Julia Jacklin ProfileA small room has its own kind of courtesy. Inside the Gem, tall men stand against the walls, as if by some unspoken agreement, so the overwhelmingly female audience can see. Nobody paid to be here. Entry was by lottery, and the people who won carry themselves like they know it. Luck, like faith, makes you a little quieter.
The facts of Julia Jacklin's career are the kind that usually harden an artist into a brand. She has four albums across a decade, an Australian top 10 debut, UK chart placings and a shelf of AIR and ARIA Awards. Lana Del Rey flew her to Denver to duet on Jacklin’s Don't Know How to Keep Loving You. In June she signed to 4AD, a label whose name is still shorthand for a certain kind of cool, but Jacklin has never seemed much interested in cool.
Her interviews will often circle one unglamorous subject: how strange it is to be a perceptive, anxious person in a profession built on self-exposure. Her records answer it by exposing her anyway. Her songs lay out a decision and what it cost with so little self-protection that it can look like fearlessness. That, more than any mystique, is what has earned her such devotion.
Her new album is called The Gem. She recorded much of it upstairs, and tonight the record is, in effect, coming home. Around two hundred people are inside and more stand on the footpath, watching through the venue’s big front window, which puts them within metres of her. It's hard to imagine a launch more deliberately small, or one that feels more auspicious.
“Hey everyone,” Jacklin says, stepping onto the low stage in the corner. Behind her are a mirror and posters for bands whose new albums, unlike hers, are unlikely to trouble next week’s ARIA top 10. In a white collared shirt under a black shift dress, Jacklin looks faintly like a novice nun on a day out from the convent.
Her band settles in behind her: Jacob Diamond, Jennifer Aslett, Jess Ellwood and Rob Muinos, who produced The Gem. She explains the plan. “So, I’m going to do a bunch of covers, we’ll have a half-hour break, and then we’ll play some of my songs.” She counts in, begins a song, goes to sing, then stops. “I need to feel really comfortable, so I'm going to have a few false starts,” she says with a smile. “And then I'll be great.” It's a very Jacklin thing to say, an admission of nerves that is also a promise.
The covers set opens with a sultry take on Kylie Minogue's Come into My World. Maggie and Elsie from The Maes join her for The Roches' Runs in the Family, and the room goes silent in a way full rooms rarely do. You can hear the floorboards shift under someone swaying, an arrhythmic counterpoint to the band’s harmonies. “One of my favourite songwriters is Iris DeMent,” Jacklin says, "and this song is called Let the Mystery Be."
It's a song about not knowing what comes next and making peace with that, and it's hard not to hear it as a kind of statement of intent. A night like this carries a lot of weight, for Jacklin, for her band and for the international attention trained on it, yet remarkably few phones go up. People seem to have decided to be here instead.
Before the set, Jacklin murmured something to herself, what looked like a small private incantation. On the slower songs, her eyes close. When they open, she looks over the crowd rather than at it, elbows tucked in and palms turned up, the light falling on her lifted face, like a child receiving communion.
But just in case there is any fear of things getting too serious, we come to “the Sugar Ray part of the set”. She plays two sunny covers, Every Morning and Someday. The bit pays off when the band moves into a different Someday: The Strokes' song, which her Like a Version performance made familiar to a generation of triple j listeners. Two songs with the same title, and between them a rudimentary map of what alternative radio sounded like when Jacklin was not quite a teenager.
Shivers is where the night tips over. Rowland S. Howard's most enduring song has been covered so often that it's more like a rite of passage, and few who attempt it get out from under its shadow. Jacklin does. The band swells and recedes like a wave while she stands inside it, eyes shut and hands open, and she makes it hers. She ends the first half with a debt repaid to Grinspoon, the first band she ever saw live. She tells us to look after our hearing and warns that things are about to get loud, which they do. Lost Control is a blast, and a rare chance for a band this sensitive to stop being careful.
Taken together, the covers work as a kind of autobiography. If you had left the show at the break, you would have felt like you’d come to know her through her choices and been totally satisfied.
The second set braids the new album through songs taken from her back catalogue, especially her 2019 album Crushing. As Jacklin told The Music’s Mary Varvaris, The Gem was completely rethought as an album after she realised that she hadn’t had enough fun making it. Tonight, it sounds as though she is making up for that.
“We made The Gem upstairs, now we’re downstairs,” Jacklin notes. The album’s first track, Brand New, sets the new tone. The band plays even more tightly and precisely than during the first half of the show, kneading the song's spacious funk as Jacklin’s and Diamond’s voices layer, echo and sometimes answer each other.
Body, God Sometimes and If I Had the Hand of God are standouts. Outside the window next to her, people dance, hug and then dance while they’re hugging. A photographer with a big flash over his camera weaves around them, searching for different angles from which to shoot. The joy seems too big for the room to hold. “I don't have much to say today,” she says after a stunning rendition of The Hardest Thing. “I'm wordless. But I feel quite happy.”
When the crowd sings Don't Know How to Keep Loving You back to her, the performance becomes something shared, and she looks euphoric. When they cheer Aslett’s especially gnarly guitar solo during that song’s middle section, she breaks into laughter. On the quicker songs, Pressure to Party and Get Away from Here (I Think I'll Love You Soon), as they dance and sing, she smiles and can't stop.
In Jacklin's hands, happiness has never excluded difficulty. Her last song, I Wish, is sad without being bleak. She, Diamond and the Maes sing it without microphones, four voices against the whole quiet weight of the room, and once again it's nearly drowned out by a creaking floorboard.
“I'm not very comfortable with being a person in public,” she tells us. “I mean, I made an album, which was a lot of work, but they're just songs, and this is just music. And I love music.”
