You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J says. There she was preparing for her first album release in eight years, ecstatically in love with her newish partner, and finally the mother of a toddler having struggled to conceive for a decade, on top of the world. Then in March she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
The singer-songwriter, real name Jessica Cornish, is famous for telling it as it is. The album, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was supposed to be an open book, dealing with every ounce of devastation she’d experienced since she last recorded music (endometriosis, miscarriage, failed relationships, gaslighting, suicide) with typical candour. The first single, No Secrets, was released in April. But by then there was a mighty secret. The cancer. Then second single, Living My Best Life, came out in May and Cornish was giving interviews about how she was living her best life, while still secretly living with breast cancer. A month later she went public, and in early July she had a mastectomy.
She gives me her best “What the fuck?” look. “I come out with a song called No Secrets. I’m doing every interview, and they’re, like, ‘So what’s new with you?’ and I’m, like, ‘Erm, yeah, nothing …’” Cornish has just had to cancel tour dates because she’s still waiting for reconstructive surgery.
We’re at a photo studio in London. She is wearing a beige fake-leather jacket, blue jeans with elaborate white patches, cream boots and oversized specs. Think biker chic meets 1970s Nana Mouskouri. “I feel like I’m in the 70s and I should have a boyfriend with a big tache.” Easy Rider, I say, thinking of the film. “That’s what people called me at school!” She grins. Cornish is quick, irreverent and filter-free. She says she has always fancied doing comedy, and is hoping to make her standup debut next year. “I love making people laugh. On stage I basically roast the audience.”
Cornish was preparing for an appearance at the Baftas when she found a lump. “I immediately went to get it looked at, had an ultrasound, and they were, like, ‘It looks like nothing; you’ve got really good dense breast tissue.’ And I was, like, ‘But I can feel it. I’ve got an achy arm and pins and needles in my hands whenever I wake up.’ And they said, ‘Well, let’s just do a biopsy.’ That was 28 March, the day after my birthday.” It was a Friday. The doctor told her if it was bad news she’d call on the Monday. By then Cornish had convinced herself it was nothing. The way she tells it, it was simply too inconvenient to get cancer when she had so much on.
“We’re two weeks away from launching this thing after eight years without an album and four years without a single. And she [the doctor] texted and said, ‘Are you free at six?’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, it’s a Zoom, it won’t be anything.’ So I jump on the Zoom thinking it’s all going to be good, and she goes, ‘Are you sitting down?’ You know that sad tone they use? And she says, ‘I’m so, so sorry, but your test results have come back as high-grade cancer cells.’” How did you respond? “I said, ‘Oh, that’s not ideal, is it? That’s not fucking great timing.’ The first thing I thought was, ‘I can’t die because my son needs me.’”
She found the surgery terrifying and absurd. “I hate being put under. They walk you down. You know when you have emergency surgery you roll down in a bed, but this time I just strolled down with a gown on and my bum hanging out. You feel like you’re in an episode of Black Mirror.” But, Cornish says, she’s been lucky. No chemo, no radiotherapy, just the op. “Cancer sucks, man, but you know what? Thank fuck I found it early. I had the mastectomy four months ago and my right breast now looks like a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” Another grin. “I got to keep the nipple, though.”
The next operation is both medical and cosmetic. Her boobs, she notes, are now “different sizes. They didn’t do an implant as small as my original. How rude! I thought, no need to bully me, I’m already having a rough time. So rude! It’s funny because I said I’d never get my boobs done because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. Cancer ruined that plan.”
Cornish is no stranger to illness. She thinks her perspective on the cancer has been so positive because she’s familiar with health crises. They have often coincided with career highs, serving as a tap on the shoulder, or punch in the stomach, to remind her not to take anything for granted. “Honestly, I feel life goes, ‘You having a good time? Sit down.’ Ever since I was a child, it has always gone alongside moments of success for me; something severe or obscure has happened to my health.”
She takes me back to her 11-year-old self, already making her debut starring in the West End in Whistle Down the Wind (she was cast at the age of nine). That’s when she was diagnosed with the heart condition Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which can cause a fast heartbeat as well as dizziness and palpitations. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an IV drip, and going back into hospital at night.” She fast-forwards six years, and 17-year-old Jess has joined the girl group Soul Deep while attending the Brit School. “I just got my first record deal, and I had a stroke. Then when I was about to put out music in 2020 I had a car crash and my larynx moved up and I couldn’t sing for a year.”
