No shortage of stories and songs for Jimmy Nail's first tour in 25 years
As a fifth and final date at The Glasshouse tips the gig counter past 50, the actor and singer reflects on music, memories and returning to the stage in an exclusive interview
“Let’s put half a dozen gigs on and see what the response is like…”
Jimmy Nail is recounting the pitch of veteran concert promoter, Tony Denton who was tabling the idea of the 72-year-old singer and actor taking his back catalogue of music and memories on tour.
“He was too polite to say, ‘to see if anybody still remembers you!’”*
*I’d confidently take a guess Tony was easing him in, but there you go.
Cracking on for 50 dates later - including an unprecedented fifth night just announced in The Glasshouse’s Sage One - it was Jimmy who put the breaks on.
“I had to say ‘look, I don’t want to do more than 50 – I’m a pensioner!’ Where would it stop. But I mean, going from six to 50…. it’s incredible, really.”
Jimmy is shaking his head and laughing as we settle down for a chat in his Newcastle home – small elderly dog in devoted attendance and an open fire being tended as required.
The aforementioned proposal for the tour came during a sell-out run at Live Theatre in Newcastle during which Jimmy revisited songs from his 1990s TV series, Crocodile Shoes with a full band.
“I’d been chatting to Jack (McNamara, Live’s artistic director) about doing something and I said I could maybe do a few gigs to blow the cobwebs off.”
As it turned out, they couldn’t put extra dates on fast enough (anyone else detecting a pattern here?), resulting in a whopping 19 nights which ran either side of Christmas 2025 – including a gruelling run of 13 consecutive performances at the Quayside venue.
“I was on my knees at the end of that - sounded like a frog, but it did go really well. The band were great - great players and nice people to hang with, which becomes not just important as you get older. It’s absolutely essential!”
Live Theatre is more than a venue for Jimmy. His sister, Val McLane, co-founded it more than 50 years ago. It’s part of his family’s story. A place where ideas are tested, shaped, and sometimes rediscovered.
He was there in 2024 with an exclusive staged reading of a play with songs, Seconds Away he created with legendary North East writer and lifelong friend, Ian La Frenais.
And just a week or so ago, he was back on its stage presenting one of the North East Playwriting Awards prizes.
But back to the new tour, and while the idea for it was prompted by a look back at Crocodile Shoes – itself a project which allowed Jimmy to flex his considerable writing, singing and acting chops in one TV vehicle – the resulting show will cast the net much wider.
Kicking off on July 4 in Basingstock, Stories and Songs is Jimmy’s first national tour in 25 years.
“That sounds like I don’t like touring,” he smiles. “And that’s not the case. I love it - but I tend to only go out if there’s a good reason to.
“When Tony asked me and I started thinking about it, I thought I’m at a point in my life where I can still put on a decent show. I can still sing, I can still recall stories and I’ve got a career which goes back over seven decades, so I’ve got plenty to talk about.”
More than plenty if his last touring mash up of music and memoir in the nineties is anything to go by.
“I got so carried away with telling the stories that I had to instruct my drummer, Geoff Dugmore, to give me a double bass-drum kick when I was talking too much because we could have been in danger of not playing any songs!”
This time around, it’ll be Jimmy’s longtime collaborator, pianist and top man at The Cluny Studios, Tony Davis who will need to agree the secret ‘time for a song!’ signal.
Maybe a determined middle C?
Despite this enthusiasm for sharing tales from his life, Jimmy doesn’t do many interviews. He doesn’t court off-work attention. Never has.
His career stretches from the North East local music scene of the 1970s to chart success, television icon status and international film and theatre roles.
Forever adored for his portrayal of Geordie bricklayer Oz in beloved comedy drama Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (written by Ian La Frenais with his longtime writing partner Dick Clement) he later appeared opposite Madonna in Alan Parker’s Golden Globe-winning Evita and has taken leading roles on West End and Broadway stages.
For all that, he remains instinctively wary of the spotlight.
“I didn’t want to become famous - I didn’t want everybody in the country to recognise me. But once it happened, that genie, once it’s out the bottle, you can never get it back in. You can’t undo that. And I struggled with it. I still struggle with it,” he admits.
And yet, here he is, about to step back out in front of rafter-packed audiences across the country.
“I’ve always been happier on a stage than I am on a pavement,” he says simply, “but I have tried to lean into it a bit more recently.
“When we did the Auf Wiedersehen, Pet 40th anniversary concerts at Newcastle City Hall a few years ago, it was impossible not to be affected and moved by how much people really love that show – I mean love it beyond the norms of how people react to cultural things.
“So instead of pushing against it, I’ve been trying to go with it… although I’ll never get used to selfies.”
In the North East alone, demand for the Stories and Songs tour has been extraordinary – as well as the now five dates at The Glasshouse, there are dates in Barnard Castle, Yarm, Middlesbrough and Alnwick.
“It’s gratifying and it’s humbling… You never really know what’s going happen. You never know if people are gonna think you’re still worth the price of a ticket.”
That uncertainty - that refusal to take an audience for granted - is something he learned a long time ago, and from the very best.
Travelling in a car with George Harrison on the way to the Royal Albert Hall and what would become the former Beatle’s final full concert performance in 1992, Jimmy was surprised to hear him admit to nerves.
