Sunday Times Article

Livin’ the dream: 9-to-5 A rock star with a proper job? Blur’s drummer is training as a solicitor, and the Farm’s is writing scripts for EastEnders Paul Sexton Published: 13 May 2012 Recommend (0) Comment (0) Print No other way? Blur’s Dave Rowntree in action (Ed Sirrs) A mid conflicting reports about the future of Blur beyond their Olympics closing-ceremony gig in Hyde Park in August, their drummer, Dave Rowntree, hasn’t been letting the grass grow under his feet. In September, he will qualify as a solicitor, completing years of study conducted without any of the fanfare afforded his other line of work. Rowntree is currently in the dispute-resolution department at the east London law firm Kingsley Napley, a rare example of a rock star planning for the future. And, of course, if Blur run up against the proverbial musical differences, they’ll know who to consult. Ian Hunter once wrote that it’s a mighty long way down rock’n’roll, and you look like a star, but you’re still on the dole. Musicians used to be like footballers, conveniently ignoring the fact that they might wash up on the unemployment shoreline at any moment. An increasing number of them, however, are proving adept at holding down sometimes highly improbable second jobs, feeding both creativity and mortgage payments. Matt Falloon is another example of the new multitasking. He underwrites his activities as the front man of the acoustic band Smoke Feathers in the Westminster lobby, as a politics and economics correspondent for Reuters. Falloon was at the White House in March, reporting on David Cameron’s visit to Washington, but couldn’t make Dave’s trade mission to Japan last month: it clashed with his album launch. Pete Gow is at the sharp end of the news, too. When he isn’t leading the British country-rock outfit Case Hardin, he’s a producer in many a war-torn region for CBS News — he was in Tripoli on the day rebel soldiers stormed Gaddafi’s compound. “I couldn’t be without either,” Gow said when the network reported on his double life late last year. “They are the two things that define me.” Roy Boulter is out on a reunion tour as the drummer with the 1990s Liverpudlian favourites the Farm. Since their heyday, however, he has developed a successful television and film production career, and sometimes puts words in Dot Cotton’s mouth as a scriptwriter on EastEnders. Mark Nevin, who continues to write and record under his own name, is occasionally recognised by one of his patients at the integrative psychotherapy practice he runs in London as the winner of a Brit award who composed Fairground Attraction’s 1988 chart-topper, Perfect. How do these artists combine their musical vocations with such wildly contrasting work? Rock performers aren’t even supposed to be awake in the daytime, are they? The strong feeling they give is that, far from resenting the need to pay the bills with a “proper” day job, it gives them space to keep enjoying their first calling. “I’ve always been able to juggle the two,” Falloon says. “If I had to make a choice, it would be music, because it’s more personal and rewarding, but I’ve had a couple of understanding bosses who’ve given me the time off when I’ve needed it. And if, as a reporter, you start losing the buzz of the chance to go on a trip with the prime minister, on his plane, you probably need to get out of the job. I’ve done a few down the years, and they are extraordinary. We went to Saudi Arabia with Gordon Brown, and they closed down an entire highway so he could get from the airport to the palace. Mandelson was on that trip, and he told us the palace had a huge fish tank with sharks in it. I thought, ‘How apt.’” Falloon laughs as he admits that it does “leak out” among his fellow reporters that he also has a band. “They always love hearing stories about being on the road. A few people from work came to our album launch. It’s quite embarrassing — to be honest, I like having the two quite separate — but I do get them down to Smoke Feathers gigs every now and again. “One of the guys I work with in parliament, we call him a fireman, as he’s always going off somewhere. He was trying to get into Syria. He was in Libya during the conflict there and was based in Baghdad for years. He’s been really supportive of the band. He went on that trip to Japan, and sent me a text on the launch night saying, ‘Good luck, sorry I can’t be there.’” After his Fairground Attraction days, and working with song-writing collaborators from Kirsty MacColl to Morrissey, Nevin started training as a psychotherapist in 2003. He graduated with an MA in 2008. “At the time, I felt I’d sort of ground to a halt as a songwriter,” he says. “I had achieved so many of my original goals in music, and when events in my personal life took me into therapy, I became fascinated by the process.” Quite the reverse of being too arty to wear the straitjacket of the 9-to-5, Nevin craved it. “Monday mornings would come along, and I began to notice that I felt a growing envy for people who had more structure to their working lives. These days, I split my time about 50-50 between being a therapist and a musician, and I find that the time spent away from each means I come back to the other refreshed. Neither one feels like ‘the day job,’ both are vocational. There are days when, one hour, I’m in the studio with headphones on, rocking away with my guitar cranked up to 11, and the next I am sitting deeply absorbed in a client’s psychological and emotional problems. I love the contrast.” Soon after the Farm’s first flush — they never officially split, but went their separate ways after an American tour in 1994 — Boulter fell into a very different trade. “We were signed to this American label, and being paid, but we weren’t doing anything,” he recalls. “Idle hands and all that. I started writing almost secretly. I sent off a couple of ideas and they got picked up pretty quickly, which encouraged me to come out of the closet and announce to the world that I was a scriptwriter.” Boulter wrote scripts for Brookside for nine years, as well as some for Hollyoaks, then formed Hurricane Films with his friend Sol Papadopoulos, who had photographed the Farm. The company has gone on to make acclaimed films, including the Terence Davies documentary Of Time and the City. Boulter’s other credits include the Bafta-winning Jimmy McGovern series The Street. What everybody asks about, however, is the scriptwriting he does around Albert Square. “About 18 months ago, I did a trial script for EastEnders and they picked it up,” he says. “The beauty of it is that they have a big team, so it’s not a full-time occupation. It means I can do the Hurricane Films stuff, and music, and three or four episodes of EastEnders a year, which is an honour. “The big, iconic episodes tend to be written by the lead writers, so I can’t say I killed Heather. But the episodes I’ve done so far have all been quite meaty.” If you’re a devotee, Boulter wrote the one where Max had a heart-to-heart with his daughter, and scripted a quiz in the Vic and a barbecue the Moons had. It’s some distance from All Together Now, which he is back performing at the moment, but Boulter enjoys the twin disciplines. “It’s just time management,” he says. “I can be writing on a tour bus or in a rehearsal room, but most of the time I keep it separate. Everything I do, I would do as a hobby.” The kick for each of these musicians comes from doing something else in a world where hit records and admiring fans count for precisely nothing. “When people come for therapy,” Nevin says, “they’re generally more concerned with what brought them there than whether I have a Brit Award or not.” Smoke Feathers’ album Liberation, Mark Nevin’s album Stand Beside Me in the Sun and Case Hardin’s Every Dirty Mirror are all out now. The Farm’s tour continues at the Venue, Derby, tonight .

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