Jessica Winter on her debut album, growing up in the punk scene, and a current internet fixation with kittens and mini dachshund puppies
PHOTOGRAPHY REBECCA THOMAS
STYLIST LUCY-ISOBEL BONNER
HAIR SVEN BAYERBACH
It’s midway through my conversation with London-based pop artist Jessica Winter, and I’m laughing. We’re talking over Zoom on a sunny afternoon, informing me that her rider at her recent headline show at The Divine in Dalston consisted of limp salad leaves and a single ginger and lemon teabag. No disrespect to the venue, mind you, this was at her insistence. “I don’t know what I was thinking,” she admits. “I must have been on a health kick.” She promises to amp up the rockstar vibe with ten bottles of whiskey next time, neither of us is sure how well that would pair with wilted lettuce.
Booked to headline the GAY TIMES stage at XOYO for SXSW London on June 6th, lead performer Jessica Winter is well acquainted with the LGBTQ+ scene in the capital. Often gracing the floors of Dalston Superstore and nearby venues with her inebriated presence, she has quite literally been raised with the gays through her family. Her brother Joshua is currently on a mission to make Soho nightlife queer and sexy again through the bougie Hotel @ 49A club night. Winter lent her musical talents for the launch night, welcoming in the new party with an opening DJ set, promoted by an incredible image of her flexing her guns in a fishnet catsuit. She is torn between Divine and Judy Garland as her favourite notable icon.
Growing up on Hayling Island off the shores of Portsmouth, Winter spent a lot of her early childhood strapped to a piano as a result of her hip dysplasia. “I had this bar back and my legs were in the splits,” she says of her earliest memory. “My Mum would put me on the piano stool because my legs could poke out on either side, and I’d be safe. And I used to play on that for ages, and I just remember loving it: like I was only two.” She didn’t start singing until she was 11 or 12. “I never really considered myself a singer at all,” Winter explains, only properly writing when she finally had something to say.
Also hailing from Hayling is her musical collaborator, Alex Sebley, a former member of The Saudis whose musical career bubbles around the fringes of Fat White Family. The two met by chance years later in London, forming the eccentric indie disco band PREGOBLIN but friction arose around the time the debut single Combustion was released in 2018. I’d surprisingly met Winter for a brief moment around this time, my ex was a bassist in the band and living with Sebley throughout our breakup. I remember a table full of collaged scraps of paper, including images of Winter assembled as they were making a DIY scrapbook video for that first track. Speaking to her now feels cathartic, being on the other side of that strange era.
Winter has notably produced for artists including Jazmin Bean, The Horrors, The Big Moon, Phoebe Green, Fat White Family, Walt Disco, Sundara Karma, Brodka, Lauren Auder, Solv, The Moonlandingz, and has toured with Rebecca Black and Death Grips separately. On July 11th, Winter is excited to drop her first debut album, cheekily titled My First Album, with a UK tour starting with a performance at Rough Trade East. Inside, thirteen pop tracks tell the story of Winter finding herself through a series of personal anecdotes. She tells me that working on her solo material has been fun but stressful. “It’s 100% me and I freak out about that sometimes, but it’s not like I can give it up because it’s a therapy and how I heal my wounds.” There’s no way around being authentically an artist without being truly seen.
In an age where AI music infiltrates streaming services like a mechanical cancer, the music itself feels rich and nostalgic, like razzing it down the motorway on a sunny Friday afternoon with the top down (and, optionally: your top off) after making a life-changing realisation. Playing with sounds in a very textural way, there are slices of Scissor Scissors, grunge, and Kylie Minogue. Each track has a personality and soul. “I wanted to make it much warmer and more analogue,” she explains about the production process, trying to capture the raw feeling of when she would listen to noughties pop as a youngster.
“I was making sure that everything I did was trying to use as many real instruments as possible, taking it out of the laptop and putting it through vintage equipment.”
