Welcome back to It Pays the Bills! Today’s guest is Gabrielle MacPherson, whose love of performing and comedy finally led her to stand-up after a drunken bet with a friend. We chatted about comedy, the importance of youth arts, and all of Gabrielle’s previous day jobs.
A bit about Gabrielle:
Gabrielle is a proud working class, northerner who started stand up comedy a couple of years ago. Since then she has been a finalist in the Leicester Square New Comedian and the Get Up Stand Up Stand Up Club competitions. This summer she will be part of Best In Class in Edinburgh.
Instagram | Best in Class Fundraiser
In the condensed transcript below, I’ve italicized my questions and comments. Paid subscribers will receive a bonus edition next week, Perks of the Job. Enjoy!
What is your creative pursuit?
Right now, most of my time is taken up with stand-up comedy. So I guess I'd say stand-up comedy.
And how did you get into it?
I have always been a fan of stand up and I've got some mates who are brilliant stand ups, love watching it, love going to see it. And I went on holiday with some friends a couple of years ago after a few glasses of wine. He loves comedy as well. So we were chatting about it and nerding out about it. And he was like, you should do stand up comedy. And I was like, yeah, you should do stand up comedy.
We made a bet. And there was video evidence and witnesses. We shook on it. We said, within three months, we've got to do our first, what I now know to be an open mic night, our first five-minute stand-up set. I pretended to ignore it for a month and booked one in for the following month. I think I did it just before the cut-off. And, yeah, booked in and did five minutes of pretty terrible material because I was super nervous.
And it's the most nervous I've ever been in my entire life and came off stage and was like, okay, I think I know some things I could do differently next time. But now it's been just over two years, I think.
Were you a performer before then or was this your first foray onto stage?
I was a performer before then. I was an actor since I was a kid. Then I went to uni to do a hybrid degree between acting and community theater and community engagement.
After that, I didn't really get any jobs, so I stopped calling myself an actor. And I started to write and work in a form of theater that is non-illusionary, so almost you yourself on stage, unless you explicitly tell the audience that you're playing a character. And so that was a little step into stand-up in a way, now looking back.
And then I also worked in immersive theater loads just as a money job. And did all sorts, working in festivals. It was performance and acting work, but it was to pay the bills as much as it was through sheer passion. I was lucky that I had stood on a stage in front of an audience before. It feels totally different.
And then being part of this theater company meant that I was writing all the time and writing for myself and writing for other people. So that was a really good training for me for stand up.
Which theater company were you part of?
So I'm part of Degenerate Fox, which is a part of a neo-futurist collective. So the neo-futurists started in Chicago maybe 40 years ago and in New York maybe 20 years ago. Two of the people who were in the New York company moved to London at a similar time. They decided to set up a London branch of the neo-futurists. We ended up calling ourselves Degenerate Fox instead of neo-futurists, but we're the London arm of the neo-futurists.
The neo-futurist aesthetic is hyper-realism on stage. So if you say you're drinking wine, you're really drinking wine. If you say you've just run a mile, you have to go outside and run a mile and then come in and perform a play. We do a play called The Dirty 30, and it's 30 plays in 60 minutes against the clock. And the audience pick the order they come in. And every week we cut mini plays, two minute plays and rewrite for the next week. And then the audience pick through a keyword, which play they want to see next. And then we say go. And whatever happens after go is a play. When we say curtain, that's when the play's over.
I was one of the founding members. I did five years. We performed bimonthly and I did pretty much five years of performing every other week with a couple of months off. You cut plays and then you bring plays to pitch on Tuesday. You rehearse Tuesday and then Friday you go up. It was amazing training for writing and directing and producing. We produced it all ourselves.
It's still going now. It's something I've stepped away from because of time, but it is an amazing thing.
So speaking about your time and what you fill your days with, let's jump to the day jobs. What is your current day job?
I have a few different day jobs.
My official day job that I do most of the time is I work with young people. I work with children and young people. And I work for a few different theaters in London and I lead workshops around specialist subjects for them.
And I write and direct for a few different theaters, youth theaters as well. So I work with their youth theater companies termly, so it could be up to 12 weeks. At the end of each term, we do a sharing or a show and the young actors get to perform on stage. So my days and some evenings are filled with that.
So how'd you get into it?
