You can’t imagine it, the singer says. There she was preparing for her first album release in nearly a decade, ecstatically in love with her current love, and at long last the mom to a little one after struggling to conceive for ten years, feeling invincible. Suddenly in spring she was found to have cancer in her breast.
The singer-songwriter, actual name Jess Cornish, is renowned for telling it as it is. The record, her latest release, was supposed to be an open book, tackling every bit of hardship she’d endured since she last recorded music (a gynecological condition, losing a baby, broken romances, gaslighting, suicide) with characteristic openness. The first single, the song No Secrets, was dropped in April. But by then there remained a major undisclosed truth. The cancer. Later second single, the upbeat Living My Best Life, debuted in late spring and Cornish was speaking publicly about how she was thriving, while all the while living with her cancer. A month later she went public, and in the start of summer she received surgical treatment.
She offers me her best “What the fuck?” glance. “I release with a song called No Secrets. I’m giving every press talk, and they ask, ‘So what’s new with you?’ and I respond, ‘Erm, yeah, nothing …’” she has just had to call off performances because she’s awaiting cosmetic procedures.
Our interview takes place at a studio in London. She is wearing a tan faux-leather coat, blue jeans with elaborate white patches, cream boots and large glasses. Picture motorcycle style meets 70s singer aesthetic. “As if I’m in the 70s and I should have a man with facial hair.” Like the film, I say, recalling the picture. “That’s what people called me at school!” She grins. Cornish is sharp-witted, unfiltered and filter-free. She says she has always wanted to try comedy and is hoping to make her standup debut in the coming year. “I like entertaining. When performing I basically roast the crowd.”
Personal Battles and News
Cornish was getting ready for an slot at the Baftas when she noticed an abnormality. “I quickly sought to get it looked at, had an ultrasound, and they were, like, ‘It seems benign; your tissue is healthy.’ And I was, like, ‘Yet I sense it. My arm hurts and pins and needles in my hands whenever I get up.’ And they replied, ‘How about a biopsy?’ That was 28 March, the day after my birthday.” It was a weekend eve. The physician told her if it was concerning she’d call on the start of the week. By then she had persuaded herself it was nothing. The way she tells it, it was just bad timing to face illness when she had a busy schedule.
“We’re two weeks away from debuting the project after eight years without an album and an extended break. And the doctor messaged and said, ‘Can you talk 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, ‘You might want to sit.’ That sympathetic voice? And she continues, ‘I’m so, so sorry but your reports have indicated aggressive cancer.’” How did you respond? “I replied, ‘Well, that’s not great. The timing is terrible.’ Immediately I felt was, ‘I have to survive for my boy.’”
Some men find me challenging due to my self-awareness
She viewed the procedure frightening and surreal. “I dislike anesthesia. They walk you down. You know when you have emergency surgery you roll down in a bed, but now 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, she notes, she’s been lucky. No chemotherapy or radiation, just the procedure. “Cancer sucks, man, but yet Thank fuck I found it early. I had the mastectomy a few months back and my right breast now resembles a fruit under fabric.” A further beam. “I got to keep the nipple, though.”
The follow-up procedure is therapeutic and aesthetic. Her boobs, she observes, are now “uneven. The implant is larger than before. That’s impolite! I felt, don’t add insult to injury, I’m already having a hard period. Such disrespect! It’s funny because I said I’d not undergo augmentation because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. Illness changed that.”
Previous Struggles
Cornish is familiar with health problems. She feels her attitude toward illness has been so optimistic because she’s used to medical emergencies. They have often coincided with career highs, acting as a reminder, or punch in the stomach, to highlight not to assume everything is fine. “Honestly, I feel life goes, ‘Enjoying yourself? Sit down.’ Ever since I was a child, it has always gone alongside moments of success for me; a major or strange event has happened to my health.”
She takes me back to her 11-year-old self, already beginning featuring in the stage in Whistle Down the Wind (she was chosen 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 lightheadedness and irregular beats. “I attended rehearsals intermittently on an drip, and going back into hospital at night.” She fast-forwards half a dozen years, and young Jessica has become part of the girl group Soul Deep while studying at the academy. “I signed my initial contract, and I had a brain incident. Then when I was ready to debut in recently I had a automobile accident and my throat was injured and I lost my voice for a twelve months.”
Hey, I say, wait, I can’t keep up. At just 17? She nods|agrees
