F rom the outside, it looks as if things have gone swimmingly for the Big Moon. Fronted by Juliette Jackson, a former waitress who dreamed big, they have been active for 12 years, a success in itself in these days, notching up four albums including this latest. They have enjoyed a Mercury nomination (for 2017 debut Love in the 4th Dimension), decent chart positions, good-sized gigs and streaming figures in the hundreds of thousands, or millions in the case of 2019 single Your Light.
Delve beneath the surface, however, and things haven’t always been so sunny. After their debut’s ramshackle wide-eyed pop, second album Walking Like We Do detailed the travails of contemporary womanhood, and Your Light found Jackson bemoaning her generation’s lot with a weary resignation: “We were promised the world, but so was everyone else”. 2022’s Here Is Everything was conceived during Covid and processed Jackson’s life-changing experience of becoming a mother, including the disorienting experience of lack of sleep. Tricky stuff, if nothing that made Jackson’s concerns much different from vast swathes of the population.
Forever, though, has a much more troubling backdrop. In 2024, the singer was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma – a destructive cyst inside the middle ear that requires surgical removal. It caused her to lose most of her hearing on one side, which would be an alarming and unbalancing experience for anyone, never mind someone whose life and livelihood centres so much on sound. As she admits: “It was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.” When she was even able to think about writing songs, she understandably found herself writing material so throughly miserable she didn’t like it. At which point she did a complete volte face, and began writing songs not just to cheer herself up but actively imagining “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet”.
There are historical precedents for such a sudden pivot from agony to ecstasy. One thinks of New Order throwing off the bleakness of Ian Curtis’s death, and their grand but morose debut Movement, to blissfully reconfigure for Temptation and Power, Corruption and Lies; the Cure’s mid-80s pop rush after years of magnificently anguished albums, or Bon Iver’s move from the melancholy For Emma, Forever Ago, recorded in an isolated log cabin, to the lush, more celebratory Bon Iver, Bon Iver. Here, Jackson’s personal shift results in a collection of joyous, uplifting, ethereally classy pop-disco tunes that have an extra frisson because they have come about through sadness. Shimmery opener Gravity clings to the simple joy of picking up your child from nursery, an unlikely but effective launchpad for a rapturous pop song with shades of Dreaming-era Blondie.
Three Things celebrates youth and pop (“My whole life imminent / I remember living inside the songs on the radio”), the wistful undercurrent carefully smothered in bouncy, MGMT-style keyboard riffs and juddering sequencers straight out of new wave and disco. The universally relatable Fun imagines a life beyond constraints – “I’ll slip away and take my brain on holiday” – the dreamily summery sounds recalling Haim and, appropriately, Madonna circa Holiday.
If Jackson’s lyrics have a recurring theme, it’s of relishing – rather than fearing – life’s transience. Delicate harmonies, Fleetwood Mac production gloss and Soph Nathan’s big guitar twangs power recent single F.O.R.E.V.E.R, a rather poetic song about grabbing moments and milestones while we can, because “some day the ocean will include the drinks that we spill / And rain that used to be red wine will fall on this hill”. The yearning, classic 60s pop-tinged Can I Get a Reading Please picks up the theme: “Life’s not long, regret is though / Can you tell me something I don’t know?” The slightly country Sounds gets even darker – “I’m going to lose something very dear to me, if not now eventually” – but such shadows are more than banished by the overall musical sunniness and loveliness.
The Bananarama-ish I See You, Honey seems to celebrate the comfort of being loved (“There’s no need to say ‘I love you’, it’s everywhere to me”). Other songs celebrate the power of determination as Jackson is “pushing through” obstacles in Speed Bump or insisting “I can give a good life / As long as I’m still on my feet” during Sounds. The album’s sense of finding joy in sometimes difficult circumstances crystallises on the wonderfully titled You Remind Me That I’m Dying (And That It’s Good to Be Alive), those words providing what may well be this year’s most bittersweet euphoric chorus. “Happy endings that don’t exist yet” or not, the song is an absolute banger, which suggests Jackson and her band really do have a lot to smile about.
Nell Davies – Never Ever Ever I caught this Penzance-based DIY singer-guitarist’s ace set in Leeds. She tours by train and sounds, wonderfully, like an effervescent, witty, one-woman Buzzcocks.
