Copyright © 2012 Omnibus Press
This edition © 2012 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)
EISBN: 978-0-85712-774-7
The Author hereby asserts his/her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the photographs in this book, but one or two were unreachable. We would be grateful if the photographers concerned would contact us.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
For all your musical needs including instruments, sheet music and accessories, visit www.musicroom.com
For on-demand sheet music straight to your home printer, visit www.sheetmusicdirect.com
In memory of my much loved grandmother Maggie Armitage who suffered a stroke, like Jessie, and passed away just after the writing of this book.
Information Page
1 The Heartache That Wouldn’t Go Away
2 Take A Look At Me Now
3 Fighting Bullets With Beats
4 A Stroke Of Bad Luck
5 Perfectly Flawed
6 Taking Hollywood On Her Own Terms
7 Spikes, Dykes And Shock Value
8 Not The Average Essex Girl
9 The Voice Money Couldn’t Buy
10 A Rhythm For Life
A special thanks goes to interviewees Kerry Louise Barnaby, Natalie Green, Kelly Kim Kranstoun, Aisha Ludmilla, Myke Rayon, Shae, Dawn Wenn-Kober and all the additional anonymous names who agreed to be interviewed.
“Stomp, stomp, I‘ve arrived!”
Jessie J
White stilettos. Criminally short mini skirts. Brutal catfights that leave bloodstains on designer handbags, ripped hair extensions strewn on the street and fearsomely long fake nails torn right off. Drunken brawls that see policemen blinking nervously and wondering whether or not to intervene. Furious girls on the warpath cutting figures more formidable than the Kray Twins. Social and sexual butterflies taking to the streets in perilously high heels and sporting tans a deeper shade of orange than an Easyjet flight to Ibiza. Gaggles of drunken girls giggling raucously before falling head first out of nightclubs and descending haplessly into pools of their own vomit. Where was the scene of the crime? The location, of course, was Essex – and the birth place of Jessie J.
Born on March 27, 1988, and christened Jessica Ellen Cornish, the singer to be could little have known the stereotypes her postcode would have in store for her. Her home borough of Redbridge was a no man’s land between the insalubrious urban decay of gritty, edgy East London and the superficial, larger than life glamour of central Essex, complete with its self-tanning parlours, spas, nail salons and all you can drink nightclubs.
Aside from the after hours parties and polluted, allegedly sewage-infested beaches, Essex was best known for its women, who – much to their indignation – had gained the reputation from hell. This county was home to every stereotype that Amy Winehouse had sneeringly paid tribute to on her single ‘Fuck Me Pumps’. The caustic song had poked fun at girls who displayed a combination of debauchery and stupidity – an opinion of Essex girls shared by many others.
According to long-standing jokes, these girls sported bra sizes bigger than their brain sizes – and Essex girls with “half a brain” were cruelly dubbed “gifted”. They weren’t known for their sexual restraint either, allegedly wearing pants for no other reason than to keep their ankles warm.
Time magazine poked fun at the stereotype too, claiming: “In the typology of the British, there is a special place reserved for the Essex girl, a lady from London’s eastern suburbs who dresses in white strappy sandals and sun-tan oil, streaks her hair blonde, has a command of Spanish that runs only to the word Ibiza and perfects an air of tarty prettiness.”
One indignant blogger lost his rag at hearing one Essex joke too many, stepping in to defend: “I am an Essex lad and frankly all of you who are choosing to tar all Essex girls with the same brush are clueless idiots – and, by the looks of it, that’s most of you!”
Ouch. Yet as much as they might protest their innocence, the die for postcode stereotyping had already been cast. The term “Essex girl” had been born when Jessie was just a year old and not yet out of nappies. It all began – just like so many other stories about Essex – with an ill-fated sexual encounter. Two girls stepped forward to the tabloids in 1989 to loudly and proudly proclaim that they’d both slept with all five members of a famous boy band on the same night. The phrase “No sex please, we’re British” clearly did not apply to Essex.
An intentionally provocative accompanying photo shoot appearing alongside their tabloid confessions saw the pair wearing barely there dresses and, of course, white stilettos, which became the infamous trademark of the county. The shoes also became a trademark for debauchery – and some might say the two were one and the same.
