another PhD than acquire a heroin habit.”

Davies is far from alone in having what she wryly refers to as “a varied portfolio”. There’s Johnny Flynn, the Mumford & Sons-ish nu-folkie who also happens to be the star of new Channel 4 comedy Scrotal Recall. Singer-songwriter Keaton Henson is a poet and visual artist known for his illustrations for bands such as Enter Shikari. Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches writes for Michael Azerrad’s online magazine, the Talkhouse, and is an administrator and editor at a feminist website run by a women’s collective known as TYCI, which stands for Tuck Your Cunt In.

Then there’s Jonathan Meiburg, from American indie bands Shearwater and Okkervil River, who is also an ornithologist; Kev Kharas, Vice UK’s online editor by day and a member of electro-pop band Real Lies by night; Fran O’Hanlon, who shares his time between making ethereal, baroque pop as Ajimal and being a doctor; Matt Hegarty from Matthew & the Atlas, a landscape gardener; and Duncan Gammon of Bristol prog-pop band Schnauser, who works as a footpath ranger for the south-west coast. It would seem that “just being a musician” is a thing of the past.

“Pretty much everybody we know in Glasgow who’s in a band has another job,” Mayberry says. “All of us have worked in bars, cafes or cinemas. It means you can afford to do the thing you love.”

With record sales plummeting and journalism proving equally hard-going, Mayberry – who was a freelance writer before she formed Chvrches – jokes that she now has two badly remunerated jobs instead of one, although she acknowledges that both her pursuits are creatively fulfilling; it’s not as though she’s digging ditches to make ends meet. “I guess I’m fortunate in that two things I always wanted to do, since I was 16, were play music and get into news media. I’m very lucky to have two things that can engage my brain at once.”

These aren’t just musicians who have failed to achieve sufficient success and so have been forced to fall back on their second or third choice of career. Rather, they’re part of a new wave of multifaceted artists actively pursuing two or three interests at once. Nevertheless, there is, in some cases, an element of facing up to the economic realities in what they do.

“There’s not as much money in the music industry these days,” says Hegarty. “And it’s not a given that if you get a record or publishing deal you’re just going to be able to give up your job. The money I got from my publishing deal was enough to pay for my first album, but I couldn’t use it as a salary. You have to be able to use the money you get from your other job or jobs to put records out. It’s certainly not a given that you can do music full-time from the start.”

Not that he’s remotely embarrassed about the fact that, for the duration of his career as Matthew & the Atlas, he has been landscaping people’s gardens.

“No!” he says, somewhat surprised by the suggestion that there might be snobbery involved. “Not at all. I don’t feel bad about saying I’ve had two jobs, and I’m sure it’s the same for quite a few musicians.”

Henson has noted a change in attitude towards musicians having day jobs. “I do feel there is a shift at the moment in opinion on artists doing other things,” he says. “When I started, I felt like everything other than music from a musician was greeted with a broad level of distrust. Now, I feel like there’s a sense of excitement when an artist turns their hand to something new and challenges themselves. If musicians can find time and have the ability to do another, less insane, job, then they should by all means do it.”

O’Hanlon has two “insane” jobs: recording artist and locum doctor (the medical equivalent of a supply teacher). He slogged for seven years studying medicine, only to realise he could combine his two loves: healing the sick and singing the blues.

“I’m in a fortunate position where I can do music and keep my skills up in medicine. I can afford to be selective, take my time and do it semi-professionally,” he says. Based in Newcastle, he divides his time between hospitals and rock venues. Sometimes he has had to dash from one to the other.

I get really bored if I just do one thing ... my brain would shrink into some shrivelled mushroom

“I remember once doing a shift at A&E, signing off at 12, getting the 12.30pm train, then getting to the gig supporting Lucy Rose in Brixton with only 20 minutes to spare. It was pretty rushed. Sometimes I’m onstage and I start thinking about how bizarre it is, doing the two things that I do.”

Still, it comes in handy when someone is taken ill at a concert. Has he ever been at one where they’ve shouted: “Is there a doctor in the house?”

“Yes, I was at a gig and someone collapsed,” he recalls. “All I had to do was get their blood pressure back down, but everyone stood by, amazed.”

Davies takes polymorphous creativity to new extremes. Apart from making solo records as Catherine AD and the Anchoress, joining Simple Minds on keyboards and recording with the “goth country” supergroup Dark Flowers with Jim Kerr, Kate Havnevik, Dot Allison and Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, she also finds time to write 100,000-word treatises on gay poetry and lecture on the same subject to undergraduates.

“I’m drawn to the idea of outsiders,” she says when asked why she chose homosexual poetry as the basis of her tome. “Who doesn’t want to read about sodomy?”

She once gave a lecture at University College London on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. “There were all these lines about being fucked up the arse, which I had to repeat in front of a bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds – and I was only a year older than them at the time. The university didn’t like it, but it appealed to the mischief-maker in me.”

Her father died last year, and that has, if anything, made her even more determined to cram as much into her days as possible. “Life is incredibly short,” she says. “You need to do what you love, because you might not be able to do it next year – that tends to focus my mind.”

It might also explain the elocution lessons that she gave to some Kazakh pop stars recently. And then there’s popping round to Chrissie Hynde’s to help her enhance her social media profile.

“My life sounds ridiculous, I know,” she laughs. Her explanation for her furious multitasking is, she says, that her family were really poor; as a result, she has a powerful work ethic. That and a low boredom threshold. “I get really bored if I just do one thing,” she says. “If I carried on, my brain would shrink into some shrivelled mushroom.”

There’s an element of performance in medicine. You meet a lot of big characters

All agree that each of their jobs feeds into the other(s) and that there is creative payback even for the most menial employment.

“It’s always nice, having that work to go to, to help with the writing,” says Hegarty of landscape gardening. “It enables me to get away from it all and be outside. Manual labour is always good for clearing the mind. There is a meditative quality to it. Plus, I get a lot of lyrical content – and pastoral imagery – from being outside.”

Davies concurs: “Academia is my passion and it informs the music – the two feed into each other. My next book is going to be about the relationship between poets and musicians. All the time I’m having a conversation in my head about the two disciplines.”

O’Hanlon, too, finds inspiration in his non-musical work. “I’m interested in medicine and science, and they definitely come into my songs,” he says. Is he a double-agent? “In a way, yes. A lot of doctors are very musical, actually,” he adds. “There’s an element of performance in medicine. You meet a lot of big characters.”

O’Hanlon, for one, has no intention of stopping one or the other. “I wouldn’t be prepared to give up either entirely,” he says. “No, I want to reconcile music and medicine.”

For Davies, the prospect of choosing just one would be unthinkable. “It’s creatively fulfilling,” she says of her varied timetable and mixed CV. “But thank God for it; otherwise, by now, I would have blown my brains out.”