Oi, I say, slow down, I can’t keep up. You really had a stroke at 17? She nods. “I was on the train, and my face dropped. I felt awful and I went to the GP, and she said, ‘I think you’ve had a minor stroke, I’m going to call an ambulance.’ I was in hospital for four to five weeks.” She smiles. “I’ve clearly got an addiction to being diagnosed with things. So maybe the cancer is part of that.”
Did illness define her childhood? Not at all, she says. “My mum and dad always did such a great job of not making that the definitive thing in my life, and not making me define my character by my worst days. That was amazing and has carried through to now.” Ultimately, she reckons her health issues have been the making of her. “They’ve made me live life more, eat better, work out more. Made me live in the moment.”
I notice a tattooed open circle on her left wrist. What does that represent? “My mum, my dad and me got this on my dad’s 60th in New York. It’s a circle of love, and my sisters were too pussy to get it. So now I’m their favourite child!” She clearly adores her family. Cornish, aged 37, grew up in Essex with two older sisters who were more academic than her and were both head girls at secondary school. Their mother was a nursery school teacher; their father a mental health social worker.
At 16, she started at the Brit School. Cornish was in the same year as Adele (with whom she sang in lunchtime sessions). In the past, she has said the Brit School was cut‑throat. What does she think students wanted more – to be good or to be famous? “I think people just wanted to be the centre of attention. We were all teenagers who wanted to be the loudest. Everything I wore was green and I’d draw music notes on my face and I was a hair model for Vidal Sassoon. So I literally looked like I was going to Star Trek school dressed as a duck.”
Did she like the Brit School? “I loved it. You know what I loved the most? That it taught me how to be streetwise because I had to get five trains there every day to get from Essex to Croydon. I had to get up at the crack of dawn, so it gave me discipline. But I loved it. I loved learning, I loved it being different every day, loved not wearing uniform, the auditions. I would audition for everything. That’s how I got into the girl band that got me the first deal.”
Cornish first experienced success aged 21 as part of the team who wrote Party in the USA for Miley Cyrus in 2009. A year later, she had her first hit with Do It Like a Dude. The song was three minutes of promotional self-referencing (“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey … J-J-J-J Jessie J”), female empowering, male parodying, double-entendre indulging (“Boys, you, you need to lick my dollar … Boys, g-getting hot under the collar”) poptastic filth. This was also her debut as Jessie J.
Jessica, Jessie, Jess. I ask her which name she prefers. “Jess,” she says instantly. “I hate Jessie. It’s like a dog’s name. ‘Jessie, come back here!’” She whistles herself over, as if she were a dog. “The J makes it somehow nicer. It changes the whole thing.”
Do It Like a Dude was followed by Price Tag, her first No 1 and still her most famous song. Price Tag is infectious bubble-gum pop about the primacy of happiness over money. But Cornish says it is also a critique of the industry she had barely entered. “It was about being a statistic and a number at a record label and it not being about talent or the truth.” She sings a line to illustrate her point, as she often does. “‘When the sale comes first and the truth comes second just stop for a minute and smile.’ I was already tired of contracts. I was so frustrated when I wrote that song. What you were trying to say wasn’t important, it was just about how much money can we make from this person.”
There were many more hits including Domino (another UK No 1), Who You Are (a hymn to being true to yourself in the face of knockbacks, and one of her favourite songs), and 2014’s Bang Bang with Ariane Grande and Nicki Minaj (another celebration of female empowerment, and her biggest US hit). After Bang Bang there was one more Top 20 hit … and then it all ended. Single after single failed to chart. Cornish has not had a hit record for 10 years. She went from one of the hottest properties in pop to has-been overnight. How did it affect her? “You know what? I’m actually lucky in that I’ve never given a shit about No 1s or any of that stuff. Ever. It’s just not who I am. And that’s probably why I’ve had so many managers, because so many are like that.”
In a way, she says, failure came as a relief. It allowed her to reclaim some of her anonymity. “I love the success, but I don’t love being famous. The hardest part of fame is losing the invisibility you have when you’re not successful that enables you to create the things that make you successful in the first place. So when I dropped off, I had a shaved head, nobody recognised me, I could go back to doing some normal shit.”
But she also admits she lost belief in what she was doing. The successful songs from her last hit album Sweet Talker were written by other people and meant nothing to her. “I just retreated and said, ‘I can’t do this no more.’ I just kind of gave up. So I took a break and said, ‘I’m done with the industry.’”
She went away and recorded the resolutely uncommercial album R.O.S.E. about “the struggle of finding my feet from the age of 25 to 30”. She loved it, but nobody bought it. “The label didn’t really support me because they didn’t get it. It wasn’t Bang Bang. But some of my favourite songs that I’ve written are on R.O.S.E.”