Emotion builds as the songs progress, peeling back layers until you find the heart of the person beneath. Already released from the album is her music video for the track ‘Wannabe’, where you watch Winter metamorphose into the misunderstood 90s goth icon Edward Scissorhands. It’s the scene where he’s outside awkwardly fingering the hairstyles of various older lady neighbours with his namesake appendages into something entirely new. In Winter’s rendition, the models are styled into clones of her until the end, where she finally breaks free of creating the same style over and over again, becoming a bleach blonde babe in the process. It’s fitting to the lyrics, where an unhealthy habit of self-comparison through social media is revealed. “It’s really important to find out who you are, or you lose yourself,” she affirms. “Comparison is a mirror, not a truth.” This is especially true in the music industry, where mental health struggles amongst artists are infamously rife.
Winter relates to the misfit essence of Edward Scissorhands and how he doesn’t fit in. “He wants to be liked and loved, and kind of just tries, but when he tries, he cuts people’s faces,” she explains. “Sometimes when you’re trying, it just goes wrong. A lot of people can feel like an alien sometimes, it’s just good to remember that you are just equal to any other human being on this earth.” It’s directed by Roger Spy, the multimedia artist and musician. “He can sing, he can dance, he can direct,” Winter appraises. “He is the next Michael Jackson, if not Michael Jackson incarnated,” she quips, although the timeline of this reincarnation is questionable. It transpires that Spy has directed two more of her upcoming videos, in one, she’s screaming atop a cliff in Wales, which will also be revealed on the album launch release.
Lyrically, ‘Wannabe’ touches on the feeling of self-comparison on social media and using outside distractions to avoid yourself. “It’s that comparing and despairing, seeing other artists doing way better than you or seeming more confident, but I’m sure they’re all going through the same,” she describes. “When you’re comparing yourself to someone, you’re not seeing them, you’re seeing your insecurities reflected,” but she has a tip to trick your brain into doing the opposite when you notice that happening. “Write it down and then write the opposite statement: one of compassion, not punishment. Do it every time and collect them in a jar. When the jar is full… burn them and let all those negative thoughts disintegrate into thin air!”
Winter notes her current internet fixation involves an adorable combo of cute kittens and mini dachshund puppies, a blessed algorithm if there ever was one. “Sometimes I have to throw my phone across the room to get it out of my hand.”
Avoidance can be achieved through anything and everything. In one of the upcoming tracks, I See The Robin, Winter averts her attention from the present moment by looking for signs. I recalled my past superstition of robin sightings as a sign from my deceased Granddad, and she said the same. How many Granddads could one local red-breasted bird be symbolic of in one area? “Is it serendipity, or is it a coincidence?” she asks, perhaps seeing 1111 everywhere is only indicative of habitually looking at your screen at 11:11 each day. “I think sometimes it’s a bit poisonous to be living in this fantasy land, because again, you’re believing this narrative in your head and you’re not being in the present moment, which is better. Usually.”
There’s an equally gothic undertone across her entire discography, in part due to her relationship to metal and rock music as a teen. She was part of the punk scene in Portsmouth and adored the fashion, the music and the ethos. “It shaped me and I think it will always be a part of me, no matter what music or clothes I wear.” Before the interview, I had been tipped off that she was partial to Epic by Faith No More. “I got a top badge for that on Spotify.”
“What I love about pop music is you can be as extreme as you want to be in three minutes, seeing how far you can push certain structures and boundaries,” Winter explains. “What I love about rock bangers is that it’s dramatic, you can hear that in my music. Punk music has theater and drama, I love all of that. It’s where I’ve come from. My whole family is very dramatic.”
The drama is undeniable. ‘Got Something Good’ features sirens and an industrial edge, ‘L.O.V.E’ feels like the hero making a comeback in a ‘90s romcom. The song ‘Big Star’ immediately followed by ‘Worst Person In The World’ feels like an immediate comedown from the positivity in the track before it. It’s theatrical but not in a cheesy way. The album ends on ‘To Know Her’, where the protagonist Winter leaves you on a fairytale ending with a baroque-style harpsichord and an organ. A heavenly moment that sounds like finally finding the light at the end of a long struggle. You’re left sitting there introspectively as the sound echoes around the room inside your headphones.
“I’m just trying to be authentic. That sounds lame, doesn’t it?” I assure her that it will look better written down. “I’m just trying to figure it out, as I’m sure a lot of the readers are. There might be resonance with that and we can all feel heard together.”
Jessica Winter’s debut album ‘My First Album’ is out now.
The post Jessica Winter: “Comparison is a mirror, not a truth” appeared first on GAY TIMES.
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