Whatever else has changed for Jane McDonald, between the working mens\u2019 clubs the cruise ships and the arenas she is increasingly packing out, one thing has remained. It\u2019s there on TV, where she remains the only Bafta-winning broadcaster liable to go full Cilla and break into song: she plays to the women. \u201cNever acknowledge the men,\u201d she advises cheerfully. There are a lot of husbands. \u201cAnd they\u2019re like, \u2018Oh God \u2026\u2019\u201d She pulls a face. \u201c\u2018Jane McDonald.\u2019\u201d Increasingly, however, her audiences may not contain many straight men: her social media-led renaissance as an icon of northern high camp means she will perform at London queer festival Mighty Hoopla this summer.<\/p>\n
I meet McDonald at her members\u2019 club in Mayfair on the morning she releases her 12th album, Living the Dream. At the age of 62, she\u2019s gone country. Recorded at the elite Blackbird Studios in Nashville \u2013 Coldplay and Taylor Swift have recorded there \u2013 she is dealing in unabashedly big country flavours. Less Cilla, more Shania.<\/p>\n
double quotation markI can\u2019t lie. It\u2019s been a man\u2019s world<\/p>\n
She was wary of agreeing to a chat with no conditions. For more than two decades, McDonald has been her own manager \u2013 and she\u2019s protective of her client. She attracts, she says, \u201ca lot of fake news\u201d, meaning the junk online news items that follow any podcast or TV appearance. She doesn\u2019t go on social media and turns down \u201cabout 96%\u201d of what she is offered unless it passes her \u201cHell yeah!\u201d test. McDonald is dressed in a crimson suit, her blowout arching like a question mark above her face. A pink wristwatch ticks down our allocated hour.<\/p>\n
Recently, she was comforting a friend ground down by her serially cheating husband. \u201cAll those wasted years,\u201d says McDonald, in the lush near-whisper she sustains throughout our interview, leaning in close. \u201cEverything she\u2019s had to put up with.\u201d That became the bar-room blues of Ain\u2019t Gonna Beg. She brought a Channel 5 crew to Nashville \u2013 her travel programmes won the channel its first Bafta in 2018. The documentary airs next month.<\/p>\n
I am sailing \u2026 McDonald with Captain Korres in 90s docusoap The Cruise. Photograph: Clive Hamilton\/BBC Archive<\/p>\n
But none of this \u2013 the album, Nashville \u2013 was meant to happen. McDonald had planned to retire with the love of her life, fiance Eddie Rothe. They had dated in clubland in the 1980s \u2013 he was a drummer for Liquid Gold and later the Searchers \u2013 and reunited in 2008. He died of lung cancer in 2021, aged 67. \u201cEverybody was waiting for that Ed song,\u201d she says. But nothing came. So for the first time, she decided to work with professional songwriters. One asked her about Rothe, \u201cand my face lit up\u201d. It does again now.<\/p>\n
Out of this came How Do I Move On. Torch song piano, gospel backing vocals and keening cello accompany McDonald\u2019s stately, intimate vocal about wearing Rothe\u2019s jumper and listening to his voicemails. Then there is the track Beautiful Soul, so titled \u201cbecause he was. And is. I still talk about him in the present. To me, he\u2019s still around in every way.\u201d<\/p>\n
This morning, McDonald woke at 5am to appear on Radio 2, singing Olivia Dean on Scott Mills in front of fellow guest Claire Foy (a McDonald stan, it turns out). Later she will sign CDs for fans on Oxford Street, and more tomorrow in Wakefield, the Yorkshire city where she has lived all her life. The fan events are rarities. Stage door signings began taking longer than the shows. Then there was a credible threat to her life. \u201cAt first I were a bit, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s just a death threat.\u2019 But you start to think.\u201d I tell her it\u2019s horrible how this just comes with being a female artist. Well, she says, \u201cWould a man stand and talk to the fans like me? And say, \u2018How\u2019s your mother?\u2019\u201d She asks about her fans\u2019 children, their divorces, their jobs. \u201cI write for them, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Oxford Street, the slowly moving queues snake out of HMV and down side streets. One fan \u2013 Rowenna, 56 \u2013 calls McDonald \u201ccourageous\u201d. Sam, 26, was reared on McDonald by his mother. \u201cJane\u2019s almost a drag queen,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich is a high compliment.\u201d Some of them are going on this year\u2019s Jane McDonald fan cruise, an October sojourn across Europe with the singer performing on board. Julie, 53, has followed McDonald since the 1990s and says we are watching \u201cthe height of her career\u201d right now, since surely she \u201ccan\u2019t peak any more than she has\u201d?<\/p>\n
