Meet indie’s goddesses in waiting
Ihave to confess I knew little of The Big Moon until their debut album Love In The 4th Dimension dropped into my paws a couple of weeks ago. After a few listens I was giddily enthusiastic about their songs’ loud-quiet-loud indierock dynamics and the stentorian vocals of Juliette Jackson.
Then I found out that the allfemale London quartet were playing the intimate Academy 2 venue in Dublin last week. I was among about 80 people who ventured to the gig – which proved thrilling. At show’s end it seemed like most of those attending immediately began queueing for a tour T-shirt. The indie-rock goddesses in waiting turned saleswomen, signing the memorabilia and posing for selfies. Job done.
Perhaps in years to come, many will claim to have been there. Maybe justice will not prevail and they won’t become the stars they deserve to be. But with so many ecstatic reviews and a summer full of festival appearances ahead, you wouldn’t bet against them.
‘The last time we played in Dublin, there were 10 people in the audience,’ recalls Juliette Jackson, 23, the statuesque lead singer. ‘We ended up organising a dance competition among the people who did come and we gave Kit Kats and crisps from our rider to the winners. The criteria was whoever had the best moves, with points for originality... We had a great laugh.’
So an eight-fold increase in popularity since their last visit means there is an upward trajectory. But regardless of what happens, Juliette would rather the band’s gender be irrelevant. The fact that they are a female foursome, she says, is ‘a happy accident’.
‘It’s never been a big deal. We just are what we are. It doesn’t affect anything we do,’ she says.
‘I had a series of crappy jobs, earning very little money and the only other thing I was good at was playing guitar. I had a load of friends in bands and I said, “Right, I’m going to try to form a band.”
‘I asked all my friends if they knew anybody who could play an instrument, even learn one, I’d wait if they were fun people. Eventually I found these three other wonderful women. We were all randomly connected, friends of friends, a six-degrees-of-separation kind of thing.’
She rehearsed with male musicians, and the group initially had a male drummer, but he left. Fern Ford now pounds the drums, with Sophie Nathan on guitar and Celia Archer on bass.
‘We do find that we work with a lot of women. Maybe it’s as simple as women tend to have female friends,’ Juliette muses.
‘There was one day we were doing the photo shoot for the album cover, and there were 12 people there. We were all sitting down to lunch, and someone said, “Oh my God we’re all girls!” We don’t discriminate, it just happens like that sometimes.
‘We just went “oh yeah” then shrugged and carried on eating our noodles... Food is more important to me than gender!’
Elaborating on the theme, she adds: ‘Seriously though, our gender is not our defining feature.
‘We do get a bit tired about having to re-articulate our feelings on the fact that we are women in a band. I’m not sure what to say. I know people think that if you’re women in a band, it’s a platform and it’s important to say the right thing. I just want us to be a great band more than anything else.’
And they are certainly getting some expert assistance as they try to achieve their goal, as Catherine Marks – who has worked with The Killers and Foals – produced Love In The 4th Dimension.
Juliette reveals: ‘Catherine is brilliant. She produced [The Big Moon’s song] Cupid first of all and we sounded exactly the way we wanted to sound, so thought, “Right that’s the producer sorted.” Serving a song isn’t about adorning it with whistles and bells or a seven-minute guitar solo to prove someone’s expertise.
‘If a song is good enough you should be able to play it accompanied by a recorder.’
The Big Moon are shining brightly. Go and take a look.
‘Our gender is not our defining feature... I just want us to be a great band’
The Big Moon’s album Love In The 4th Dimension is out now on Fiction Records