Jay-Jay Feeney’s year of change
Last year Jay-Jay Feeney quit her job and separated from her husband. She’d had the job, hosting on The Edge radio station, for 23 years. The husband, Dom Harvey, she’d been with for 18.
For Feeney, job and husband were packaged together. She and Dom hosted radio station The Edge’s breakfast show together, along with Clinton Randall.
They came as a pair, always mentioned in the same sentence: ‘‘Jay-Jay and Dom’’. She was sick of it. Sick, too, of The Edge’s relentless drive to keep its huge audience tuned in, to keep shocking them with new pranks and stunts.
At the end of 2016 the mental illness she had struggled with most of her life overcame her. Midway through a morning radio show, she disappeared to cry in the toilets and wasn’t back in the studio for a month.
When she told her boss she wanted to leave, he asked her to stay on The Edge for another year. The ratings were good. But her life had to change, so she packed up and moved to Christchurch, where she is cohosting the More FMdrive show with Jason Gunn.
Sitting in a cafe near the More FM studio in Addington, Christchurch, Feeney confesses she’s nervous about the new role. The new everything, really. She drums her fingers on the table. ‘‘I’m so out of my comfort zone at the moment,’’ she says.
In a way, the new job is a return to her earliest days in radio. Feeney will be the new show’s anchor, the person who speaks first and last between ad breaks, the one who pushes the buttons to turn on mics and activate sound effects.
‘‘When you’re anchoring it’s just a whole different skill. Just being on the radio, someone else throws to you and you’re just the meat in the sandwich,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m no longer the co-pilot, I’m the pilot.’’
Feeney hasn’t anchored a show in more than 21 years. When she first joined The Edge it was, as the name suggests, a station that aimed to shock listeners. In the early years she embraced that, but she is 43 now – older than most Edge listeners. And while she’s adamant she still related to that station’s audience, she’s tired of those shock-value gags.
‘‘In the early days, it was no problem, our job was just to get out there and shock. I didn’t mind doing that back then, because that was me; young, eager, keen, trying to make a name for myself, just trying to make the station succeed.
‘‘But after 23 years you do get a bit tired of that same old game. It was time to grow up a little bit.’’
Feeney says she’s never been comfortable offending people, but that’s something husband Dom has, over the years, managed to do repeatedly. Because they lived and worked together, she often ended up shouldering part of the blame.
‘‘It’s always like, ‘Jay-Jay and Dom’. Even when we did anything that made the news, that was scandalous, it was never ‘Jay-Jay, Dom and Randall’ or ‘Jay-Jay, Mike and Dom’, it was always ‘Jay-Jay and Dom’. I always got put in the same thing as him.
‘‘And we are different people, and I don’t always agree with everything he says and does, and sometimes I’d be cringing at the s... we’d get in trouble for.
‘‘So in some ways I just wanted to break free from the Jay-Jay and Dom box, and just be Jay-Jay again. And I’d forgotten who she is. It’s taken me a little while to find her. It’s quite scary.’’
No sooner has she mentioned her husband than her phone IAIN MCGREGOR
‘‘It’s just too hard to separate, and we’re not at a point where we need to yet. We will, maybe. Like, he’s got a girlfriend, things might get serious and we’d need to look at it then, I might find a boyfriend, the same thing might happen to me, like whatever. You never know,’’ says.
In this case, Dom’s calling to keep Jay-Jay in the loop about the sale of one of their three Auckland properties. He’s at the auction; it’s going well. To hear Feeney tell it, Dom taking the lead on the house selling is pretty typical.
‘‘I lost a lot of confidence in myself over the years, because I rely on Dom to take the lead, because he just does,’’ she says.
‘‘It’s quite scary that I don’t have him to fall back on now. It’s liberating, but it’s frightening, because I don’t know if I’m any good without him.
‘‘It’s just a lot of silly insecurities. I think it’s natural for someone who’s been with someone for so long – 18 years.