Delivering chart success

Midwives magazine: Issue 6 :: 2011

I suppose the similarity between being a midwife and a singer is that I use my abdominal muscles a lot while I’m singing and I used to use them as a midwife too – when I was telling women to push,’ laughs Alana Watson.

The popstar, who has already got a number one album and single under her belt, is talking to Midwives just a couple of weeks after she decided to leave her job as a midwife for the heady heights of fame.

‘But there’s also the adrenalin: when you are working in a busy labour ward, if an emergency happens, it can be really scary and having to get onto stage in front of thousands of people is petrifying too and really gets the adrenaline going. Maybe I love both because I’m an adrenaline-junky.’

Until 25 August, Alana was working as a midwife at Hillingdon Hospital. But, after chart-topping success as the vocalist for the dance band Nero, she opted to leave the profession.

‘It was a really sad day’, says the 27-year-old from Harrow, London. ‘I shed a tear on my last shift and a lot of my colleagues were taking photos on their phones and asking me to sign autographs for their teenage sons. It was really hard to juggle being a midwife with the music. Midwifery wasn’t something I wanted to give up at all, but I didn’t want to let my practise suffer. I could never have done that.’

After completing a degree in geography, Alana worked in her parents’ care home for the elderly and realised she wanted a career where she could care for people. After three years spent training to be a midwife, she qualified and started working at Hillingdon. But as her career in midwifery was taking off, so was her career as a popstar.

She would work 12 hour shifts and then rush over to the recording studio to spend hours singing and get back home at midnight for a few hours sleep before getting up at 5.30am the next morning to go back to work at the hospital.   

‘It wasn’t a snap-decision,’ says Alana. ‘It was something I thought hard about over two months. It took a lot of time to make the decision, because it’s something I love doing and after all the time training and honing my skills while working, I didn’t want to give it up.’

While she was still working as a midwife, Nero had their first number one single with their song Promise, which topped the chart on 15 August and the band’s first album, Welcome reality, was released the next day and took the top-spot too.

‘I knew the single was at number one before it was announced on the chart show, but I decided to keep it quiet,’ says Alana. ‘Then as soon as it was announced I started getting a lot of texts from my colleagues, who have been so supportive.

‘A few of them have come to see Nero play live and now they’ve even formed a Facebook group where they are planning to come along and see a show that we’ve got coming up. They are saying that they’re going to turn up in their scrubs, which I think would be fantastic – I’d love to look out over the audience in a show and see a sea of blue boogying away.’

 Despite only being a qualified midwife for eight months, Alana loved the work and says she’ll miss it a great deal. ‘I just enjoyed being able to make a difference. It’s a massive thing to be able to have a positive impact on someone’s birth and I found having empathy and patience is such a vital thing to being a midwife. I think the thing that I loved the most was being able to make a painful and distressing experience as pleasurable as possible and to be able to make it the kind of birth that the woman wanted, even if things took a turn for the unexpected.’

A turn for the unexpected is something that Alana’s used to, as she never planned to be a popstar. Nero started when she got together with two childhood friends and started writing and recording songs in a bedroom where she would sing into an old karaoke microphone. But things quickly snowballed when Nero were signed-up by the major label Mercury Records.

‘Things just started happening and all my annual leave was taken up recording music, playing gigs and festivals and doing photoshoots,’ she sighs. ‘There were moments when I couldn’t get time off, so there were things that we had to turn down, but I didn’t mind. I love midwifery and music, so it was just a balancing act.’

The day after Alana left the hospital she spent a week relaxing in Turkey – her first holiday since she started training to become a midwife and it could be her last holiday for quite a long time…

Nero are touring in Australia from the end of September, followed by a tour of the UK, then it’s over to America, then supporting the acclaimed UK rapper Tinie Tempah on a stadium tour. After that it’s back to America for some more dates before they record their second album (which the band are writing at the moment).         
     
But Alana knows that musical trends come and go – that a band can be top of the charts one day and, just months later, can fall out of fashion and be dropped by their record label. ‘I know the music industry is fickle and that things look great now but it could all change,’ she says. ‘I’ve no idea what the future will bring, or what it will throw at me. I’ll do Nero as long as I’m enjoying it, but I love midwifery and there are great retraining schemes so it’s always something I can return to and hope I will one day.’