On Christmas Eve 2017, I told my wife that, eight years into a successful 10-year music career, I wanted to quit and tell jokes instead. She told me she supported me and – crucially – that she believed I was funny enough to make a go of it. I was elated … until we pulled a cracker and she almost died laughing at the joke inside. Fair to say her comedy barometer was a bit buggered.
I recorded music for a decade under the stage name Tall Dark Friend. Don’t ask me what it means – I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Seven albums, two European tours, a proverbial “shelf of awards” (the awards were real, I just never got around to putting up an actual shelf) – and no plan B. Everything culminated in a memorable stint on The Voice in 2016, signing to a label, bringing out a rubbish single, being unceremoniously dropped from said label, and dragging my arse across the Pride circuit for a year as my heart scabbed over. I turned my head one day to find the muse on my shoulder had long since flown away.
If you’d prefer more a “trailer moment for the biopic”, my epiphany actually came during the live semi-finals of The Voice. On the show, hosted by Marvin Humes and Emma Willis, choice contestants were ushered over to “Marvin’s corner” for a chat – akin to being invited on to Johnny Carson’s couch. The show had tailored me a red suit that happened to match the shade of the couch. For a laugh, I lay down prostrate, pretending to be invisible, and felt a pang of excitement and immediacy I hadn’t felt for years making music. I realised then and there that I much preferred acting the clown to singing for my supper.
Solo stagecraft – be it singer, comic, dancer, juggler, stripper – is by its nature a lonely job. Counterintuitively, the more people you meet night to night, the easier it is to feel isolated within the Hanna-Barbera background your life has become. The travel. The sterility of hotel breakfasts for one. The swimming pool of your Melbourne hotel at 2am because you can’t shake the jetlag. The waking nightmares that manifest themselves as tentacles rising from the water to pull you down to the unspeakable horrors below. You know, that sort of thing.
The music industry compounds that loneliness by drawing an invisible line between artist and public. The old “Elvis has left the building” shtick. In business, you might call it “the ethic of scarcity” coupled with “the ethic of exclusivity”. Comedy does away with that veil of pretence. Brainwashed by 10 years in music, I was always blown away to see a headline comedian standing at the bar post-show. The comedy biz is a box of broken toys, all jumbled together. The music industry likes to keep those broken toys apart, like grim museum artefacts on glass pedestals. Look, but don’t touch.
If you write a hit song, you’re stuck playing that song until the day you die or retire (one and the same occasion for the truly greats). Comedy demands the opposite. You can’t dine off the same joke for your entire career – though many have tried. Comedy keeps you on your toes. It took me 10 years in music to learn that I am either too easily bored – or too emotionally spoiled – to sustain a career in anything other than shark fighting, bomb disposal, or standup comedy. I once literally fell asleep while performing my monthly residency at the local Las Iguanas. I’m not kidding. I woke up as the song that I WAS PLAYING ON THE PIANO came to an end.
Deep down, all rock stars want to be comedians and all comedians want to be rock stars. Musos covet the comic’s self-reliance; comedians covet the musician’s sex appeal, money, fanbase – the list goes on. I am so lucky and grateful that my tired little muse flew back to me after I became a comic. I am so proud of my dumb little songs about bread, Jesus and ejaculation, because they represent an atonement for my formerly swollen pop star ego.
It’s easier to say I gave up music, but what I really gave up was taking myself too seriously.
Jordan Gray is currently on tour with her multi-award-nominated show Is It A Bird?
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