The pair paved the way for women high on beauty but low on scruples who realised that their looks were a form of currency to be exploited and traded in for such goodies as wild sex with attractive partners, bagging a rich husband or getting their own way in various regards. It was an extension of the “Daddy’s girl” persona but extended to the wider world. Some called them smart, while others branded them devoid of morals. Either way, their liberation was a bitter pill to swallow for the majority of a then civilised, orderly and respectable British society.
The eighties had been a time of sexual restraint, prompted by the arrival of AIDS in the Western world at the start of the decade. Not only was casual sex risky, but condoms were discouraged, implying that the only safe options were marriage and abstinence. While religious puritans still objected to abortion in Jessie’s ancestral homeland of Ireland, back then it was forbidden altogether – and birth control was frowned upon. Women were instead expected to find a husband for life.
For example, in 1987, adverts for birth control were banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, who insisted these could influence young people into “thinking premarital sex was normal”. Durex almost went bankrupt because mid-market tabloids such as the Daily Mail banned their adverts from what it considered to be a respectable “family newspaper”. In one case, a photo depicting a pair of intertwined feet under bed covers alongside the phrase “I hope he’s being careful” was censored lest it outrage readers’ morals. In previous years, even the Yellow Pages had been forbidden from advertising products under the illicit category “Contraception”.
Against a backdrop of the ultra-conservative eighties, when some women were branded sluts just for dropping their pants before their wedding day, this spelled trouble for the freedom-loving Essex girls. It was an era when men were desperate to secure chastity in their wives, one where the stereotype dividing Madonnas from whores really applied. In fact, one 1980 survey revealed that half of the supposedly liberated male respondents – all under 25 – wanted to marry virgins. “I’m not [a virgin] but I would like [my wife] to be,” one explained. “I just would not like the idea of a second-hand woman.”
Add a couple of brash, lascivious, shamelessly lustful, unmarried good-time girls from Essex with a penchant for orgies into the equation and the problem begins to come into focus. From that moment, the reputation that linked Essex with bimbos and sex-crazed nymphets was set in stone. As the old saying goes, credibility was like virginity – and, in both cases, it could only be lost once.
A BBC report rationalised: “Statistically Essex girls were no more sexually promiscuous, nor were they of lower intelligence, than their counterparts in any other part of the UK.” However, listeners were far from convinced and the county became the subject of ridicule from then onwards.
To jokers, an Essex girl’s academic knowledge barely extended past the basic sex education biology – and, judging by the scale of unwanted teenage pregnancies, some might say it didn’t even extend to that. According to the stereotypes, schooling for an Essex girl consisted of how to bag a footballer and how to perfect the full-on, trashy, drag queen-inspired glamour look which was all a budding Essex woman needed to get by. People across the nation jibed that the best way to make an Essex girl laugh on a Saturday was to tell her a joke on Wednesday and that the difference between Bigfoot and an intelligent Essex girl was that there had actually been sightings of Bigfoot.
The jokes snowballed, and included a jibe that their favourite form of protection was the bus shelters in which they had sex. One gag was: “What does an Essex girl say after sex?”, with the response “Do you REALLY all play for the same football team?” No doubt that taunt was inspired by the groupies of the boy band.
Meanwhile the town where Jessie grew up and spent most of her childhood was the subject of the cruellest joke of all. A girl involved in a traumatic car crash and trapped in the wreckage is asked: “Where are you bleeding from?” only to answer “Bleeding Romford!”
At the tender age of one, Jessie could not have known the history of her home town – but she was soon to find out. Just a short distance from the fake nails, fake breasts, fake hair and fake eyelashes of flamboyant central Essex was her own place of birth, Romford. While towns like Brentwood might have attracted occasional, small-scale petty thieves,
Romford – and the borough of Redbridge as a whole – was felt to be a fully fledged crime hotspot.
Local gangs terrorised residents, with Ilford’s library of all places being the location of countless broad-daylight muggings. Many took place at the hands of a powerful group calling themselves the Afghan Gang. The London borough of Redbridge was placed ninth highest for car theft and was generally better known for gang violence than buoyant nightlife, with around 16,000 people each year said to have been directly affected by crime.
On one occasion during Jessie’s childhood, there were five near-fatal stabbings in the area in one day. A resident nonchalantly chuckled: “There are stabbings and shootings here all the time.” He advised out-of-towners who could be on a visit: “You might as well be done with it and book two weeks all inclusive in Kabul.”
