If you are a full time musician or singer and have performed the pub and club circuit for many years you might consider a career diversion into cruise ship entertainment. This type of work is perfect for those of you who are still single and before you settle down with a family.
It is an amazing way to see the world and actually get paid for it in the meantime. To get access to one of these jobs takes two paths mainly, the first is by knowing someone who does it already and asking them to arrange it or by applying yourself.
The main route this way is to ring all the entertainment agencies you can find on a search engine or a phone book. If you already work for these agents be sure to express your interest as it isn’t something they’ll offer out of the blue. If you have no luck then you can locate the company email and addresses of all the cruise ship companies. If you write a letter to the Events Team asking how you would go about obtaining work and in the letter be sure to ask for the name and number of the director of music. This sounds like a formal title but the music director is usually just the drummer or the one who has been on cruise ships the longest.
With all of these leads try and set up an actual audition, you should pay for a rehearsal room yourself and invite anyone from the industry you can to watch you. Offer complimentary food and drink, even if its crisps and pop. It all makes you look more professional in their eyes and as you will be living onboard 24/7 these impressions count.
If you’re persistent and finally break through and go onboard you must know what skills you’ll need. If you’re there as one of the backing band for the large room where tribute acts and one off performances are you need to be highly skilled at reading sheet music and be proficient at playing a song first time without even knowing it sometimes purely from the sheet. So for the musically skilled of you this is a great job and most of the time you’ll be in black at the back of the stage which means you don’t need to worry about stage fright as the singer takes that pressure for you. Perfect.
Another job in cruise ship entertainer would be as a singer. You will more likely be in a bar area of the ship and will be singing to backing tracks. A nice touch here would be to play a guitar along with the tracks to give a sense of realism to the music and remove the karaoke singer stigma which sometimes comes with this job. You will normally do 3-4 30 minute shows six times a week so you’ll need at least two hundred songs in your repertoire. Then double that figure as two hundred is for a week and most people cruise for two weeks and if you repeat the same song over you will find some very unhappy holiday makers.
A key skill of this job is interpersonal skills. You will be the one that bring that personal touch to the evening on the ship so you should banter with them and ask how their day was etc. You will also get officer privileges so you can eat/drink and socialise amongst the passengers which most of the other crew members cannot do. With that perk comes the responsibility to be respectful, kind and above all always on professionally.
It can be a fairly draining job even though its only a couple of hours a day as you live, eat and breathe the ship but when you’re home you will have seen places in the world you may never have dreamt of going and most definitely will feel like a success.
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