35 f The Explorer’s Tale

It’s clearly an Oates thing. Unlike some other English folk artists, Jackie Oates always rings the changes between albums. ‘I’m going out there, I may be some time,’ she tells Tim Chipping.

Jackie Oates is on a long van journey to play at the Eroica Britannia festival in Bakewell when I call. “It looks like quite a nice festival but we’re only playing for half an hour and it’s pouring with rain,” she sighs. That’s a lot of waiting for 30 minutes of soggy singing.

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“It was like that in Iceland too,” Jackie tells me, about that month’s trip to the VAKA Folk Festival in Akureyri. “We were sharing the stage with seven other acts and it over- ran by an hour. I was supposed to be doing a 40-minute spot but by the time I got on stage it was midnight. So I just did 20 minutes and left! All the way to northern Iceland for that.

harlie Watts is over-quoted as describing his first 25 years drumming with The Rolling Stones as “five years playing and 20 years waiting around”.

“But it was a magical place; it never got

dark at all. It’s very small and there’s knit- ting everywhere! And the people just see things differently to the way we do. They don’t have the concerns that you have when you live in a busier place.”

Clearly no one told Charlie that “life is a journey and not a destination” as the the- ologian Lynn H Hough less famously coined. Anyone else would consider a job travelling the world for so little work a charmed life. Anyone except a professional musician perhaps. I wonder how much of Jackie’s twelve-year career as one of our most prominent English traditional fiddle singers has been spent actually being an English traditional fiddle singer.

“A big portion of my life is spent being a folk singer because there’s so much more to the job than just singing. There’s an

awful lot of admin and organisation and just getting your head round what’s hap- pening when. And mulling things over. Any time you make a new album or come up with new material it’s usually the result of a good few months of having these little seeds of thought in your head.”

Can you allow yourself time for mulling? Is it structured into your day?

“Whenever you try and make it a con- scious thing it doesn’t happen. I do find that circumstances dictate how receptive I am to being creative. I like to make music that reflects where I am in my life and who I’m with and what I’m into. That’s a lovely thing really. So at the moment I’m going to a folk club regularly and I’ve got a very good song writer friend who I drink tea with every week. And it’s kind of feeding that musical head.”

Photo: Darryl Everitt