A New Life: Teacher discipline may not be very rock'n'roll, but it's useful for life as a musician, writes Tony Clayton-Lea.
The joke about how teaching children is solid preparation for a life in the music industry isn't as true (or funny) as it used to be.
These days, if you're on the lower rungs of the fame ladder, you have to know how to multi-task in an organised, friendly and strategic manner. Rising Dublin singer-songwriter and former primary school teacher Gary Dunne knows this.
He left St Pat's teacher training college in 2000, and within months started two full years of teaching primary class children in a school in Rathmines, Dublin. He was helped in no small way by having teacher parents, he says, so the work came easy to him.
"I enjoyed it; it was never that I felt I was doing something I hated, and that music was always itching away at me. My parents also write - novels, poetry - so there was always this balance between art and teaching in the home, and that was the mindset I got into."
Music turned out to be the stronger of the two, however. During his two-year tenure in Rathmines, Gary was gigging several evenings a week, undertaking numerous support tours with the likes of Irish singer-songwriters Damien Rice and Mundy.
"I'd be teaching the next morning, and sometimes I'd have to drive back to Dublin from Cork, arriving home at 4am, and getting up at 7.30am for school. So the two lifestyles didn't necessarily match.
"It was only in the last week of teaching that I decided I had to move to London, and it was when I got to London that the teaching became a universe away."
London was busking, and something of an eye opener. Here, Gary met buskers whose lifestyles were far removed from his own - a guitarist who worked to feed his alcoholism; a man who left his accountancy job for a seven-day week playing harp.
It was, recalls Gary, a good, fun way to earn money. "There is a centralised network of busker spots on the London underground - you dial a number and you book your pitch and your hours."
It helps to be an early riser, he says, and to have a diary close to hand. "The earlier you call, the better and more central a pitch you have. I was working for about two-three hours a day per five-day week, and was coming out with as much money as I'd get from teaching.
"If you can book your Leicester Squares and Oxford Streets for the week, then you'll clean up. Somewhere like Hatton Cross is not so good, though - you might as well sit in your bedroom!"
The differences between Gary's former career and his new one aren't as dissimilar as one might think. He talks of elements of acting that impinge on the teaching process: "You're jumping from one subject to another: you're talking to a parent, you're teaching PE running around the place with the whistle, then you're the scientist. So you have to take on different personas, and you have to perform, and I'm sure that helped me out somehow with being on stage."
Does he miss teaching? No, he says, because he's much happier now than he has ever been in terms of the way his career and life are developing. What, then, does music give you now that teaching didn't?
"The intrinsic feeling of doing what you're supposed to be doing. I could very easily take up a music teaching job for five days a week, but at this point my music takes up all my life - I run my own website, I manage myself, run my own label, book my own gigs. Also, when I'm doing music, there are no questions I have to ask myself - this is what I'm meant to be doing. You have to go with what feels right."
Not that living a life that feels right is without inherent pressures - although it clearly diminishes stress levels. Teaching, says Gary, never really stressed him. Why?
"Possibly because I never found it difficult. One of the unspoken pressures of a nine-to-five job is that it provides the structure for your life - it tells you that you have to get up in the morning, work for five days, and then have weekends off.
"When you are essentially your own boss, like I now am, you need a huge amount of self-discipline to get up in the morning and do things like sort out your VAT returns.
"I've grown to have self-discipline. It's not that I went crazy as soon as I left teaching, but it took me a while to get the balance right - it's not just being a musician, it's the managing of it as well. Yes, I don't have to get up each morning for a job, as such, but I still have to get on the computer and sort out all my gigs here, in the UK, the US."
Even for a former teacher, there are lessons to be learned. Planning is one; respect for people is another.
"One of the constants of a career in both teaching and music is that it's good to treat people well. In teaching - whether it's the kids, their parents, your co-workers - and in music - be they sound technicians, gig bookers, journalists - the minute you have an attitude in either, whether you're an angry teacher or a stroppy musician, it will come back to you.
"Planning is essential, too. I learned that from St Pat's, and it's true for music, as well. It might not seem very rock'n'roll, but planning works. I wouldn't have been able to do my album if I hadn't had my administration hat on. And I'm sure a lot of that came from teaching."
Gary Dunne's debut album, Twenty Twenty Fiction, is available from most good record shops.