Strong. Smart. Cool as f**k … and Jo Whiley is just getting started
‘I mean, the 90s – ’ Jo Whiley says with a wide smile when I ask for a standout memory from that iconic era. (Freshly resonant as this issue went to print, with the nation buzzing over the Oasis reunion shows.)
Fittingly for the woman who’s fronted the BBC’s coverage for 30-plus years, she finds it in the fields of the UK’s most famous festival.
‘It was this hazy, lovely, summery Glastonbury,’ she recalls, of June 1995. ‘I remember being in the backstage area, and I was doing the TV coverage, and there was Robbie [Williams], and he’d got this red Adidas tracksuit on, he’d got bleached blonde hair. Jarvis [Cocker, Pulp frontman] was walking along with a carrier bag full of records and [I was] looking around, just going, “Oh my god, to be alive and to be part of all this scene. This is something.”’
In the (nearly) three decades since, the Northamptonshire native and mother of four has been busy – her personal and professional worlds populated by the things that make her tick: music, conversation (she’s interviewed everyone from Madonna to Dolly Parton) and community.
‘Being on the radio and playing music, it’s just everything…That’s what gets me up in the morning. It keeps me sane,’ she says. ‘If everything’s kicking off at home, it’s like, “Okay, bye, I’ll see you later. I’m just gonna go and join my people.”’
She’s still collecting core memories. ‘I interviewed Nick Cave the other day, who is just so eloquent and intelligent and wise,’ she says. ‘It was fed back to me that he walked out and he said, “Oh, she knows her stuff” and I was like, pinch me! Oh my god, that’s all I wanted in my life.’
If the WH team’s impression of our cover star was captured in one of those cringey corporate word clouds, one would loom large. Cool. You can try to pin it down – the physical prowess that sees her leg pressing 120kg effortlessly; the oversized bomber and Carhartt dungarees that she dons as she leaves the studio; the way she – assuming role of Chief Vibes Officer – presides over a playlist featuring Fontaines DC and Chappell Roan.
But really, her coolness is elusive. As someone who reported from the front line of Cool Britannia, what does the word mean to her?
‘It’s how people hold themselves. It’s what there is about them to admire,’ she begins, before listing examples. Patti Smith (‘there’s a real presence about her’), Blur, Elastica, the Spice Girls, Zoe Ball and Sara Cox.
As for her? ‘Obviously not,’ she says, voice lowered. Cool, by her workings, is about mastery, perspective and authenticity. More than anything, it’s about longevity. ‘I think what is cool is all these people have endured.’
Fit for purpose
Endurance as coolness: it’s unusual framing but makes perfect sense. For one, Jo’s not planning on hanging up her headphones any time soon (‘I’d be happy if it was just one show a week right up until my dying day’). Then there’s her gang of kids – the youngest of whom is 15. For them, she’s set her sights on staying as well as she can for as long as she can.
In order to make good on this goal, she trains – hard. She puts in the hours in the pool, at the gym – and even has a few triathlons under her belt. ‘With running, I really have to make myself do it. But the gym,’ she smiles. ‘I love working out and doing weights.’
The physical effects are obvious (you can steal Jo’s formula, details on p30). But it’s inside where lifting has been truly transformational. ‘I did go through a period of time when I felt like I was just a bit weak, but I think it’s probably when the menopause hit,’ she tells me.
‘When I was going through [it], I think the conversation wasn’t being had that vocally, like it wasn’t on social media with Davina [McCall] and her campaign… I really lost myself. I cried all the time. I mean, I cry a lot anyway, but I cried all the time. I just felt very weak. And going to the gym and getting myself strong has played a really big part in helping me be the person I am today,’ she reflects. ‘It really saved me.’
If a destabilising menopause proved a catalyst for being more intentional with her health, so did the loss of several friends, including fellow broadcaster Steve Wright. ‘Our family motto was “can everybody stop dying?” because it was just like, oh my god, another one,’ she shares, with a wry laugh.
Amid a ballooning grief conversation, I put it to Jo that mourning your much-loved mates often goes unvoiced. ‘Friends are the people that you really, really love, because you’ve developed this deep connection… the loss of them cuts really, really deep, because you spend so many hours [together], they’re so much a part of your life… and then suddenly, when they’re not there, there’s this huge void.’
The bereavements triggered a wake-up call. ‘I’ve always been healthy, and so [there weren’t] any major lifestyle changes, but it was going and getting health checks... [and] having a yearly MOT.’
Love and care
Movement also serves as a balm for the grind of caring responsibilities. Jo’s beloved sister, Frances, has cri du chat syndrome, a learning disability. During the pandemic, Jo made headlines when she successfully leveraged her platform to ensure people with such disabilities were prioritised during the vaccine roll-out.
‘I think when Covid happened, it was exposed that there was this huge forgotten sector of society – people with learning disabilities,’ she reflects. ‘So much of the system is pretty broken, and it needs fixing with urgency.’
Frances lives in a care home (‘we are so unbelievably grateful to the people who look after her’) and stays with Jo’s folks every third weekend, while Jo performs a tertiary role, supporting everyone.