In fact, its reputation was so flawed that a local drama group had once made the borough the scene of their own specially adapted crime thriller, Murder On The Leyton Orient Express. The group hoped to portray that the truth was always darker – and stranger – than fiction. As for the local girls that lived here, they were said to have more prison-cell mug shots than Facebook photographs – and, on both counts, it was a lot.
There was a backdrop of poverty and social deprivation in the area too – although Jessie’s parents both held down respectable jobs, nearly a quarter of children lived in households whose members relied exclusively on state benefits. To add to the unrest, there were growing tensions over immigration. Redbridge had become the UK’s most ethnically diverse borough, with 40 per cent of residents being from a racial minority. Some suspected it wouldn’t be too long before, in their little area, the minority would become the majority.
With jobs in short supply following the recession and – for many – poverty and destitution just around the corner, native Londoners were becoming resentful. While some appreciated the diversity, others perceived that immigrants were moving in on their territory and merely grumbled: “How am I going to feed my children?”
Some tried to make crime pay their way to otherwise elusive privileges, while more honest members of society found themselves constantly looking over their shoulders in anticipation of either burglary or a visit from the bailiffs. Plus, if the rumours were to be believed, Romford was more violent than wartime Kabul and had about as much monogamous morality as Tiger Woods.
Yet this was the location, deep in the hinterlands of suburban East London, where a certain pop star would begin her life – and, soon after, she would have a yearning to break away from the restraints of her postcode and seek a more exciting, liberating life on the stage.
Enter Jessie J. Naturally, someone who would go on to be a performer ought to have had a dramatic stage entrance – and she didn’t disappoint. While most children’s first words were generic terms such as “daddy”, “dog” or “ball”, Jessie, on the other hand, didn’t utter a single word until the age of two. However, when she did, it was a phrase that showed an instant affinity with the world of music showbiz.
While fellow entertainer Robbie Williams had proudly proclaimed that his first word had been “fuck”, Jessie had gone one step further in the outrageous stakes to prove her love of the stage. Asked when music began to have a real impact on her life, she told Gigwise: “My first words were ‘jam hot’. My sisters used to sing: ‘This is the boys from the big bad city, this is jam hot’. My mum was like, ‘Momma’ and I used to reply ‘jam hot’.” She added mischievously: “My mum was very disappointed!”
The words were part of the 1990 tune ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ by Beats International, a song so popular it would later be covered by Faithless and Dido, The Ting Tings and – in his own version, ‘Just Be Good To Green’ – Professor Green featuring Lily Allen.
Jessie was ahead of her time – “jam hot” would later go on to take its place in the urban dictionary.
However, she’d been a late developer in speech, with the typical child speaking their first words at a year old and a small minority chattering away as early as six months. Jessie started speaking a year later than the national average and it was feared that she was mildly dyslexic – but she soon caught up, using her love of song as her motivation.
“It just goes to show that everyone has their niche,” an anonymous friend of Jessie’s told the author. “Everyone has something they’re good at, even if it’s not the conventional stuff like maths and English, or the normal way of measuring intelligence. Everyone has a talent, something that can inspire them to do what they thought they never could – they just have to find it.”
Jessie’s first experience of finding that talent was being thrust into the limelight unexpectedly on a family holiday, lisping away to nursery rhymes onstage while her proud parents looked on, camcorder in hand. “My first musical performance memory was my sister playing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on the recorder,” she recalled to I Like Music. “I was three and I was singing. It was at a caravan park and it was an open audition for anyone on holiday. I just totally forgot the words and started laughing!”
She added to Neon Limelight: “That was my first little taste of [fame]. I was really young and it was really awful. I was just standing there and I started humming and singing out of tune.”
What was more, her parents had no intention of sparing her blushes – they filmed the whole event and played it back to her throughout her childhood. For Jessie, it was eye-wateringly embarrassing, but that was no deterrent for her sisters Hannah and Rachel – five and seven years old respectively – who took every opportunity to tease her about it.
Not to be outdone, Jessie got her own back by practising – and the family was soon subjected to a three-year-old, an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old all singing their hearts out in the front room. They formed a group called The Three Cornish Pasties – a pun on their surname – and put on a show for anyone who would listen.
“Me and my sisters were in a fake girl group,” Jessie told Global Grind with a touch of sarcasm. “We used to do shows for our aunts and uncles on a Saturday afternoon and that kind of tied in with my love of performing. My sister would play trombone and my other sister would play piano and I would have to sing a song like Aladdin or something irritating.”
