63 f Happy/Sad Life


“I didn’t realise I was making an album about my dad,” confesses Jackie Oates to Tim Chipping about her latest one, The Joy Of Living.


here were few dry eyes in the tent when Jackie Oates per- formed on the main stage at Sidmouth FolkWeek in the summer of 2018. She cried, I cried, the audience bit their lips and gulped. It was one of those performances where everything connects, and an artist who’s been part of that festival since she was a small child sang and played the most emotionally resonant and flawlessly delivered set of her career. And while it meant a great deal to fans who’d been buying Jackie’s albums since her 2006 debut, it meant a heck of a lot more to Jackie herself.


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“It was poignant because of course that was where it all started, you know?” recalls Jackie when I remind her that she left the stage in happy/sad tears. “We used to go there every summer and I know that my dad would have been there in The Ham marquee and he would have been proud. And it was weird standing there, pregnant with my second child knowing that my first child and my husband were in the audience, and my mum.”


Jackie’s father Colin sadly and sudden- ly passed away at the start of 2016. His ubiquitous presence at Sidmouth, often singing in The Bedford Hotel, is missed by many. And he looms large on Jackie’s lat- est record The Joy Of Living, although that wasn’t her initial intention.


“I didn’t realise I was making an album about my dad at all, at the time. I’ve got a very lovely record label who were looking out for me, and they’d arrange these little recording sessions and I just wouldn’t do my homework in time. I’d know that the producer Simon Rich- mond was about to arrive and I wouldn’t have worked on any songs or arrange- ments. But I would’ve spent the past few weeks sitting at the piano and playing things that came into my head. And so that’s kind of what we recorded. Then it was Mark Constantine from the label who realised what the record was about, months before I did. And I think I battled the concept for months and felt uneasy, because I’m quite a private person.”


Photo: © Judith Burrows


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