The Big Moon have been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize for their debut album ‘Love In The 4th Dimension’. If you’re here, it means you probably know we think it’s brilliant. And we’re right.
After taking a bunch of photos, doing important Mercury Nomination type things and having a pub lunch (“I bloody love a Caesar salad. I love that dressing. It’s also Fern’s birthday today, so we had some birthday cake as well.”) we caught up with Jules Jackson to see how she’s finding it all.
Hi Jules, you’re a Mercury Nominee. How’s that feel?
It’s madness. It feels like… I’m just completely bamboozled, to be honest. It feels like I’m not awake and I’m actually asleep, and someone is going to wake me up in a minute and say ‘do you want a cup of tea?’ Yeah, but what about the Mercury Prize? It’s totally surreal.
Were you expecting it?
No. Not at all. We found out a week ago, and it was completely out of the blue. When you make an album, you just make your music, you make it how you want it to sound, and you don’t think anything really. You hope that people will like it. This is a big deal for us. It’s so well respected, and we’ve grown up watching the Mercury Awards on TV so now to be part of that, it’s really strange and wonderful. Even being shortlisted, we still feel like we’ve won, to be honest. You even get a trophy if you don’t win. I checked on the website.
Where are you going to keep the trophy?
I guess we’re going to have to work out a schedule and divide the time between the band. I could put it on top of the fridge. I could put it in the fridge, keep it fresh.
And then you’ll be reminded every time you open it.
‘Remember that time we were nominees?’ We’ve been calling ourselves MN’s all week. Every time something shit’s happened, it doesn’t matter ‘cos MN. If you discover you’ve got loads of fruit flies in your soy sauce that you’ve been using for the last year, and you’ve just eaten, it doesn’t matter ‘cos MN. It’s been quite difficult to sleep. And quite difficult not to tell everyone ‘cos we had to keep it a secret.
Who didn’t you keep it a secret from?
I told my mum and dad and my boyfriend. My parents were like, ‘Wonderful, what is that?’ They had to go and Google it and then ‘We’re so proud.’ It’s funny how sometimes something that is so big in your world is so insignificant in someone else’s. It brings you back down to earth.
[sc name=”pull” text=”It’s been quite difficult to sleep… And quite difficult not to tell everyone.”]
How are you finding the nomination? Because this album is songs you wrote in your bedroom, then recorded with some mates.
It’s really weird. I did think about that today. We all went for a pub lunch after the thingy was announced. We had loads of people taking photos and doing loads of stuff, then we went and had lunch with our manager Louise who’s like our best friend and her dog, and some people from the label. I was thinking, if I hadn’t decided to try and work out how to write songs in my bedroom, none of us would even be sitting here. It’s mental how it’s all escalated and grown. The whole MN thing feels like the icing on a cake. A really big delicious cake.
Are you going to win it?
Uhm, no. I think Kate Tempest is going to win. Or Loyle Carner, I like him. Or Stormzy could win, he’s also great. For us, just being nominated, it’s like being nominated for the Turner Prize. It’s better than The Brits or The Grammys because it’s voted for by people we respect. It means so much. It really means so much. It’s like Tinkerbell has just donked her little magic wand on our planet and said ‘here’s a little boost for you’. We really needed it. We needed something to happen. The album came out four months ago, we love it, and we’re really proud of it but nothing crazy happened, it kept bubbling, and building and you just keep going, but at some point, we started to wonder where does this lead. We’re also running out of money, we all started scratching our heads, what do we do now? Make another album I guess. It’s really nice to have a little boost. It’s a big new second wave of excitement a few months after the album comes out. Hopefully lots more people will get to hear our album now, which is really cool.
And why do you think your album got shortlisted, over all the over albums.
It’s hard to say really. We threw everything into this album. I guess people have picked up on that passion and our music is fun. It was written and recorded at a time when everything felt fun and lighthearted, at least for me, and it’s really nice to have music, with the way the world is now, that is an escape from all that. I don’t know why really, I’ve got no idea, but I know I’m really fucking pleased.
The Big Moon’s debut album ‘Love in the 4th Dimension’ is out now.