Even then, Jessie had been subversive, finding traditional song and dance routines “annoying” and wanting to experiment. She didn’t have to wait long. Her mother, a former ballet dancer turned nursery school teacher, was keen for Jessie to learn the ropes and follow in her footsteps.
Living up to the precocious stage-child stereotype, Jessie trained at dance school every weekend from the age of four. “Me and my sisters would go to ballet on a Saturday morning, then it became something I was obsessed with – tap, modern and jazz dancing, then singing and acting as well,” she told This Is Essex.
Yet how would her cash-strapped parents afford the fees? Although Jessie had never been poor, she wasn’t the archetypal wealthy stage-school kid with millionaire parents and a detached mansion in the country. Living so close to central London had taken its toll on the family finances – growing up, a bowling trip to Dundee or a break in Cornwall was the closest Jessie would ever get to an exotic holiday. Instead, mundane caravan parks in middle England were the norm for her – it was certainly nothing to write home about.
Yet, in spite of the sacrifices they’d made with the less than glamorous holidays, her parents didn’t compromise on paying for the training that they hoped would make her a star – and it was a gesture for which Jessie was ever grateful. “I was a normal kid,” she added, “[but] my parents invested a lot in me, from singing lessons to ballet costumes. I could never say I had a tough upbringing.”
Indeed, by the age of six, her showbiz lust had already stepped up a gear and she found herself attending four classes per week. Most of these were at the Wenn Stage School in Ilford, which was located within walking distance of her home. A young Jessie faced some tough competition there – not only were her older sisters already skilled in dance, but her own classes were filled with talented children too, including the founder’s well-trained daughter and niece to name but a few. In spite of Jessie’s inexperience, the school’s founder, Dawn Wenn-Kober, fell instantly in love with her.
“When you have a big group of kids, sometimes your eyes are just drawn to a particular child and that’s how I felt about Jessie – your eyes were always drawn to her,” she told the author. “She was a really bubbly little girl – she was really enthusiastic and wanted to do everything. She was always a live-wire in the class – a class with Jessie in it was never boring.”
She added: “She was really determined [to beat the competition], bright as a button, very enthusiastic – I would say overly so – and that comes from giving 100 per cent of herself all the time. She clearly had a unique stage presence and she was always keen to try new things.”
What was more, there was no rest for the talented – and, even if she’d been feeling shy, she was encouraged to try all of the classes. “She was six so we throw them into everything to see what they’re good at,” Dawn explained, “but because she was good at everything, she carried on doing everything! She’d say, ‘I’m too tall to be a ballet dancer, so I’m not going to do ballet!’ And we’d say, ‘Yes, you are!’“
Even as a child, Jessie was head and shoulders above her peers and, according to Dawn, was “blessed with incredible legs that just go on and on”. Although practising ballet at a young age would stand her in good stead for the future by harnessing her self-discipline and focus, she did struggle at times due to her physique. “She was always tall, with a short body and long legs, which is very difficult when you’re little,” Dawn recalled. “She was very supple and when your legs are so long, it’s quite difficult as you have little muscle power to control them, so they go all over the place.”
For a girl whose first words were “jam hot” and who loved the urban music scene, classical ballet tunes didn’t impress her much either. “She was all about the music,” Dawn chuckled wryly, “and classical wasn’t her thing. She didn’t want classical dancing either as she would want to do her own style. She also had quite a high instep so her feet weren’t as strong as they might have been, although she did practise pointe work. Most kids complain about ballet at some point, but she did try to get out of ballet as soon as she could, or as much as she could.”
However, she would persevere with her ballet training for several years longer and – as much as she complained bitterly at times – she even grew to enjoy it. But the one aspect of performance that Jessie lived for above all else was singing. Her parents, whom she described as her “two best mates”, also encouraged her early passion for music. The reggae rhythms of Bob Marley, the iconic dance classics of Michael Jackson and the heartbreak ballads and empowerment anthems of Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston were all regulars on Jessie’s CD player. Her favourites, though, were soul and funk artists – and there were some that her parents were responsible for introducing her to. “I am so, like, the uncoolest person ever,” she joked. “My dad’s cooler than me. He was the one playing D-Train and Funkadelic in the house. I will not lie!”
She added to Gigwise: “My mum and dad would always have music playing, some funk and soul, thank God they had good taste in music. I grew up listening to Funkadelic, The Gap Band, Aretha Franklin, Prince, Michael Jackson and James Brown.”
