f64 T
he songs Jackie ended up recording for the album were often those she learned from her dad, either through his singing or his record collection. And they were interspersed with others that she felt captured his spirit and attitude to life. Colin even got to appear on the record in a posthumous duet on the John Tams song Rolling Home.
“It was really hard to make that happen because we don’t have any recordings of my dad. I knew that there were nooks and crannies in the old family home where there might be cassettes or Dictaphones lurking, but trying to find them was virtually impossi- ble. Then magically I contacted his friend Martin who was someone who ran a session with my dad for years, and he came back with this video of him in Scotland late one night singing this song, and it was like it was meant to happen. So Simon and I put this duet together. Listening back to it for the first time, we both had tears in our eyes. It was just such a spooky moment, but very fitting.”
Our direction in life is so often influenced by our parents’ pas- sions, whether we know it or not. Jackie is fully aware that she chose a career in folk because of her father.
“You don’t realise when your parents are still around, but I think ultimately you want to please them and you want to relate to them and you are a product of them really, and everything you’ve been surrounded with when you’ve been brought up. And so folk music was part of my life because of Dad’s passion for play- ing records on a Sunday and taking us to sessions and festivals. Me performing was a way of getting his attention and his love. Yeah, it was a bonding thing. It was lovely, and entirely him.”
The other focus of the record is Jackie’s daughter Rosie, born just five days before Colin died. Her burbles and laughs ripple through the recordings like percussion. And she’s visible on the cover, seated at the family piano in a sketch beautifully rendered by Christina Alden of fRoots favourites Alden Paterson and Dash- wood. I wondered if Jackie had also wrestled with the idea of allowing her first born to be so prominent on the album.
“At the time I just felt very apologetic, as you do when you’re a mum. Wherever you are with a baby you feel like you want to apologise when they make a sound or noise. And so initially I felt very embarrassed that I had this baby in the house; she wouldn’t go to sleep when we wanted her to. But Simon Richmond is a father himself and I’m so grateful that he celebrated her presence rather than begrudged it.”
“The picture on the front was originally a photo and I thought
‘Gosh, that’s me 30 years ago!’ And in a way it is me, because I feel like that little girl. I’ve been reading Rosie story books every night that I read as a little girl, and so I wanted the cover to have a child- like timelessness about it.”
The most spellbinding moment of the Sidmouth performance came from the album’s most surprising song. John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band’s Mother, written by Lennon after a course of primal therapy, about the parents who abandoned him, would seem an unlikely inclusion on a record that also contains works by Lal Waterson, Ewan MacColl and Hamish Henderson.
“I’d been to Liverpool to see my brother’s new house for the first time. John Lennon grew up very close by and his Aunt Mimi lived a couple of streets away. It coincided with me thinking a lot about both of my parents, and I came back from Liverpool feeling really wound up but also a bit obsessed with John Lennon! The next day Simon came over and asked if I’d ever heard Mother, and I hadn’t. But I recognised in the song that there’s something incredi- bly emotive in so very few words, and it just speaks beyond lan- guage to this deep-seated childhood hurt. I wanted to encapsulate that feeling; that childish feeling that never really leaves you.”
“I hadn’t had to think about this before I lost my dad, but just what pillars your parents are to your very sense of everything being okay and settled. Once you take one of those pillars away, you do feel very, very vulnerable and childlike.”
One of the gifts of the folk world, with its performer and audience longevity, is you can stay a ‘young’ musician for a remarkably long time. But with seven solo albums to her name,
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