It’s interesting that she says her early music stopped meaning anything to her. Last year, it was reported that she had made £7.6m in 2023, and there was speculation that she had done so by selling the rights to her music. Is that true? “No!!!” She laughs. But Cornish is a useless liar. She looks embarrassed. “I don’t know! Errr. I might have done.” She comes to a stop and, to the tune of Total Eclipse of the Heart, she sings: “Moving on to another question because I don’t know what to say to that one.” I was just curious, I say. “Music’s supposed to come and go,” she says. “Let it go. It’s like your wardrobe. You’ve got to have a little clearout now and again.”
While R.O.S.E. flopped commercially, in 2018 she enjoyed her most surprising success when she entered the Chinese talent contest Singer. By then she was living in Los Angeles and was a distant memory for many of us in Britain. “My managers at the time said, ‘This TV show keeps coming in, and you’d be a special guest’, and I said, ‘Just say yes to it.’ They were, like, ‘D’you want to know more?’, and I was, like, ‘Nope, just sign me up, I need a shake-up.’ And that was it. I thought I was a special guest for three weeks, and I land in China and I’m a contestant on a competition and I didn’t even know. I sang Domino on the first show and won that, then I won the next and the next, and they were, like, ‘D’you want to stay on?’, and I was, like, ‘Well, yeah!’”
The show was regularly watched by 500 million people. After 11 episodes, Cornish got to the final, which had an audience of 1.2 billion. She sang I Will Always Love You, and won the contest. It’s such a moving moment when she realises she’s won. A mix of shock, incomprehension (literally because it’s in Chinese) and euphoria. What did winning mean to her? “Oh! To be celebrated as a singer like that, I hadn’t had that before.” Does she think she should have been respected more as a singer? “No, but I always say the people who know I can sing wouldn’t buy my music and the people who buy my music probably don’t know I can sing that way.”
Her new music seems incredibly personal. At times, it feels like the songs are private messages to all the people she’s been closest to throughout her adult life.
Where does the album’s title come from? “I say ‘Don’t tease me with a good time’ all the time.” She explains it can be genuine, when somebody tempts her with a kind offer. But often it’s sarcastic. She gives me an example. “‘So do you want to have breast cancer surgery?’ ‘Don’t tease me with a good time!’”
The song I Don’t Care ends with her monologuing: “So let’s raise a glass to us and to those still finding the courage to walk away from the gaslighters, the abusers, the narcissists.” Who are the gaslighters, abusers and narcissists? “They’re the men in my career and my life that have called me difficult because I’m a strong person who understands who I am.” They said that to your face? “Oh yeah, all the time. 100%.” Was this more in her personal or professional life? “More business. Maybe a couple of guys I dated, but nothing serious. I wouldn’t get serious with someone like that.”
In the song Complicated, she summarises the first decade of her career. I quote her lines back at her. “2010 was the year I didn’t know what I was doing. I sang so loud. Insecure, but nobody knew it.” Yes, she says, well, she didn’t, and she did, and she was.
In 2012, she sings, she broke up with “my beautiful girlfriend” and “With the press in my face, called it a phase, babe I’m sorry.” When Cornish became famous, she was dating a woman and said she was bisexual. After they split up, she said it was just a phase she was going through, which alienated LGBT+ fans. Thirteen years on, she’s making a public apology – not to members of the public who took offence, but to her ex. She says she worded it clumsily at the time. “It wasn’t me saying I’m not bisexual. I think I’m always going to be attracted to women. I’m so honest and open about it, but I don’t want a label on it, like ‘Jessie J the bisexual singer’.” Is Jessie still in touch with her ex? “No, not any more.” She sounds sad about it. Was she upset when she read that you had said was just a phase? Yeah, I’m sure it hurt her because our relationship was amazing and we were really serious. We lived together for a long time; around three years.”
And so Complicated goes on. In 2014, she was told everyone hated her, in 2015 she was told she couldn’t have children, in 2016 and 2017 she grieved for herself, and in 2018 she “met a Magic Mike, will that ever be forgotten? Cos everything they write, that’s the headline, that’s the topic.” This is a reference to her then boyfriend Channing Tatum who starred in the Magic Mike films. “I played him the song to see if he’s OK with it and he was.” How does she get on with him now? “Oh, he’s so sweet. Oh my God, yeah! Channing is such a sweet guy. We were such good friends and had such a good time together.” In this relationship, he was the star and she was the plus one. She says it gave her a taste of what it must have been like for some of her former partners. “It did get frustrating. It felt that everything I read about myself was about him.”