Less credible was an “obsession” with The Spice Girls. Jessie had wanted to be Posh Spice as a child, but felt that she “wasn’t pretty enough”. However she defended her lack of credibility and her right to play the good, the bad and the embarrassing, telling Global Grind: “The best thing about growing up in a family that loves music is that you get everything from TLC to The Beatles to Michael Jackson to Tracy Chapman – music is beautiful because it doesn’t all sound the same. You know, I always say, how would you fall in love if everybody looked the same? How would music be judged if we all sounded the same? That’s the best thing about the music industry, that everyone has their own likes and dislikes.”
Jessie also admired the emotional quality of soul music, whether it told of a heartbroken lover clinging to her other half, like Etta James in ‘I’d Rather Go Blind (Than See You Walk Away)’, an incurable romantic full of craving like Prince in ‘The Beautiful Ones’ or an emotionally overwrought lover at the end of his tether who’s turning away from relationships altogether, like Bob Marley in ‘No Woman No Cry’.
What was more, to her, music had no colour. While she felt some of the other white families in her town were borderline racist, blaming immigration for their troubles, Jessie was the polar opposite, believing music to be a universal language that could break any barrier – and that included race and colour.
To complement her musical diet, her parents encouraged her to be creative with what she’d learned by enrolling her in private singing lessons every week. However, she was no ordinary singing personality. Unusually, despite being a keen ballet dancer, Jessie was also becoming a self-confessed tomboy. Like Rihanna, who would later go on to straddle a bright pink cannon ready for war in her music video ‘Hard’, Jessie would also play with gender, mixing up the male and female – with often disastrous results. “I wore a plastic flower on the side of my head with a bun, a blue Gap jumper, tracksuit bottoms and shell-toe trainers,” she cringed to Bliss magazine of her preteen fashion efforts. “I literally lived in that outfit for a year!”
While Rihanna would combine a fierce scowl or a jacket decorated with lethal-looking spikes with thick black eyeliner and undeniably feminine sex appeal, Jessie too was interested in blurring gender boundaries. Not only that, but both were perceived to have been boyish as children.
“I wasn’t someone who played with dolls or did the typical girly things,” Jessie told PrideSource. “I was always the girl who was a bit ballsy and quite rebellious and I always had something to say. You know how some girls were all like, ‘Everyone’s lovely and I love everything?’ Well, I was kind of like, ‘No, I don’t like that.’ If I wanted to play football with the boys, I would … I didn’t care if I looked stupid or my nail split. I wasn’t that kind of obsessive girly Barbie doll.”
Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Jessie was a little boyish – from day one her father encouraged all three of his daughters to unleash their inner tomboy. In a bid to toughen them up and hone their survival skills, he persuaded them to sleep in a tent in their back garden from time to time in the summer. To liven things up, he would often create potentially fatal scenarios for them to escape from, such as pretending to be a wild bear invading their camp. He hoped that this would train them to prepare for the emergencies of life.
Whether or not the bid had succeeded, what it did do was spark off a longstanding phobia of camping. Jessie elaborated to Q magazine: “When I was a kid, my dad used to make me and my sisters sleep in a tent to man us up a bit. All I have is a memory of my dad weeing in a bucket outside, him pretending to be a bear, getting really bad heat rash and eczema … my mum taking pictures from the house going, ‘Hi kids!’, being really eccentric.”
Her experiences of camping had left her hot, sweaty and miserable – tents infested with woodlice hadn’t helped – and instead of the great outdoors becoming the fun place to play that her father had hoped, it became the stuff of nightmares. “I think that’s why [I can’t do the tent thing any more],” she later shuddered. Not such a tomboy after all – sleeping out under the stars might have practically been part of the Cornish family’s bloodline, but Jessie was loathe to join in.
In spite of the hiccups, she enjoyed a close relationship with her father. The two would regularly travel to tube stations, where they would “randomly” dance or sing together in full public view. They would also joke around constantly; despite having an emotionally draining job as a social worker for disadvantaged members of the community, her dad believed that laughter was the best medicine – for the privileged and under-privileged alike.
“At Christmas, it’s a competition in my whole family as to who can make everyone laugh the most,” Jessie told the News Of The World. “My dad, my sisters and my mum are comedians.” She regularly won the contests by pulling cartoonish and cross-eyed faces, an ability she’d inherited from her dad. The harmony at home seemed almost surreal. However, in spite of an idyllic home life, filled with laughter and happiness, Jessie’s world was about to be marred by a tragedy that would change life as she knew it forever. What was more, she was just eight years old.