When I was younger, everybody was going to Stagecoach and all these Saturday morning classes. They were so expensive. It was always the posh kids that went to stuff like that. So I never went to anything like that. But I knew someone that worked for Stagecoach in a neighboring area and they asked if I was available to assist in the room, support people in the room that might need some extra support to access the work they were doing. I think I was 16, 17. So I started doing that every Saturday morning and working in a nightclub on a Friday and Saturday night. So I'd get in at four and be back out driving to Liverpool.
That got me into working with young people and I really loved it. It still feels - it's very creative.
So I did that and went to uni and did a degree that I was really lucky that I got to do - I got to lead workshops with young people through the arts and learn how to do it and work with lots of different - I mean, it wasn't just young people either. I worked with people from different backgrounds and disciplines, supporting people that needed different things out of life. And I got to do that for three years. And then, yeah, I've never looked back.
It's different every day. I get to meet brilliant people. I get to work in brilliant spaces.
It's something I really feel strongly about - everybody should have access to the arts and young people should feel confident enough to access the arts, whether it's to go to the cinema or to be on stage. Everybody should have access to the arts. So being a mini cog in making sure that's accessible to people is a great thing.
But obviously I don't just do it for the passion. I've got to get paid because I've got to pay the rent. It fits a lot of things together, which I'm really fortunate to get to do.
What have your previous day jobs been? And do you have any favorites or least favorites?
Oh my God, I've had so many day jobs. I worked restaurants, nightclubs. I was a cleaner for ages. All the way through uni, I was a cleaner in the summers. So whenever I went back home to my parents every summer, winter, I'd go and clean the pub at the end of the road. Which was fine, I just quite like it.
My most bizarre job and the one I hated the most was I cleaned for a woman who was like a cat breeder. I didn't do it for very long because it was really quite strange. You'd think, how much fun loads of kittens around? Oh no, you can never get it clean. So that's probably my most bizarre job.
I've also worked in call centers, worked in sales, trying to sell broadband to people, which is ironic because my broadband doesn't work very well.
Yeah, hospitality, immersive theater, PR, trying to get people to sign up to charities and then doing PR and dressing up as a rabbit and having prosthetics on for no reason, apart from trying to get people to buy… I can't even remember what it was. Just bizarre stuff, anything to get that extra 75 quid to make sure I could pay heating or whatever it was at the time.
A lot of the work I've done since coming to London was bizarre, but good fun because it was always with other people in a similar position.
How does your day job feed into or relate to or oppose your creative pursuit?
That's why I think I'm so fortunate because I get to work with people who are either experiencing the arts for the first time or people who perhaps haven’t experienced lots of it or people who are choosing to invest more of their time into it. So it's a really amazing position to be in because I just facilitate people’s engagement with that.
And it feeds into it because I work in arts buildings all the time. I work a lot with Shakespeare. I work a lot with new texts and new writing. And it means that my understanding of the history of the written word in this country or the performed word in this country and then the future of it, I get to understand through other people's engagement with it.
In terms of stand-up, all my work is pretty much during the day, so I do have my evenings free to go and do gigs all over the place. It's really flexible.
People are really inspiring. Other humans have brilliant material. Not that I've ever written about anybody I've worked with, but some of my experiences with some of the people I've worked with can be quite funny, and so I write about that a lot. It all feeds itself.
And I have to write for young people. I have to edit scripts for young people. I get to talk to other artists all day, every day, in terms of who I work in the buildings with. So that also really helps inspire.
And the communities that are built within those theaters, I have worked with in a strictly artistic sense with a lot of the people I work with in the buildings I work with, which is cool.
I'm really fortunate and it's taken a lot. Like I've done it for nearly 20 years. I invest back in myself in that. I'm as passionate about my day job as I am about other artistic endeavors I have. So I'm fortunate that I care about it.
Because I'm not driven by money. If we were driven by money, we wouldn't be doing this.
I'm really not good at saying no to things. I think because I know that I love what I do and I know I need to pay rent and everything is so expensive and the world is on fire, I do end up working six days a week and gigging five or six nights a week. So I am pretty tired and the important people in my life that I live with and I have to make time to speak on the phone and go to friends' birthday parties and see my family. It's tough to fit it all in, but I always think it'll pay off.
Do you have any advice for anyone looking to pursue a creative career?