McDonald was born in 1963 to a coal miner father and shop-worker mother. \u201cWe were really working class,\u201d she says. The youngest of three, she has only lovely memories of the cigarette and coal smoke of her home. Music originally came from the radio \u2013 her first word was Downtown, as in Petula Clarke \u2013 and then came the golden age of light entertainment on television. She remembers \u201chow excited we all were to sit down on a Saturday night\u201d for Cilla or Tonight at the London Palladium. \u201cIt was so light,\u201d she says. \u201cIt lifted everybody.\u201d She gestures upwards with a hand, as if floating above the troubles and disappointments of life. \u201cI wanted to make people feel how I felt watching it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The club circuit around Yorkshire was creatively ambitious. Her local was Wakefield Theatre Club, which showcased modern jazz and touring Americans. It was at the age of 12, while watching Birmingham beat group the Fortunes and enjoying the intoxicating smell of \u201cstale beer and fried food\u201d, that she realised she wanted to be a singer.<\/p>\n
But this was not the generally done thing. \u201cIn my age, everybody was either a secretary or a nurse.\u201d She began as a \u201cturn\u201d in her teens, with clubland providing an education in everything from ballroom dancing to standup comedy. In her 2019 memoir, she briefly mentions the awful effects of the 1984-85 miners\u2019 strike. Her father and her brother Tony went out on strike. \u201cThat were hard work,\u201d she says. \u201cTerrible.\u201d It wasn\u2019t just about miners. \u201cIt was every industry: the mills, the steelworks. The whole north just collapsed.\u201d She raises her hand and brings it crashing down. \u201cMusic was the one thing that everybody wanted to listen to, but it was horrendous. I can\u2019t lie.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Thank you for standing up for the north\u2019 \u2026 McDonald and her Loose Women co-panellists. Photograph: Ken McKay<\/p>\n
A rare pause. She begins speaking more softly. \u201cI\u2019ve always had mixed feelings about that time. When you see the whole of your community fall, it stays with you. The clubs weren\u2019t full any more. When the working man had money, he\u2019d spend it.\u201d And this was what funded the glamour of clubland. \u201cWe lost that because everything stopped. Every. Thing. Stopped.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even now, she finds nostalgia for the era painful. \u201cA lot of people say celebrate the 80s, especially down here,\u201d she says, surveying the London luxury around us. When Margaret Thatcher died, McDonald was booked to appear on Loose Women, where she was a panelist for 10 years. \u201cAll the Londoners on the panel were devastated. And I went, \u2018My thoughts are with all the miners that she \u2026\u2019\u201d Her whispers get even quieter. \u201c\u2018That actually died.\u2019 A lot of people couldn\u2019t stand it. They couldn\u2019t look after their families.\u201d<\/p>\n
She received more letters after that TV appearance than any other. \u201cSaying, \u2018Thank you for standing up for the north.\u2019\u201d This goes back to why she plays for the women. She saw what they were capable of during the strike.<\/p>\n
Yorkshire clubland never recovered, so McDonald moved with the times: three shows a night in Manchester. Her father ploughed his redundancy money into her stage show, becoming her roadie. McDonald remembers taking on the promoters who paid male turns more. \u201cAnd it wasn\u2019t just a little bit of money. Massive. I was told, \u2018They\u2019ve got a wife and kids to look after.\u2019\u201d She threatened to walk \u2013 and won her equal fee. \u201cI can\u2019t lie,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s been a man\u2019s world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seasoned traveller \u2026 Lost in Japan, one of McDonald\u2019s documentaries. Photograph: Channel 5 Television\/ ParamountUK<\/p>\n