It had started out as a day of fun like any other. “Me, my dad and my sisters were in Epping Forest and my dad said, ‘Let’s race to the car,’ Jessie recalled to The Telegraph, “and I just collapsed.”
At first the others had thought Jessie, the youngest in the family and the most notorious prankster, was playing a practical joke – but this was no April Fool’s stunt. “They were like, ‘Stop messing around!’“, she continued. “But I just went white and got rushed to hospital.”
Once there, she was diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, a debilitating heart condition that can cause sufferers’ heart rates to increase by up to four times the normal speed. Symptoms include chest pain, palpitations, a pounding heartbeat and a temporary inability to breathe. Sufferers can also experience such intense dizziness that they faint. Obviously, the human body has just one electrical pathway in the heart, purpose-built to regulate the heartbeat and to prevent it from becoming too fast. However sufferers of Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome have an extra pathway, one which – if triggered by physical activity or stress – can spiral out of control. It was a lesson that Jessie had learned at a cruelly young age.
From the moment of diagnosis, her life was one of rules and restrictions. Ahead of her should have been the archetypal experiences of late childhood – illicit sips of alcopops, playing kiss chase in the park, racing each other in the playground, climbing trees and scaling fences, or girls taking on boys for a gender-wars football game. Yet now she couldn’t run or even ride a bike without fear. What was more, even when she did feel strong enough to do intensive exercise, her terrified parents banned it, fearing for her safety. Her father in particular was very protective as he knew from direct experience what the dangers were – her heart condition was a genetic one. “I remember my mum and dad saying, ‘You’re just like daddy, you’ve got a special heart,’“ Jessie recalled. “Every time I got sick, my dad [would feel] so guilty, like it was his fault. He’s got Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome [too]. It’s just one of those things.”
In a bid to prevent the onset of more attacks, her father put a healthy eating regime in place. “My mum would make me fake McDonald’s because she never wanted me to have it,” Jessie chuckled to Global Grind. “She would make me chips and do some nice healthy chicken and put it in a box and put an M on it and I used to be fooled every time!”
Her mother would also sing to her to shake the depression, play her favourite soul tunes on repeat when she tired of singing herself, and gently remind her that her problems were not as bad as she thought.
“[My bad health] never really hindered my love of life, because my parents never really let it,” she continued. “They would be like, ‘OK, there are people way worse off than you’.”
In spite of their optimism, adjusting to life as a child who would never be the same as her peers wasn’t easy. Most painfully of all, she was forbidden from taking part in school sports lessons in case the exertion triggered an attack. While she’d previously been an active child, she was now reduced to standing on the sidelines, watching wistfully as her classmates competed. Fiercely competitive and driven even at her laziest, it wasn’t Jessie’s style.
To add salt to her wounds, her school’s Ofsted report berated pupils for not being more physically fit, one of the few major problems they wanted the school to tackle. No matter how much Jessie might have wanted to be more active, it was never going to be a reality – and it was a bitter pill to swallow for a boisterous child full of excess energy. “I couldn’t really be as free as other kids,” she lamented later. “I always had to take it slow, otherwise I’d end up [ill].”
The carefree, liberated, reckless Jessie, who had shared the same devil-may-care attitude as most of her friends, had gone forever. Now one wrong move could see her back in hospital – and it wasn’t a risk she was prepared to take.
However, Jessie soon drowned her sorrows in music and performance and, encouraged by her equally ambitious ballet dancer mother, her desire to take to the stage stepped up a notch. She was no longer content with ballet and tap classes on the weekend or passively listening to the musical greats she admired. Coming face to face with her own mortality at such an early age defined Jessie’s goals and gave her a focus – she could no longer take life and good health for granted, so she wanted to achieve as much as she could. “I would watch the BRITs and say ‘Mummy, I want to be her, be that person and win an award!’“ Jessie recalled. “My mum said: ‘One day you WILL be there and win it.’“
Encouraged by her optimism, Jessie found herself auditioning for lead roles in school plays like Annie – one production a young Amy Winehouse had also been part of a few years previously. However, a class of eight-year-olds weren’t ready for what a thrilled Jessie had to offer. “I was just loud since the age of eight,” she remarked wryly to The Big Issue. “They didn’t let me into the school production of Annie because I was too loud.”
