BIG interview
With a brand-new tour on the horizon Jane McDonald tells Yours why she’s feeling positive about her future…
Earlier this year, singer and TV presenter Jane McDonald spoke movingly about how the grief of losing her mother, Jean, and her fiancé, Ed, would never go away but that she was getting there. She thanked her fans for helping her survive her sorrow, saying that, on tour, she knew many of them had been through something similar, “so I was singing for them, too”.
She also vowed to take her foot off the accelerator when it came to her busy working schedule as she continued to heal. So, has she slowed down? Apeal of laughter. “No, of course not,” she says. “I keep thinking I’m going to and then something wonderful comes in.”
For example? “Well, I started talking to my team about putting another tour together and I found myself getting really excited.”
It’s called With All My Love and will involve 24 concerts starting in Blackpool on October 11, ending in Leeds on November 22. The title for the tour came from Sue, the friend she invited to come and live in her house in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, after losing the love of her life Ed Rothe to lung cancer in March 2021. Fans of Celebrity Gogglebox will know Sue, Jane’s pal of 30 years, for her hilarious one-liners.
“I don’t want to live on my own,” says Jane, “and she’s a good cook which is handy because I don’t cook at all. I’ve landed right on my feet!”
Jane had lived with her mother and then with Ed for the last 13 years of his life. “Solitude didn’t work for me. So, I was pleased when Sue agreed to move in. It helped keep the grief at bay.”
Grief is a funny thing, she says. “It doesn’t come with a rulebook. I tend to grieve in private. But you can’t always be sure when it’s going to strike. Your emotions can ambush you. You’re listening to the radio and suddenly a song will come on that triggers a flood of memories.”
Jane and Ed first met in 1980 when she was 17 and working at a pub and Ed came to play as the drummer with the band, Liquid Gold. The relationship lasted 18 months.
Fast forward to 2008 and the two met again when Jane was in make-up prior to an appearance on Loose Women and Ed, now a drummer for The Searchers, appeared on the monitor. The Searchers were performing in an adjacent studio.
“It was like we’d never been apart. He proposed to me that Christmas Eve and we were together for the rest of his life.”
Ed has remained a big part of Jane’s family. Her brother, Tony, has a daughter, Katie, who gave birth to a son in late 2022. “One day, she said to me: ‘Auntie Jane, would you mind if we called him Ed?’ Let me tell you, there wasn’t a dry eye in the h