Her sets included disco, ballads, standup. She knew a lot of psychics, so she understood early that her future involved sea and success, but she had to work at it. \u201cI was lucky that Whitney Houston was massive when I was doing the clubs.\u201d She serves me the opening bars of I Will Always Love You in a luxurious whisper. That\u2019s how you belt it out: by not doing. She learned that in Skegness. Today, on social media, the camp value of that same approach to contemporary pop hits \u2013 Ros\u00e9 and Bruno Mars\u2019s APT or DNCE\u2019s Cake by the Ocean \u2013 has brought her viral renown.<\/p>\n
When her father died suddenly in 1993, his GP revealed that he had been terminally ill for a long time, meaning he had chosen to spend his final years working with his beloved daughter. \u201cThat\u2019s when I ran away to sea,\u201d she sighs. \u201cI couldn\u2019t face the clubs without him.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is how she ended up becoming one of the UK\u2019s first reality TV stars. BBC One\u2019s The Cruise aired in 1998 (it is back up on iPlayer). Its first episode followed McDonald preparing for a headline cruise set with all of the warmth and excitement that has become her trademark. It was watched by 13 million people. \u201cSuddenly, you\u2019ve got a fanbase.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her self-titled 1998 debut album topped the charts \u2013 \u201cbut everybody wants to change who you are\u201d. That included her first husband, Henrik Brixen, who became her manager, siding with an industry that said she couldn\u2019t be that Wakefield woman any more. \u201cThey cut my hair. I hated it. I was laughed at and shunned and underdogged.\u201d She feels that the industry mocked her cruise and club origins. \u201cBut I was proud of where I came from. The public liked me because I was real.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is when her songwriting began: she escaped to the piano as her career fell around her in the early 2000s. \u201cHenrik had left,\u201d she says. \u201cI got dropped from the BBC. My record company dropped me. And I just thought, \u2018Well, carry on. But do it yourself. How hard can it be?\u2019\u201d She read music industry guidebooks, learning how to be \u201ca lawyer, a promoter, a manager\u201d. Even today, filling arenas, she has only just stopped paying every invoice herself. \u201cI didn\u2019t save the money, like normal people,\u201d she says. She would invest it in the next album or show, often using her house as collateral.<\/p>\n
When Covid hit, McDonald was exhausted from three non-stop years filming her cruising programmes for Channel 5. Her mother Jean had died in 2018. On long lockdown walks with Rothe, exploring the Yorkshire countryside without deadlines or camera crew, he pointed out that she could have this life all the time. He had quit music a few years earlier. Then, what had been a persistent cough led to him being diagnosed with lung cancer. McDonald became his full-time carer until his death. In her 2024 self-help book Let the Light In, she writes that she was diagnosed with PTSD, and has since moved out of the Wakefield bungalow they shared.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I could bring back Ed, I would give everything up and have him back.\u201d But she can\u2019t. \u201cMy life has just gone: boom! That is a gift from him. So why wouldn\u2019t I celebrate him? And not be sad. I don\u2019t want to be sad about Ed. He was a wonderful, beautiful soul.\u201d She considers herself blessed to have had the years they did. \u201cI feel like he\u2019s with me all the time. And now, with the songs, he will be.\u201d<\/p>\n
As with the country divas with whom she is communing on her new album, it is McDonald\u2019s survivor attitude \u2013 overcoming loss with Yorkshire grit and an insistence on living her dream \u2013 that has afforded her icon status. \u201cI quite like being the underdog,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t mind it.\u201d Whenever people underestimated or overlooked her in the clubs, she knew what to do. \u201cI used to think, \u2018Go on. Watch this. I\u2019m going to blow you away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n