Jessie had boasted a formidable voice, but back then it had been more of a curse than a blessing. She was mortified when, at the casting, every single one of her friends made it through – apart from her. “Everyone got in – there were literally like 100 of them,” she told VEVO, cringing at the memory. “When it came to me, they were just like, ‘Sorry’ and I walked out on my own.”
It could have been that Jessie’s tutors feared she would overshadow her peers, who might not have been able to match the strengths of her voice – but, as a child, it was a bitter disappointment and a despondent Jessie fought with herself not to take the snub personally. “I didn’t do plays in school [after that] because I didn’t really feel comfortable with not being accepted, and not everyone used to like my voice,” she vented to PopEater. “People used to tell me to be quiet and laugh at my songs when I’d write songs.” However, she soon learned to take the situation in her stride, adding: “I believe a song lasts forever. It’s the best up-yours you can possibly give.”
The Annie audition was just one in a string of humiliating rejections – later, even Jessie’s request to join the choir would be denied – but it would prepare her for a life in showbiz, giving her the thick skin she needed for survival in a cut-throat industry. It might have been embarrassing in primary school, but as she grew older, standing out from the crowd would prove to be the best thing she’d ever done.
Undeterred, Jessie turned to TV, finding her match in advertising slots on the children’s TV channel Nickelodeon. Meanwhile, in her spare time, she began putting pen to paper and devising her own songs. “I remember going to her house when we were younger and she kept a box full of the songs she’d written,” fellow aspiring child actress Natalie Green told the author. “She was always really ambitious, even back then.”
Yet it was the first song Jessie ever wrote that meant the most to her. While her rival Lady Gaga’s first song – devised at age 13 – had been sweet and innocent, inspired by her orthodox Catholic father’s classical music collection, Jessie’s had a much darker twist – she’d been subversive from the start.
Gaga had written about a love that had been lost and how the lovers might find what had attracted them to each other in the first place and rekindle the flame. Back then, her parents had provided a diet of princesses in fairytale castles meeting their handsome princes and living happily ever after – without thought of illness, poverty or any of the other battles of real life. Plus her neighbourhood had been upscale New York, not the bullet-dodging, knife-wielding culture of downtown Romford with its East London overspill. Unsurprisingly then, her first work was that of a hopeless romantic. A far cry from her later, much more subversive, work, Gaga had been motivated by misty-eyed childhood idealism. Jessie’s, however, was motivated by reality – and her life so far had been much less romantic. “I was nine,” Jessie told The Mirror. “I don’t really talk about it much because it’s pretty bad – ‘There is never freedom in a world like ours, people always dying, what is it all about?’ – and I was nine! Seriously intense child.”
Yet she’d hit on a winning formula. As macabre as it might have sounded to a child, The Black Eyed Peas had a worldwide hit years later with ‘Where Is The Love?’ which dealt with exactly the same topic.
However, Jessie’s song had probably been inspired by Michael Jackson’s 1995 hit ‘Earth Song’ or his 1996 tune ‘They Don’t Care About Us’, both of which had very similar themes or lyrics to her own song. Dealing with death, poverty, rampant evil, the needless suffering of children and the self-destruction of the human race, his songs were even less cheerful than Jessie’s.
What was more, another thing she shared in common with Michael was her hatred of racism. Jackson had later admitted that the dramatic scenes in the ‘Earth Song’ video shoot, featuring him sinking to the floor in incandescent rage while miming the words “What about us?”, had been totally authentic and unscripted. The famous scenes had been a reaction to his genuine fury both at the suffering depicted in the song lyrics and at his own life events – including being a victim of racism.
Yet while Michael hadn’t covered the perils of racism directly and explicitly, using more diplomatic phrases, such as it not mattering whether a person was black or white, Jessie tackled it head-on in her very first song.
“One of the biggest motivations for it was definitely her anger at racist behaviour,” an anonymous friend revealed to the author. “She had black and mixed-race friends all her life and she had no time for ignorance. Jessie would call it colour blindness. In her eyes, intolerance is acceptable if you’re allergic to a food – not when you have an issue with someone because of their race.” The friend added: “Plus the fact, she had a real affinity with people of colour because she thought they had natural rhythm in their blood. Most of the artists she grew up with -all the kings and queens of soul – were black, so she always had really positive things to say about people of colour. She grew up with them in her bedroom, coming out of her speakers … treating them differently never entered her head.”