“I said to him, ‘George, you were a Beatle, what could you possibly have to be nervous about?’ But what he was saying was, ‘don’t ever take the public’s support for granted, because you don’t ever know if somebody’s going to put their hand in their pocket come out on a wet Tuesday’.”
Judging by the way the tickets for The fifth Glasshouse gig on Tuesday, November 3 are already being snapped up(do not tarry if they’re on your ‘to grab’ list), it’s fair to say Jimmy doesn’t need to worry this time around.
The friendship with George - still something Jimmy says he finds unfathomable – began in Los Angeles, in a room full of musical royalty, and a spare ukulele.
“I was staying with Ian (La Frenais) at his home in the Hollywood hills, writing Spender,” he explains, referencing the BBC police drama he co-wrote and starred in from 1991-93.
“Ian would have these Sunday evening get togethers for Brits in LA. I went into the kitchen and the Travelling Wilburys were in there. I asked Tom Petty if George was around.”
Tom directed Jimmy down to the den where he found George strumming a ukulele.
“I popped in and introduced myself – I just wanted to say hello, but he asked me if I played. He always had two ukuleles in case he could give one to someone else to jam with – so the next thing, I’m four chords into playing Something like George Formby!
“I stopped and said I was sorry if I was taking a few liberties… but he told me to carry on and started playing along with me before inviting me to the Bel Air hotel the next day to jam some more. I mean, just the stuff of dreams.”
They remained good friends until George’s untimely death in 2001 – with George even playing guitar for the track Real Love on Jimmy’s 1992 album, Growing Up in Public.
“If I didn’t have a couple of photographs of he and I together, I still wouldn’t believe it myself,” says Jimmy. “I was nine when The Beatles started releasing records and 16 when they packed it in… so all those formative years.
“They were working class kids like us – as well as making the kind of music no one had ever heard before, they inspired a whole generation to think at least you could have a crack at it.”
These are the kinds of stories audiences can expect on this tour. The kind you wouldn’t dare make up. Like the time Steven Spielberg gave him a piece of career advice, which he’s still putting to good use.
“This was when I was in New York doing The Last Ship with Sting on Broadway.”
(You know it’s quite the story when Sting is mentioned incidentally.)
“He asked how the show was going and I said, ‘it’s going good – could be going a little better’. He said: ‘You know what you should do… take it to the people, don’t expect people to spend hundreds of dollars coming to New York’.
“Now, I did mention that we had a more challenging delivery mechanism – a 100-piece company to take to theatres vs a roll of film stock or a digital transfer or whatever,” Jimmy laughs, “but his point was nevertheless a good one.”
It’s a direction which has shaped this tour. Not just big venues, but smaller, more intimate spaces. Places where audiences might not always get the chance to see a show like this.Places where stories land differently.
Not that every audience will get the same stories, mind you.
“I will have stories I can swap in and out for different evenings, to keep things fresh,” he says. “I mean there are quite a lot of them.”
When we turn our attention to the setlist, there is also much to choose from.
“I did sit down and make a list… and there were about 50 songs on there, so that’s no good. I’ll have to get it down to 20 or so.
“That’s quite a job, but while I’m not one for looking back and congratulating myself, it is nice to revisit the music when you’re doing it for a purpose – what would work best here? And what shall we put there? Shall we do it chronologically or mix things up?That kind of thing.”
As well as the seven studio albums and associated compilations and soundtracks Jimmy has released (featuring big hitters like Ain’t No Doubt, Big River, Cowboy Dreams and a cover of Love Don’t Live Here Anymore), he’s also looking towards the songs which influenced him… starting with a still-vivid memory from primary school featuring a baritone-voiced teacher with an unfortunate name.
“He was called Mr Willie,” laughs Jimmy. “Poor bugger, having to face a classroom of four and five year olds every day. Is there anything better for a kid than having a teacher with a name like that?
“Anyway, he introduced us to the music of [Northumberland concert and opera singer] Owen Brannigan and he would sing to us too – traditional folk songs. There was one I can still remember so clearly:
[Imagine Jimmy singing]
Ca’ Hawkie, Ca’ Hawkie,
Ca’ Hawkie through the Watter,
Hawkie is a sweir beast
And Hawkie winna wade the watter.
“I can still see him at the front of the class singing. I didn’t have a clue what he was singing about - a sweir beast? - but I never forgot it. So I may sing that song – you still hear it in folk clubs.”
For all the global success, it’s clear the through-line of Jimmy Nail’s career begins - and continues – here at home.
He’s been living back in Newcastle for the past decade, something he clearly relishes – in a similar way to his continuing passion for making music.
It’s what came first and it’s never far away.
“You know, you get in the shower and you sing in the shower, you’re happy… You don’t ever hear of anybody acting in the shower… one’s a craft and the other’s a feeling,” he says.
“One’s something that you can work and get better at. Another’s an emotion. Music’s an emotion that moves your heart, moves your spirit. How could you ever not want to do that?”
Jimmy Nail’s Stories and Songs 2026 tour will be playing the following North East dates:
July 8 - Princess Alexandra Auditorium, Yarm
July 9 - Middlesbrough Town Hall
July 10 and 21 - The Witham, Barnard Castle
August 1 - Alnwick Playhouse
October 11-13 and November 3 - The Glasshouse, Gateshead