I'm in one of the coolest bands of the 90s but have quit fame to be an estate agent | The Sun

IN the late 90s and early noughties US rockers The Dandy Warhols were very hot property.

Their best-known song, 2000's Bohemian Like You, was a global smash appearing in a massive Vodafone advertising campaign as well as in vampire drama Buffy The Vampire slayer.

At the same time, the group caught the attention of music legend David Bowie during a performance at Glastonbury and were handpicked by him to appear on the Meltdown festival bill at London's Southbank Centre in 2002.

The following year they went out on tour with the great man, who was famously the king of reinvention thanks to his alter egos Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The White Duke.

It was a golden period for the band and it proved to be their zenith despite regular album releases and tours in the years since.

Keyboard player Zia McCabe, 48, recently outlined how the group's modest commercial success prompted its members to explore other career options.

While the band is still active, it now plays second fiddle to other projects.

Zia herself is focused on a career as an estate agent in her native city of Portland.

She told the Willamette Week: "So we did this wonderful switching of gears a lot of people do in midlife. We fired almost everybody who was taking a percentage off the top—which is why we weren't making money—and now we're doing all these exotic gigs and weekends away, and netting almost the same.

"So it's not that we stopped making money as a band, we just stopped working all the time as a band. And that gave us all more time to do other things. We just diversified, really."

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The musician studied for her realtor licence while on the road with the Warhols and admitted it was a lot less fun than partying.

However, she came out of the other side with a new skill set and an exciting future in the property sector.

She's faced her fair share of judgement since making the transition from people who can't equate a famous rocker with a more 'normal' profession.

"There's quite a bit of rebranding between the way people see you as a rock star and the way people see you doing a complicated legal transaction for them," she said. "I was expecting everyone to go, 'Zia's smart, she can do this.' Some people still think I'm just drunk every day."

But ultimately, she's having the last laugh as, not only does she have added job security in her new profession, it also benefits her cool side hustle too.

She explained: "The real impact becoming a realtor has had on the band is now there's someone in the band who knows how to run a business.

"Not once has one band member known what our overhead is. If you get a check each month, it's so easy to not pay attention to where the rest of the money went.

"Now, everyone wants to know where every penny went. And I sit at a desk, so I can stop doing real estate and do Dandys stuff for 30 minutes. I run one business, it's not hard to run another business from the same spot."

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