I yearned to be a pop star – but loneliness and boredom made me quit for something better

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 semifinals 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