9 pop stars that quite there mundane job for fame
5. Brandon Flowers.
The Killers: Somebody Told Me (Later Archive 2004)
Once Morrissey had left the Inland Revenue to become a pop star, he helped inspire a new generation of aspiring musicians working in steady-but-unsatisfactory jobs. When Brandon Flowers discovered The Smiths as a 12-year-old, his life was changed - he later told the Guardian that hearing the band's single Panic for the first time was what made him fall in love with pop music.
Years later, Flowers found employment as a bellhop at the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino in Nevada, Las Vegas. Coincidentally, one of the guests at the hotel during his stint there was Morrissey guitarist Boz Boorer, with Flowers telling Spin that he once secretly rifled through his luggage. It was during his days as a bellhop that Flowers made his first inroads into music, too, with his first band Blush Response, and when the group split, the singer decided to stay in the glitz and glamour of Vegas, channelling its decadence into the music he made with The Killers .
6. Nicki Minaj, waitress and office manager
Nicki Minaj interviewed by Semtex, 2014
"I'd been fired like 15 times because I had a horrible attitude," Nicki Minaj told Billboard in 2010. The rapper-cum-singer had a string of jobs while trying to make it in the music industry - one of them, a position as a waitress at a seafood restaurant franchise, culminated in her chasing a customer out of the door so she could swear at her and "demand my pen back" - but the final straw was a role as an office manager. "The last job I had was as an office manager in a little, tiny room where I literally wanted to strangle this guy because he was so loud and obnoxious," she explained. "I would go home with stress pains in my neck and my back. That's when I went to my mother and said, 'Look, I’m not going back to work...'"
Luckily for Minaj, there's been no need to dust off her CV again: her star has gone supernova in the seven years since releasing her debut album Pink Friday in 2010, with a career that has encompassed critically acclaimed records, mega-selling singles and culture-defining music videos - in August 2014, her much-discussed Anaconda video was viewed nearly 20 million times in just one day.
7. Freddie Mercury, market stall salesman
Johnnie Walker and Mark Blake remember Freddie Mercury
One of rock's greatest ever showmen, Freddie Mercury lived in Zanzibar until 1964, when the 17-year-old's parents fled the revolution and settled in Middlesex. Mercury went on to study at Ealing College of Art and, after graduating, ran a clothes stall in London's Kensington Market. Speaking to Classic Rock magazine, Queen drummer Roger Taylor explained that he and Mercury had set up a stall in 1971 while they were waiting for the band to become a success, using the money they got from flogging second-hand clothes and art to support themselves and fund the recording of demos.
"We were selling artwork from some of the students at Ealing," he said. "Then we sold Fred's thesis, which was all based on Hendrix. Things like that are probably worth a lot of money now."
The effort paid off two years later when they released their self-titled debut album, the first step in them becoming a world-conquering force of nature, although some people still remembered their experiences with a pre-fame Mercury. Asked by the Guardian about the provenance of his famous mirrored hat, Slade 's Noddy Holder reminisced: "I got the hat off a guy in Kensington market, called Freddie. He said: 'One day I'm gonna be a big pop star like you.' I said: 'F*** off, Freddie.' He became Freddie Mercury."
8. Björk, fish factory worker
Björk interviewed by Jo Whiley, 2015
Having played with punk bands Spit and Snot and Tappi Tikarrass as well as the jazz fusion outfit Exodus, 17-year-old Björk was already a Reykjavik scene veteran by the time she co-founded dark, anarchistic post-punkers Kukl in 1983. Yet along with her bandmates and future fellow Sugarcube Einar Örn Benediktsson (media studies lecturer) and Sigtryggur Baldursson (road builder), she was also still working full-time - in a fish factory.
Her particular role involved pulling worms from the fish with tweezers, to ensure that seafood lovers weren't infested with parasites. Grisly work, but it probably chimed well with her sensibilities at the time - between stinky shifts, she was reading surrealist works such as George Batailles's classic The Story of the Eye, a darkly sexual novella that lent its name to Kukl’s first album, The Eye. And despite all the fish worms, she never lost her love of nature.
9. Philip Glass, taxi driver
[LISTEN] BBC Radio 4 - Philip Glass: Taxi Driver
Examples of musicians who were earning a more traditional type of crust before making a living from their art aren't just limited to the pop world. American Philip Glass is one of modern music's most influential figures, but he was forced to eke out a living as a taxi driver until he was 42. In a
Radio 4 documentary (above) about his bizarre double life writing breathtaking music and driving fares around New York, he says: "I would show up around 3pm to get a car and hopefully be out driving by 4. I wanted to get back to the garage by 1 or 2am before the bars closed, as that wasn't a good time to be driving. I'd come home and write music until 6 in the morning."
According to Glass, who also worked as a plumber, life in the city was violent at the time - he'd regularly have to escape being ambushed by violent gangs, and it wasn't uncommon for colleagues of his to be murdered - but he was able to find time to compose while working (his opera Einstein at the Beach, for example, was written and premiered at the Met in New York several years before he gave up his cab). Since then, he's gone on to write countless symphonies, concertos, chamber pieces, operas and film scores, with his famed minimalist approach to composition making him a revered figure across the globe.
