Jackie Clarke: My story as told to Elisabeth Easther

Jackie Clarke. Photo / Darren Meredith

Jackie Clarke has charmed audiences for decades as a solo artist, in musicals and as a member of a variety of bands including When The Cat’s been Spayed. Clarke is soon to star in Rock Follies Forever with Jennifer Ward-Lealand and Laura Daniel as part of the Hamilton Arts Festival, February 24-March 5.

I have no memory of my parents being together, because mum and dad split up quite quickly after Robyn, my twin sister, and I were born. When that happened mum left Christchurch with us and our older sister Tracey, and we headed to Gisborne to be nearer mum’s family.

My first memory is of mum coming in the door of Nana’s house in Gisborne and saying, “I’ve just been to State Advances and we’ve got a house”. Which is how we grew up in a pink two-storey duplex state house in Kaiti. When the Queen came to visit some years later, in 1977, every single state house in our suburb got a makeover - including new footpaths, a faux gazebo and a lick of fresh pink paint - because there were rumours she might do a drive-by.

Mum was on the DPB, which meant we lived within our means and put everything on layby. But we always had clean clothes and shoes, and three square meals including a proper lunch in our lunchbox. A lot of the kids we grew up with didn’t have any of those things, and the kids who did have fathers, lots of them were bastards. So I grew up thinking blokes weren’t really necessary, or at least not key to household harmony.

Mum didn’t drink or smoke or go to parties but she was always cracking jokes and doing silly voices and we all sang funny songs together. Our home was the sort of place where you could be a dick and feel okay about it. I’ve often wondered, if there had been a father in our house, would we have been as free? Would we have danced around the house together singing silly rude songs at the top of our lungs?

In a parallel universe, mum might’ve been a performer but because her family was lower working class, and her dad worked on the Napier docs, she left school at 14 for a series of shopgirl jobs. As for dad, he was highly educated, one of the first Samoans to come to New Zealand on a tertiary education scholarship. When mum and dad met, it was a whirlwind romance with a very short extra-marital interlude that resulted in my elder sister being born. By the time mum realised she was pregnant, dad was already off sowing his wild oats elsewhere, so mum went to the country to have the baby and dad never knew.

Years later my uncle George, who was a ship’s captain, was in port in Gisborne when he bumped into mum. She introduced him to this small brown girl and George realised Tracey was his brother’s child. So George told dad who, being a good Catholic Samoan, raced in on his charger and did the honourable thing.

Once they were married, mum went to Christchurch and quickly had twins, me and my sister, but the marriage was all over by the time we were 18 months old, and although dad was the love of mum’s life, they never should’ve married. Growing up we had holidays with dad, but he was largely absent. At least he was, until he turned up on my doorstep just before I started my family. He’d been living in the States, and he needed a place to stay so suddenly he was living with us. Then he got lung cancer almost straight away, and he died about the same time I got pregnant.

I was the brainy girl at school. I wore glasses, and I was good at writing and public speaking. I was quite funny too, but growing up in the 70s in a state house, I certainly never thought I could be a professional singer or an entertainer. None of that was on my radar and until high school, my only experience of live music was Y One, that touring Christian band. They seemed so glamorous, just like ABBA and I was obsessed with ABBA when I was 11. I was also obsessed with the radio, and I’d sit beside it, with the cassette player all lined up to record my favourite songs.

During my last year of high school, I was part of Gisborne’s only synth rock new romantic post-punk band. We were called Marching Orders. In spite of being very wet behind the ears, I loved being the front person. It felt amazing when we made it to Shazam’s Battle of the Bands, then when school finished, we toured the DB pub circuit. Mt Maunganui on a Tuesday, Taupō on Wednesday, Wellington on Thursday, doing five or six gigs a week, but the band soon fell apart, because we didn’t have the skills to navigate collaboration in a small group.

Jackie Clarke performs at Christmas in the Park at the Auckland Domain in December 2022. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

At school, I did sometimes imagine myself in a newsroom, like Mary Tyler Moore so after Marching Orders ended, I did a journalism induction course in Rotorua. It was designed to encourage young Māori and Polynesians into the field. I was even offered a cadetship in Invercargill but I decided to go to Victoria instead, where I ended up with a history degree. Partway through my honours, I was shoulder tapped to do some TV work and ever since then it’s never stopped. I’ve gone from one job to another, like a gypsy, entertaining and singing my whole life, from 16 to 56 and it has been wonderful.

I’ve always strongly identified as a Pacific Island New Zealand woman, but growing up, although we knew we were Samoan, we were also simply brown kids in Kaiti. We didn’t really differentiate between being Māori and Samoan, and I didn’t properly learn about dad’s side until I got to university. When I first arrived in Wellington, I stayed with my Samoan grandmother who lived in a Karori Council flat with my Uncle Robert who was a bus driver. My grandmother was an old-school Catholic Samoan, and if you did anything wrong she’d get her salu and smack you. I loved the time I spent with her, and I soaked it all up.

After nana’s place, my first flat was a semi-vegetarian, all-woman house in Mt Victoria where I paid forty dollars a week for a massive room. We walked everywhere. When we needed more lentils we’d go to the organic food co-op and my summers were spent singing backing vocals for Netherworld Dancing Toys. We did these massive six-week tours and I’d make enough money from that, and waitressing, to put myself through university. Those were golden days and my heart breaks for all the people these days who come from no money. Who have no financial fat in their family, so they finish their education with a massive debt.

I’ve been blessed with bullet-proof self-esteem. In the early days of Marching Orders, somehow we were Iggy Pop’s support act when he was playing at Mainstreet. Only he pulled out and we ended up playing the headline. I was very into vintage clothes back then, and I was wearing an emerald green strapless ballgown that didn’t quite fit. I have also been blessed with a very large rack, and I spent the entire set hitching my frock up to cover my bosom, turning this awkward thing into something funny. I made a running gag of hoisting my frock up, but when I came offstage, these beautiful Auckland lounge lizards said, “oh, you poor thing, having to cope with that”. But to me it was a gift having something go wrong, for something potentially so humiliating to become the best thing.

When I give talks to young people, I tell them I have no training in anything. That I make it all up as I go along. I say, always trust your instincts and be a good human. Make sure your ears are always flapping and your eyes are always open and never be afraid to ask questions. I explain that it’s important to authentically hold your space, because there is no one else like you and that is a wonderful thing. Maybe too, the stuff you think is ‘wrong’ about you is what is right about you. I also tell them, everyone has the right to be involved in music.

That said, I still have a bit of imposter syndrome. I think everybody does, but my single best asset, aside from always doing a lot of preparation, before I go on stage, I let all conscious thought go. Whatever will happen will happen, and so long as I’m present, even if I f*** up, no one is going to die.

The ageing process is weird, and there is so much ageism in entertainment, where 30-year-olds are cast to play grandmothers but I have never felt more comfortable in my skin, or sexier than I do today. Even though some things seem to happen overnight. Like this crepey bit of skin that wasn’t there yesterday, or the perpetual frown, but ultimately no one sees your marionette lines if you’re smiling. They just see that you’re having a great time, and as long as you’re vibing, they’ll want what you’re having. I feel more beautiful and powerful at 56 than at 26, which is all about not giving a fuck, or feeling you need to please other people, because when you amuse yourself and you’re having a good time, you feel a million bucks. Simple as that.

www.hamiltonartsfestival.co.nz