‘I probably just have the mental worry of, oh god, all the guilt, all the stuff that goes with it, like [thinking] I’m not helping enough.’ I suspect there’s no ‘just’ about it. ‘My husband’s brilliant, and the kids as well, at just going, “It’s okay.” And they help out as much as they can, too… Respite is very important, and self-preservation is incredibly important. She was sectioned once, and that was a very, very dark time – it was really awful. And they were great at supporting me through that.’
Jo’s respite? There are the SKNfluence facials from Georgina East at Grafton Spa and Wellness (her local). But it’s jumping into bodies of water (‘a swimming pool or a lake or a river or the sea’) that restore her to her factory settings.
‘It utterly changes everything. Nick Cave was saying that the other day. He said a quote, something about: you went to the water with a whole load of demons, and then you emerge and you’ve left them behind. And that is what it feels [like].’ Not that you’ll find the former competitive swimmer doing the other kind of bathing.
‘I had a sports massage the other day, and they started talking about sound baths. And I was just like, okay, out of here, I’m done,’ she deadpans. ‘Anything vaguely hippy-dippy, I leave to my husband.’ She traces this back to her childhood. ‘Maybe that comes from my background of having my sister.
It’s like, there’s just never been any time for any of that s**t,’ she says – playfully. ‘It’s like, let’s get on with the job in hand, which is just living – and coping.’
Great expectations
In person, Jo is polite, deeply conscientious and determined to do a good job in our interview. Pair this with her competitive nature (she was recently told off by her kids for taking a game of table tennis too seriously) and ripped physique and you’d be inclined to class our cover star as a classic Type A. And yet. ‘I never had any vision for anything in my life. I’m very much like Winnie-the-Pooh. I just stumbled through life,’ she tells me. ‘Things happen, and that’s fine, and then I work my way through it.’
When I ask how the culture Jo came of age in shaped her understanding of what women in their fifties and sixties could be, she says she never projected forwards. ‘But my perception of what my mum was like and my grandma and looking at people who were in their late fifties felt old and a little bit fuddy-duddy,’ she recalls. ‘Me at 20 or 30, I’d be so surprised I was still on the radio, that I was doing bits of TV, I was still doing Glastonbury, I was still going to gigs.’
I ask her to compare the era that taught her how to be a woman with the one her youngest daughter is living through. ‘The whole Loaded culture that came along – there was so much objectification and judgment of women and their bodies. It was a ludicrous time to be a woman, but I just kept my head down and weathered the storm,’ she recalls. And now? ‘I think this generation [of girls] is still dealing with a lot. There are so many crises and so much pressure and so much to worry about in the world.’ But she’s hopeful.
‘There’s an army of [young] women who are fearless, absolutely fearless, and they take no prisoners, and they will be who they want to be. And it’s much healthier,’ she says, listing some of 15-year-old Coco’s pop heroes: Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, Billie Eilish. ‘It’s liberating. Coco can be herself, so can her friends and they don’t agonise or have lots of angst over the way they act and their bodies.’
This contrasts sharply to her eldest’s experience. ‘My older daughter is 32 and, growing up, she faced an awful lot of pressure,’ she recalls. ‘A lot of fat shaming and a lot of attention about how you look and how you should be; [that] you have to be skinny all the time.’
Hold out hope
With a milestone birthday on the horizon, Jo is still evolving. ‘I was on stage last week at the Isle of Wight Festival, this crowd of like 10,000 people in front of me, DJing the 90s Anthems gig that I do. And I came off stage and [my husband] Steve just grabbed me
and said…“When you were up there, I just looked [at] you and thought, Wow, that girl that I met the very first time, she would never have dreamed in a million years that she’d be on that stage with those people in front of her.”’ Jo smiles. ‘It’s taken a lot of personal development to get me on that stage in front of those people. It’s been really hard.’
I tell her this may surprise people, given the ethereally calm vibe she emanates on-screen and on the airwaves. How did she do it? ‘I just had to get over myself,’ she shares. ‘I remember doing one gig, and I was just so scared… My friend was in the audience, my best friend Amy, and I was actually having a panic attack on stage.’ It was Amy – grinning, willing her on – who got her through. But it marked a turning point.
‘I thought, I can’t go on like this. This is ridiculous. It’s ruining my life, because I’m just such a ball of anxiety.’ Repitching her focus outside herself helped tame the beast. ‘I realised how happy it’s making people when I do these gigs and the audience that I’m playing to is why I do what I’m doing… That was a game changer.’
Looking out on to those crowds, Jo’s observed a shift in the energy of the audiences who attend her gigs post-pandemic. One signalling that maybe, like she did in response to losses in her own life, people are deliberately grabbing on to joy following the collective hardship of the Covid era.
‘When we started doing our shows again, it was like this wall of joy and enjoyment from everybody that was there. Everything was so much more fierce, more ferocious, just the appetite for having the best time and appreciation for every single song that we played,’ she recalls. ‘It’s really beautiful... The dance floor is exactly where anybody can be, no matter what age. No matter who you are.’
We might not be at Glastonbury in 1995, but that’s a sentiment I’ll be holding on to this autumn.
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