Jessie J

Jessica Cornish earned her first million-dollar paycheck before ever stepping onto a massive stage. She wrote Party in the U.S.A. for Miley Cyrus in 2009, and the royalties paid her rent for three years in a row. She could have lived comfortably behind the scenes writing melodies for American radio. But she wanted the bright glare of the spotlight.

In the classrooms of the BRIT School in Croydon, she shared breaks and vocal exercises with Adele. The school churned out performers by the dozen, and Cornish stood out for a vocal flexibility that was rare in Europe. In 2010, she released Do It Like a Dude, a track originally written for Rihanna that the label executives chose to save for her own debut.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2011, her first album, Who You Are, placed six different singles in the British top 10, an unprecedented feat for a solo British artist with a debut album. The song Price Tag topped the charts in nineteen countries within weeks. The industry then built her a rigid look of geometric bangs and a tight suit that overshadowed her real personality.

Studio spotlights and the conquest of China

Television quickly realized that her outspoken personality worked in front of the cameras without the need for a script. In 2012, she joined The Voice UK as a judge on its inaugural season, alongside Tom Jones and will.i.am. The small screen soaked up her energy but gave her a media presence that conventional pop releases no longer guaranteed.

In 2014, the track Bang Bang brought her voice together with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj, under the direction of producer Max Martin. That recording sold millions of digital copies in the United States. Her move into scripted screen work came in 2016 with the live broadcast of the TV musical Grease: Live, where she took on the technical challenge of opening the broadcast by singing in real rain. That same year, she voiced the character Brooke in the animated film Ice Age: Collision Course.

In 2018, she decided to compete on the Chinese televised music competition Singer, in front of a weekly audience of hundreds of millions of viewers. She was looking to escape the Anglo-American circuit.

Nobody in London understood the move.

For three months she competed on the sets in Changsha against established stars of Asian ballads. She delivered bare-bones takes on soul classics without relying on Western PR machinery. She won the competition after collecting 52% of the final audience vote in China, a figure no foreign musician had ever achieved on that country's public television.

The broken body and the rebuilding

Cornish's relationship with her own body was never peaceful. Since childhood, she had lived with a congenital heart condition that forced her to spend entire stretches in London hospitals. In 2020, she woke up one morning completely deaf in her right ear due to Ménière's disease. The loss of balance and hearing put her pitch at risk and halted her recordings.

By 2022, she had a full album finished with the major label Republic Records. But the tracks she had recorded didn't reflect anything she wanted to say.

The album ended up in the trash.

So she decided to break free and manage her catalog with financial independence. In May 2023, she gave birth to her son after having suffered the loss of a pregnancy alone two years earlier. But the final blow came in June 2025, when doctors diagnosed her with early-stage breast cancer.

She underwent a mastectomy while finishing the mixes for Don't Tease Me with a Good Time, her sixth studio album, released at the end of 2025 after seven years of silence from her label. In September 2026, she announced a temporary break from public life to undergo a second breast reconstruction surgery and complete her medical treatment. Tickets for her concert scheduled for August 2026 at the Party in the Paddock festival in Newbury went on sale with a base price of £34.