I tell her I think the song Threw It Away is about him, too. (“I gave you my love/ You threw it away.”) “Haha! That’s funny.” She starts singing it. “Yeah, I reckon there’s probably a little bit of that in there,” she concedes. “But it wasn’t just about him. I dated a lot of people when I was in LA and there were lots of men who were, like, ‘Yeah, ride on my motorbike and I’ll show you around’, and then they just drop you off. That’s the negative of LA.”
She spent a decade there – her “solo” years. “It was a really selfish, amazing life I had. But it wasn’t the kind of life I could maintain with a child and a partner. When I had Sky I thought I didn’t want to raise my son away from his immediate family. And my partner’s Danish, so we wanted to be closer to Denmark, too.”
Last year, she moved back to Britain with her partner, the Danish-Israeli basketball player Chanan Colman, and Sky. “I just felt the new chapter was going to be here. It was the day that Trump got elected that I left. It was the day we planned to leave, so it felt aligned.” Did she want to be far away from him? “As far away as possible, please. I feel awful for the people who are still there. So many of my friends are struggling mentally with America right now. It actually scares me that I can’t even get into that mindset to try to understand what he does. It’s the polar opposite of what I believe in, which is equality and love and everybody having the freedom to enjoy the life they want to.” Does she think Trump is stopping them from living that life? “Of course he is, yeah. So many of my friends in America are scared because they’re not what he wants them to look like and be like and feel like.” And what is that? “Him!”
Two of the songs on the album are about the death of loved ones. Comes in Waves addresses the baby she lost, with Cornish singing: “I hate how much I miss the future we never made.” In 2021, when she didn’t have a partner, she got pregnant by IVF, and miscarried after 10 weeks. Was it a tough decision to become a single mother? “No, I wanted to be a mum, and I wasn’t in a relationship. I had endometriosis and I’d done all these tests, and they said, ‘Your egg count is low and if you don’t get pregnant in the next year it’s highly unlikely that you will be able to conceive naturally.’ Obviously, that wasn’t true, because I did in the end.” The lyrics to Comes in Waves are so raw, Cornish wearing her vulnerability like gossamer armour. But it’s also a song of defiance that anticipates the birth of Sky, promising “Next time you come to me I’ll make a place for you to stay”. Again, she sings the line for me. “And I did. I fucking did it. I’m so proud of myself. I went full term. I had a C-section, which I didn’t want, but it didn’t matter.” Does she feel the baby she lost is still with her? “Always. Always. They say the DNA of a baby stays within you, so the bit of that DNA will be in Sky and in me for ever. But I do feel it didn’t happen because I wasn’t meant to do it on my own.”
The song I’ll Never Know Why is equally painful. Here she berates herself for not seeing that an unnamed friend was “lost and hopeless”, and she asks him: “How could you say goodbye without saying goodbye?” In 2018, soon after she won Singer, her bodyguard and close friend Dave Last died unexpectedly. I ask her if this song is about him. She nods. Silence. Did he take his own life? Again, she nods, struggling for words. “I miss him so much, man. He was my guy for seven years. He was like my big brother. It makes me so sad that there was a loneliness there that meant it got to that before he would call me. I hope it’s a song that can help people who are left behind. And I also hope it helps people who are thinking of doing it to see a different perspective of what they would leave behind and how much they’re loved and wanted.”
Cornish kept herself together while talking about her miscarriage and cancer, but now the tears come. “He was one of my favourite people in the world,” she says. When they were on tour, he was the first and last person she saw every day. “After every show we’d go for a walk and he’d always ask, ‘Have you got your hoodie?’ I’m performing the song at the Royal Variety Show and I’ll be wearing a hoodie.”
She calls the album her journey through grief. Although it concludes on a positive note (with songs Living My Best Life and H.A.P.P.Y), it ends before the giddy high of having a baby with Colman. Cornish can’t wait to write about this on her next album. She says she’s never loved in the way she loves Colman. “Birthing someone’s child is so unique. It’s for ever engraved in our relationship because I’m looking at my son and it’s literally his and my face mashed together. That’s a different kind of love.”
And doubtless she’ll be reflecting about the cancer on her next album. She’s been given the all-clear, but she knows there’s a chance of it returning. Life’s too short to worry about that, though, she says. There’s so much to be getting on with – motherhood, touring, writing, recording, standup comedy. “I’ve just got to hope it doesn’t come back,” she says. “And if it does, then we’ll fucking deal with that when we get to it.”
• Jessie J’s new studio album Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time is out now.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
