Bio
You don’t mess with Jessie Malakouti. Anyone who starts her own rock band just to piss off her parents and then promptly leaves home at 16 to live out of her car isn’t going to take anything lying down. Growing up in and around LA Jessie is not your usual valley girl by any stretch of the imagination.
Going from mate’s sofa to audition to odd job and back again, Jessie would live off various paid acting/dance gigs (she’s appeared in a Pink music video, a Powerade commercial amongst other things) as well as teaching at the local dance studio.
Being on the LA music scene, it wasn’t long before she was realizing her rebel dream of starting a rock band and Shut Up Stella were born. Working the sweaty dives and noxious clubs of Southern California with their shouty rock rap, Jessie lead her motley crew to a record deal, even playing on the same bill as the likes of Muse and The Killers.
Then things started to change. ‘I just wasn’t in the same head space anymore,’ says Jessie, ‘They wanted to carry on making angry music and I was writing happy pop songs’. And so they disbanded. A chance meeting with Brian Higgins and Miranda Cooper brought Jessie to England to write with one of the UK’s most exciting and prolific purveyors of all things pop, Xenomania.
‘Standing Up For the Lonely’ (released on Ministry of Sound in January 2010) is the result of Jessie and Xenomania’s first collaboration, and the birth of a true star with Popjustice calling the track ‘a defiant modern disco record with a slightly mournful, triumph-over-adversity element’.
With her Hollywood starlet looks and own unique style she is no stranger to the hard graft that the music industry requires. ‘I ain’t afraid of working my ass off or getting my fingernails dirty… if it means at the end of the week I can afford a manicure again!’ she says with her trademark cheeky glint in her eye.
For a girl who’s crossed genres and written all her own music from the very start, she’s comfortable with any comparisons you want to throw at her. ‘I’d rather people love me or hate me, nothing in between thanks.’ says Jessie with a no nonsense, matter of fact tone that makes you intrinsically believe what she says. For Jessie there is no mediocre, only extremes.
READ JESSIE'S TOUR BLOG!
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