Years later, Jessie would put her disgust at intolerance into words publicly, telling the BBC: “I want young people to know that they can belong – whatever your culture, your religion [or] your sexuality, that you can live life how you want to live it and feel comfortable how you are.”
In spite of brief flashes of brilliance musically, Jessie’s life was still blighted by her rapid heartbeat, which would flare up from time to time and see her sent back to hospital. Jessie’s medicine cabinet was full, but her attacks kept returning – and it wasn’t long before specialists suggested trying a permanent cure. Jessie underwent harrowing cardioversion – a procedure where electric shocks are administered to the heart – in hope of a solution.
An incision is normally made in the sufferer’s groin, from which a tube is inserted into an artery directly leading to the heart. Radiofrequency energy then burns away the affected area. Undergoing a radiotherapy treatment, just as a cancer victim might, terrified Jessie – but it was her best hope. “I had some wires put into my shoulder and my groin and into my heart,” she recalled to The Mirror. “They tried to zap it into a normal rhythm, and it didn’t really work.”
Her only other hope for a permanent cure was open-heart surgery – but due to the high mortality rate and huge risk of complications, this type of surgery is usually reserved for extreme cases. In any case, Jessie was terrified of going under the knife – and she had good reason to be. While she was in hospital, her wardmate – just a young boy – had the same surgery for a heart transplant and never woke up. “I was in Great Ormond Street hospital, opposite this little boy,” she recalled sorrowfully to The Big Issue. “I remember waking up in the night and hearing him pray [for God to save his life]. He was on his knees with all these wires hanging out. He passed away the next day and I remember asking my mum why God didn’t save him.”
Perhaps his prayers had been answered after all – his death had brought an end to his pain. But for a young Jessie, his death was not just a shock, but a grave injustice. “One day he was there and the next he was gone,” she explained incredulously.
Perhaps it was hardly surprising that Jessie was an “intense” child – in fact, her trauma also led to the onset of OCD. While she struggled to come to terms with the indignity of children dying young, she was expected to enrol at Mayfield Secondary School in Dagenham. This would spell a dark time for Jessie – one that would soon see life getting even worse.
She would struggle under the weight of expectation from the moment she arrived. She wasn’t a blank slate – her two elder sisters had already set a standard in school and made the family name notorious. They were both renowned for being straight-A students and had been respected head girls with their names on a plaque in the assembly hall. Unfortunately for Jessie though, she just wasn’t academic – and no amount of burying her head in the books was going to change that.
“I was never really that good at anything,” she told The Independent despairingly. “At school, they were like, ‘Oh, you’re a Cornish girl!’ and they kind of expected me to be the same as my sisters. Give me something to draw or an outfit to pick for someone or hair, make-up, acting, write a song, I’m fine with it, but anything to do with sums – it was never my thing.”
While Jessie would later say that she had never based her intelligence on her exam results, there were times when being different still got her down. “I cried because I wasn’t doing well at school and all my friends were,” she told Bliss magazine. “But my mum, dad and sisters always made me feel comfortable.”
However, in the school environment, she couldn’t turn to her family – and she sometimes felt lost among all of the high-flying achievers. She would descend into depression, knowing she would never be academic and that it wasn’t what she aimed to do with her life.
To make matters worse, instead of being praised for her vocal abilities – the one thing she did feel confident about – her teachers criticised them. The school was less than sympathetic about her penchant for breaking into song to liven up the more boring classes – and, increasingly, she found herself accused of being disruptive. “I was so bad at history, maths, science, geography, anything academic,” she told MTV. “I really tried, it just never clicked with me. Every single report was, ‘Jessica could do with not distracting people with her voice.’“
Even in situations where singing was acceptable, Jessie never fitted in. Within a day of joining the school choir, she was banned from it altogether. “I was in it for a day and some of the adults were moaning that their kids were upset that I was too good. I was 11. Can you imagine? I was heartbroken.”
Before long, a devastated Jessie had grown to doubt even the voice she had been so proud of. “I’m not the best singer around,” she later told the Daily Mail, before conceding: “At school I wasn’t good at maths or science but I was a decent singer. I have to believe in myself. If I don’t, then who will? I won’t apologise for who I am.”
But back at the tender age of 11, Jessie hadn’t yet harnessed that self-belief – and when she didn’t measure up to her sisters or her peers, she suffered from crippling feelings of inadequacy. According to an old acquaintance, school had by then become little more than a prison sentence.