Jane Kennaway has been played on NTS in shows including Supporter Radio: Your Specialist Subject II, featured first on 16 April 2026. Songs played include I.O.U..

For the youngest daughter of Scottish writer James Kennaway, it could - and should - have been so different. Born in 1955, Jane spent her early years travelling the world with her parents, an itinerant yet charmed childhood which included a year spent living on a boat in Kashmir, as well as extended spells in France, Switzerland, Spain, Majorca, Italy, New York and Beverly Hills. James Kennaway had found fame with his first novel Tunes of Glory in 1956, later filmed by Ronald Neame with Alec Guinness and John Mills. Other novels include Household Ghosts, The Mindbenders, The Bells of Shoreditch and Some Gorgeous Accident. He was also a successful screenwriter, with credits including Violent Playground and The Battle of Britain. However tragedy struck in December 1968 when Kennaway suffered a heart attack while driving on the M4 motorway, this following a night out with the actor Peter O'Toole. He was just 40.

Jane wrote her first song aged 15, shortly after the death of her father. 'I just sat down at the piano and wrote a song. I was playing it in my mum's restaurant, and somebody from Apple Corps came up and said, "Hey, can we record this song? We think you're great". I turned them down at the time, but that inspired me to go on. Dad used to say to me, you are not born an artist, you become one. Something happens in your life to make you what you become. His death was the "something" that happened to me.'

Her formative years were spent at several exclusive boarding schools, including St Denis in Edinburgh, and Cheltenham Ladies College. Here Jane continued to write songs, albeit somewhat removed from contemporary influences. 'It's a fight to survive in places like that. It teaches you independence. Then, when I was 17, people started saying I had a voice, which I'd never ever contemplated. I'd always wanted to be a songwriter because I was never interested in performing at all. Then I got a job in a band that went to Italy, and carried on singing.'

The Italian engagement offered glamour of a sort. 'After Cheltenham Ladies College had taken my sister Emma through the sixth form, the school said that it couldn't cope with another Kennaway and that I'd have to leave. We both went to Italy and did our first professional music gig together, backing the Patrick Sansom Band - an unlikely sounding name for two Libyan brothers, one of whom was dying of kidney failure and the other determined to pay off the hospital bills.' This first and last tour by the Kennaway sisters ended with the pair wiring their mother Susan for funds to get home.

In 1978 Jane formed a band called The Sneaks, singing lead and playing guitar, and financed by working in The Ken Mackintosh Big Band, doing the rounds of Northern working men's clubs and Mecca ballrooms. Not to be confused with other new wavers of the same name, The Sneaks were co-fronted by droll writer Tom Hibbert, but broke up without making a record, the high spot of their brief career being a support slot at The Marquee. 'We were really excited at finally getting the gig, and I decided to go out of the dressing room and have a look at the audience. They were all really heavy looking punks, so I went back and told the band we'd better change the set and put all the fast numbers at the beginning, straight through with no breaks. We went on and went through them. I saw this punk sitting on the side of the stage, stubbing his cigarette out on the drummer's foot. Finally he said to me, "Can't you play any faster?" To which I replied, "Only if I've got a train to catch".'

Keen to promote beautiful Jane any which way, managers Robin Eggar and Buzz Carter (aka Deckstar Management) also pushed their client towards acting work, including auditions as a Bond girl, and cult TV series Rock Follies. 'Not that I could act,' admits Jane today. 'But Rula Lenska was extraordinarily kind to me. I also found myself doing a lot of session vocals for adverts and jingles, and a gig at Reading Festival doing backing vocals for a sort of Australian Elton John.'

The following year Jane and Deckstar put together a more polished pop project, Strange Behaviour, placing this under the musical direction of drummer Andy Duncan, already a favourite of legendary producer Tony Visconti. 'Andy slowly whittled down my choice of musicians and put his in,' explained Jane. 'I don't have that musical accuracy or production. I've no ideas about that, I have to leave that all really open for everyone else to organize.'

An inspired choice, Duncan would later find enormous success with everyone from the Bee Gees to David Bowie, Seal to Simple Minds. Strange Behaviour eventually settled on a line-up including Wims (guitar), Eugene Organ (guitar) and Keith Wilkinson (bass), while Jane signed a publishing deal with DinSong, a boutique subsidiary of Virgin run by Carol Wilson. 'Jane was immensely talented,' recalls Wilson, who pressed up a four song promotional EP and the end of 1979. 'She wrote beautiful songs, looked great, and had a good personality and attitude.'

So far, so good. Unwilling to follow the lurid example of Toyah and Hazel O'Connor, however, Jane Kennaway and the emerging new wave scene made for uneasy bedfellows. Although the strength of her songs, voice and presence was never in doubt, Strange Behaviour looked somewhat less smooth than they sounded, and gave rise to an image problem. Laughably, some even hinted that Jane herself was too old at 24. Reviewing an early gig at Fulham pub venue The Greyhound, Paul Sexton wrote of 'taking in great gulps of the sheer greyness of the place, towards the back of the hall I noticed a lady of indeterminate age (youngish, let's leave it at that) in clothes somewhat livelier than the setting. Next thing I knew she was on stage. Jane and SB play music that doesn't fit snugly into any category. This certainly isn't pop in the usual sense, perhaps an extension of pop which takes a little longer to digest. She's a strong-voiced blonde surrounded by three guitars and a drumset, with a sound that draws heavily on those axes without drowning her. No, she floats nicely on a set of "new" music with considerable melody and inventiveness, but not a little aggression when it's needed. Jane's voice is agile too, never better shown than on their final number, IOU.'

Similar Stalinist style problems afflicted New Musik, the underrated electro-pop group formed by producer Tony Mansfield, who asked Jane to provide backing vocals on Sanctuary, a minor British hit in June 1980. 'I'm really worried about England and where music's going, especially the melody since new wave came in,' Jane confided to the music press. 'I'm very strong on melody. I can write my melodies before I even touch a guitar. And I just feel that the melodies always follow the chord changes in half the songs I hear now. I'm sure they wrote it while they were playing a guitar, and their fingers dictated the melody instead of their heads. I find that the saddest thing.'

Having failed to match the DinSong deal with a major recording contract, Jane and Deckstar released standout track IOU as their debut single on a tiny independent label, Growing Up In Hollywood. Issued in October 1980, the first 3,000 copies retailed at just 50p, accurately reflecting a set of sharp, ironic lyrics about recession and credit - and a desire to break into the charts. Thanks to the memorable chorus and ascending guitar hook IOU quickly picked up heavy airplay from mainstream radio deejays as well as John Peel, and was further promoted by punishing gig schedule around London, visiting pubs and clubs such as the 101, Greyhound, Moonlight, Dingwalls, Rock Garden, Bridge House and The Venue, as well as far-flung outposts in Richmond, Hailsham and Warwick.

More at http://www.ltmrecordings.com/janekennawaybio.html