Yeah, I think be patient and be kind to yourself.
If it's something you can do, go and see as much art in any form as you can, whether that's going to cinema, going to theater, going to a free art gallery somewhere, just have a walk around. Even if it's something I'm like, I have no idea what this is about because there'll be something in it that sparks something that I think, oh, okay.
Don't let it fill your whole life either. You've got to be a human and you've got to have relationships and you've got to switch off and play video games and do something that's nothing to do with art or your artistic endeavor. I think you're a better artist if you experience things. So just going out there and experiencing stuff and also talking to people, asking people, because people love to talk about their art or love to talk about art that they love.
So I am trying to be better at emailing people that I think are brilliant, even if it's someone so far removed from me. Like watching Gavin and Stacey, I love Alison Steadman and she's such a hero of mine. I've actually made choices in my life and I've written to her and she's actually donated when I was self-funding. She is so brilliant. I re-watched the Gavin and Stacey finale the other day and I was like, I'm actually just going to write to her and tell her where I am now compared to where she last got an email or her agent got an email off me.
You just have to reach out to people and be like, you're amazing and you're inspiring. Because it's just creating networks and have your people who get it, get that you're not going to be around for every birthday, but who also inspire you and work as hard as you.
I guess that's advice, which isn't very tangible.
Depends what discipline you are, but just try and see as much art as you can and be kind to yourself. Be patient and know that actually stickability is the most important thing. When it gets really hard, stick at it. When it feels like everybody else is doing something and you're not, that's okay. Stick at it. But believe that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.
This sounds really airy-fairy, but it will become obvious when you hone down into what you really should be doing. I started to stand up a couple of years ago and it's so obvious that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And I didn't realize that till I was way over 30. It will become obvious what you're supposed to be doing and just give yourself grace to do that.
Let's get into the last two questions. The first one is: what is your creative dream?
My creative dream is to take an hour stand-up show to Edinburgh. I'd like to debut at Edinburgh. I would like to write my own sitcom. I'd like to work as a writer on other people's work. I'd like to support other people's work.
I'd like to have enough money that I can invest in after-school clubs. I feel like we have such a lack of places for young people to go and be young people and learn stuff and be around each other. So I'd like to be able to create after-school clubs that give kids and young people access to different things, have specialists in different things going in, somebody who's really into fencing going in, or they do archery one week and just have them dotted all over the country, and then have someone who's a stand-up comedian go in, or a pilot, or someone who manages a supermarket or someone who works as a teacher or people from different walks of life go in. And answer questions. But then also it gives them a space to mess about and just be safe and be kids.
I also sometimes think, do I want to work full time as a stand-up comedian? But then I don't know what that looks like. I knew nothing about it until two years ago. I'm still learning what different terms mean and all this sort of stuff. So, that would obviously be a dream to be able to afford to pay rent from stand-up comedy.
What's the most surprising thing you learned about stand-up comedy in your past two years?
How much time you spend on your own and how much you miss other people.
It surprised me how quick you get over people not laughing. I've died on my arse a couple of times and come home and cried. But the fear of that is there every night. And then when that happens, inevitably again happens, you go, oh, good, fair enough. And you record yourself and you listen back to it and you go, oh, it's because of that.
Another surprising thing is how fragile a comedy night is. It's way bigger than the comedian that's on stage. It's what's happened before. It's what sort of seats the audience is set on. If music is played as you're walking in, if it's summer or winter. Gigs are totally different in summer or winter. The day of the week it is. What season it is. It's so fragile a night.
Last question. Obviously, this is about how we pay our bills. I think you might have found it already, but just in case you haven’t, what is your dream day job?
I have this weird fascination I have since I was a kid. When I was a kid, I used to play pretend in a drive-thru. Like a fast food restaurant drive-thru. Fascinated by getting people their food. Maybe because I love food so much.
Or being like a bus driver. A double-decker bus driver. That'd be sick, even just to try. It would obviously be really tough and difficult and long hours, and you've got millions of people's lives in your hands.
My dad was a lorry driver, and I think that'd be cool.
Maybe there's a red letter day I can do where I go and drive a double-decker bus around some race course. When I was talking before about how all artists try to experience things, I just want to drive my bus.
I think I've found my dream day job. Touch wood, it lasts!
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