9 pop stars who quite from there mundane job for fame
Everyone has to start somewhere, and the employment history of revered musicians can make for inspiring reading, from the former inconspicuous drones harbouring grand dreams to the canny operators who take on the unsociable outsider jobs that most people shun. Grafters, we salute you: here's to the humble origin story.
1. Calvin Harris, shelf stacker
Dumfries DJ Calvin Harris 's first attempt at breaking into the music industry turned out to be something of a damp squib: believing he'd find more luck in London, he headed south, working as a shelf stacker while hoping to meet like-minded people who could give him his big break. But a combination of scant opportunities and spiralling living costs forced him to return to his parents' house in Scotland.
Back in his old haunt, he found himself grinding away in a familiar job. "I worked at Marks & Spencer in Dumfries," he later told Prestige . "On the sales floor, in the warehouse, on the tills, stocking shelves. I showed people where the corned beef was and date-rotated the yogurt."
But he kept plugging away with his other ambitions, too, recording songs on his own cheap equipment and uploading them to MySpace in the hope of attracting industry interest. "I was literally on the shop floor and got a call that EMI was offering me £30,000 for three years," he said. "I was earning £20,000 a year and I was thinking if I should really leave. Thank God I did."
It's unlikely he regrets it: since then, he's sold over eight million singles and one million albums in the UK alone, and US business magazine Forbes claimed that he was the world's highest-paid DJ for three years in a row between 2013 and 2015. According to them, he's currently worth around $63 million .
2. Madonna, doughnut seller
Not everyone gets the chance to leave their 9-to-5 behind like Harris did, though; some get booted out of the door with their P45 in hand instead. Long before she reigned as the Queen of Pop,
Madonna was a talented student who was handed a scholarship to the University of Michigan School of Music, Dance and Theatre. But by 1978 she'd grown tired of studying and quit so she could pursue her dreams of stardom instead.
Moving to New York, she combined working with modern dance troupes with a gig at the branch of a doughnut chain. She wasn't a natural, though: according to the singer, she was fired when she decided to squirt jelly meant for the doughnuts all over the customers instead. Whether she channelled those food-serving experiences into her first band, The Breakfast Club, is unclear, although both jobs served as little more than footnotes into what was to come next: her decision to go it alone as a solo act instead was vindicated when she became the planet's most famous popstar and, according to the Guinness World Records, the biggest-selling female artist of all time, and fourth most successful ever
3. Rick Ross, prison guard
[LISTEN] BBC Radio 1Xtra - Rick Ross interviewed by Charlie Sloth, 2014
Few musicians have been as secretive about their past as rapper Rick Ross , whose previous life as a prison guard has been the subject of great scrutiny in the hip hop community. For years, Ross denied rumours that he had worked as a corrections officer in his native Florida before he found musical success, despite evidence to the contrary: a photograph of the musician in his uniform first surfaced online, then documents allegedly detailing how Ross, born William Leonard Roberts, had started working for the Florida Department of Corrections as a 19-year-old and held the position for 18 months.
Fellow rapper 50 Cent was among those who made fun of Ross's past, accusing him of phoniness as "a correctional officer that is rapping like a drug dealer", but Ross later told Rolling Stone he only took the job as a last resort after a friend of his was sentenced to 10 years in prison for trafficking drugs. "This was my best friend, who I ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with, and pork and beans with, my buddy, my partner, my number-one dude. Suddenly I'm talking to him over federal phone calls. Hearing the way it was building, I knew I couldn't take nothing for granted."
4. Morrissey, office clerk
4 - Desert Island Discs: Morrissey
As frontman of The Smiths , Morrissey often sang of the grey miseries of work: both Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now and Still Ill spoke of the dreary reality of an existence tethered to a boring desk while life's more exciting possibilities passed one by. Upon leaving school (another joyless experience he was forced to endure that would inspire some of his songs), he landed a job working for the Inland Revenue in Manchester as a filing clerk. Typically, he found the role uninspiring and, after finding his other brief flirtations with work equally unsatisfactory (jobs included a clerk for the civil service and a hospital porter), he quit and began claiming the dole instead.
However pointless it may have seemed at the time, it still had its benefits: having money in his pocket allowed him to buy tickets for gigs and make friends in Manchester's music community, leading him to brief stints with local bands The Nosebleeds and Slaughter & The Dogs. By 1982, he'd struck up a friendship with guitarist Johnny Marr ; the two of them formed The Smiths, leaving those tedious memories of pushing paper and ticking boxes firmly in the past.
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