Once Morrissey had left the Inland Revenue to become a pop star, he helped inspire a new generation of aspiring musicians working in steady-but-unsatisfactory jobs. When Brandon Flowers discovered The Smiths as a 12-year-old, his life was changed - he later told the Guardian that hearing the band's single Panic for the first time was what made him fall in love with pop music.
Years later, Flowers found employment as a bellhop at the Gold Coast Hotel and Casino in Nevada, Las Vegas. Coincidentally, one of the guests at the hotel during his stint there was Morrissey guitarist Boz Boorer, with Flowers telling Spin that he once secretly rifled through his luggage. It was during his days as a bellhop that Flowers made his first inroads into music, too, with his first band Blush Response, and when the group split, the singer decided to stay in the glitz and glamour of Vegas, channelling its decadence into the music he made with The Killers .
6. Nicki Minaj, waitress and office manager
Nicki Minaj interviewed by Semtex, 2014
"I'd been fired like 15 times because I had a horrible attitude," Nicki Minaj told Billboard in 2010. The rapper-cum-singer had a string of jobs while trying to make it in the music industry - one of them, a position as a waitress at a seafood restaurant franchise, culminated in her chasing a customer out of the door so she could swear at her and "demand my pen back" - but the final straw was a role as an office manager. "The last job I had was as an office manager in a little, tiny room where I literally wanted to strangle this guy because he was so loud and obnoxious," she explained. "I would go home with stress pains in my neck and my back. That's when I went to my mother and said, 'Look, I’m not going back to work...'"
Luckily for Minaj, there's been no need to dust off her CV again: her star has gone supernova in the seven years since releasing her debut album Pink Friday in 2010, with a career that has encompassed critically acclaimed records, mega-selling singles and culture-defining music videos - in August 2014, her much-discussed Anaconda video was viewed nearly 20 million times in just one day.
7. Freddie Mercury, market stall salesman
Johnnie Walker and Mark Blake remember Freddie Mercury
One of rock's greatest ever showmen, Freddie Mercury lived in Zanzibar until 1964, when the 17-year-old's parents fled the revolution and settled in Middlesex. Mercury went on to study at Ealing College of Art and, after graduating, ran a clothes stall in London's Kensington Market. Speaking to Classic Rock magazine, Queen drummer Roger Taylor explained that he and Mercury had set up a stall in 1971 while they were waiting for the band to become a success, using the money they got from flogging second-hand clothes and art to support themselves and fund the recording of demos.
"We were selling artwork from some of the students at Ealing," he said. "Then we sold Fred's thesis, which was all based on Hendrix. Things like that are probably worth a lot of money now."
The effort paid off two years later when they released their self-titled debut album, the first step in them becoming a world-conquering force of nature, although some people still remembered their experiences with a pre-fame Mercury. Asked by the Guardian about the provenance of his famous mirrored hat, Slade 's Noddy Holder reminisced: "I got the hat off a guy in Kensington market, called Freddie. He said: 'One day I'm gonna be a big pop star like you.' I said: 'F*** off, Freddie.' He became Freddie Mercury."
8. Björk, fish factory worker
Björk interviewed by Jo Whiley, 2015
Having played with punk bands Spit and Snot and Tappi Tikarrass as well as the jazz fusion outfit Exodus, 17-year-old Björk was already a Reykjavik scene veteran by the time she co-founded dark, anarchistic post-punkers Kukl in 1983. Yet along with her bandmates and future fellow Sugarcube Einar Örn Benediktsson (media studies lecturer) and Sigtryggur Baldursson (road builder), she was also still working full-time - in a fish factory.
Her particular role involved pulling worms from the fish with tweezers, to ensure that seafood lovers weren't infested with parasites. Grisly work, but it probably chimed well with her sensibilities at the time - between stinky shifts, she was reading surrealist works such as George Batailles's classic The Story of the Eye, a darkly sexual novella that lent its name to Kukl’s first album, The Eye. And despite all the fish worms, she never lost her love of nature.
9. Philip Glass, taxi driver
[LISTEN] BBC Radio 4 - Philip Glass: Taxi Driver
Examples of musicians who were earning a more traditional type of crust before making a living from their art aren't just limited to the pop world. American Philip Glass is one of modern music's most influential figures, but he was forced to eke out a living as a taxi driver until he was 42. In a
Radio 4 documentary (above) about his bizarre double life writing breathtaking music and driving fares around New York, he says: "I would show up around 3pm to get a car and hopefully be out driving by 4. I wanted to get back to the garage by 1 or 2am before the bars closed, as that wasn't a good time to be driving. I'd come home and write music until 6 in the morning."
According to Glass, who also worked as a plumber, life in the city was violent at the time - he'd regularly have to escape being ambushed by violent gangs, and it wasn't uncommon for colleagues of his to be murdered - but he was able to find time to compose while working (his opera Einstein at the Beach, for example, was written and premiered at the Met in New York several years before he gave up his cab). Since then, he's gone on to write countless symphonies, concertos, chamber pieces, operas and film scores, with his famed minimalist approach to composition making him a revered figure across the globe.
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