Julia Jacklin: "If I’m going to do it, I have to love the music top to bottom – otherwise I’m just going to hate the whole thing”

Just north-east of Melbourne’s centre, Collingwood is a tight, weathered patch of brick warehouses, laneways, bottle shops and band rooms – an old industrial suburb remade as one of the city’s great engines of music, style and nocturnal mischief.

And there’s a glorious watering hole that squats on Wellington Street, called The Gem, which serves as Julia Jacklin’s local boozer, creative hangout and artistic muse. When Sydney native Jacklin first shored up in Melbourne in 2017, The Gem became more than a haunt – it was a doorway into Melbourne’s music scene.

“In Melbourne, the live music is baked into the culture of the city,” Julia expands. “So a lot of musicians from Australia end up in Melbourne. There’s a lot of songs  people write about, ‘Don’t move to Melbourne!’”

We’re sat in the tranquil hush of the 62 Drury Street Bar, a quiet Dublin spot that offers welcome relief on a day like this. Outside, Ireland is enjoying its first heatwave of the summer; inside, there’s shade and cold beer. Julia is in town to play an intimate set at Spindizzy Records later in the afternoon, before returning to these parts next February for a show at the National Stadium.

For now, though, we’re here to talk about another bar – The Gem, that Melbourne haunt that gives her September album its name. The Gem is a cream-painted, two-storey corner pub with a red-tiled roof, dark groundfloor windows and old signage hanging from the façade proclaiming it as Curry’s Family Hotel.

“That was the original name,” Julia confirms. “It was one of the first places I remember when I moved to Melbourne, and I’d just gone through a lot of stuff. I just had the big break-up that ended up being Crushing.”

Jacklin’s sophomore album, Crushing mapped relationships turning claustrophobic and controlling, and love affairs morphing into hate affairs. But the lesson derived was to face the burdens of life down – indeed, there exists a titanium steel that pulses through the Australian songwriter’s work.

“I was just a very classic 27,” she continues. “Like, ‘Whoa, life is hard and different than I imagined.’ I was having to go out by myself a lot to try to make new friends, because I didn’t know many people who lived in Melbourne at that point. The Gem is off the main drag, so it’s a bit hard to find, but there’s not that many bars like it in Melbourne. It’s very intimate, and it has live music for free a lot of times.”

Fast forward eight years and Julia had three acclaimed solo albums behind her – Don’t Let The Kids Win, Crushing and Pre Pleasure – and was beginning to circle a fourth. Between labels, between managers, and with a rare pocket of time opening up, she decided to make a record at home in Melbourne.

She rang Robert Muinos, whose Rat Shack studio sits above The Gem, and assembled a small crew of friends – Jacob Diamond on guitar, Mimi Gilbert on bass and Jess Elwood on drums. They recorded upstairs in the pub’s converted hotel rooms, working in tight quarters under limitations that ended up giving the record its character.

Since The Gem was residential, they couldn’t go blasting late into the night. Sound bleed became part of the bargain – footsteps from the hairdresser and tattoo parlour next door, noise from the kitchen crew below, bands thundering downstairs. And when anyone needed air, they simply went down and watched a gig.

Recording was no smash-and-grab job either. The album took the guts of a year, largely because Julia refused to rush the record into existence simply for the sake of it.

“I just allowed myself not to rush it,” she confirms. “That was a real testament to Rob. He understood that if I was going to make a fourth record, I had to really love it. Otherwise, there’s no point.”

For Jacklin, the stakes were not just artistic but existential. Putting out an album is not a neat promotional cycle; it eats years. Touring means weddings and funerals missed, and nieces and nephews growing up in your absence.

“You sacrifice a lot of life to do this job,” she says. “So if I’m going to do it, I have to love the music top to bottom – otherwise I’m just going to hate the whole thing.”

Rob Muinos was crucial to the Melbourne-ness of the record. Jacklin first met him when he was guitar tech for Australian alt-rockers Cloud Control, and he had long been one of those figures who seemed to exist everywhere in the local scene – playing in bands, recording people, quietly earning Melbourne icon status.

“I’d known Rob for years,” Julia says. “He’d been playing in heaps of bands, recording things – he was just around, a local legend.”

That mattered. Rather than chasing some big-name producer, Jacklin wanted someone who felt part of her world. “With producers, you’re often encouraged to work with these big names,” she says, “but that can create a power dynamic.”

SOMETHING TO PROVE

With Muinos, there was none of that waiting around for a studio guru to transform the music. “With me and Rob, it felt like we were both on the same level,” she describes. “We were both learning and figuring it out together. We both had something to prove.”

So, The Gem became less a handover than a partnership – two friends, upstairs over a pub, working to find the thing together. Lead single ‘Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)’ is a nod to ’80s jangle rock and the Melbourne sound that Julia fell in love with. Which brings us, inevitably, back to the city – what exactly was it in that slightly ramshackle scene that got under her skin?

“The big band for me in this sound,” Julia explains, “is a band called RVG. Moving to Melbourne, knowing there was a band like RVG there, was very motivating. I would try and see them whenever I could. It’s the Romy Vega Group. She’s now doing solo stuff, but it’s her guitar playing – she’s just an incredible guitar player.”

‘Walk On Me’ contains some gloriously unvarnished Jacklin guitar of her own – all bite and nerve beneath the bruised melody.

“I have great memories of recording that one,” Julia reveals. “It’s one of my favourite songs where it’s just two chords. It’s six minutes, which is also the longest song I’ve ever released, we just jammed on. That was really nice because we did quite a lot of it live. The room is so tiny, so we were all very close together when we were recording, and with no headphones, which I really enjoyed doing.

“Rob was very big on no headphones. I’d never done that before, but it was really nice, because you’re not listening to yourself doing it, and thinking about how it’s going to sound on a record.”

Because Rat Shack sat above The Gem, the record didn’t stay sealed inside the studio for long. Songs could be worked on upstairs, then carried downstairs into the pub’s live room almost immediately – less a formal showcase than a nightly stress test in front of the very scene that had helped shape them.

And being that Melbourne audiences are a cosmopolitan and cultured bunch, it was quite the litmus test.

“People say they’re intimidated to play in Melbourne,” Julia confirms. “Because the crowds are more reserved. But I do think it’s because Melbourne is really used to having live music, so it’s not as novel. They are also deep listeners, because sometimes you could be watching the most amazing thing in the world and having the best time in your brain, but if someone looked at you, you’d be like, ‘Oh, they’re not having a good time.’”

Album opener ‘Brand New’ gets things moving with a deceptively breezy purge – Jacklin sloughing off the old self in real time.

“I think it was an important first song,” Julia confirms. “I went through a lot of changes before this record. Basically, all my music industry relationships ended – my management, my label. It was the first record where I had no one monitoring it either, which was really nice.”

Being released on 4AD gives The Gem an instant indie-mythology charge, with the label being the house of Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Throwing Muses, The Breeders, This Mortal Coil and many more legends.

With song titles such as ‘God Sometimes’, ‘If I Had The Hand Of God’ and ‘Angel Vision’, the record also possesses a curious metaphysical streak, though Julia is quick to distance it from anything conventionally religious.

“I’m so non-religious,” she says. “And Australian society isn’t overtly religious in any way. So, my relationship to religion is more curiosity. I find it interesting.”

On The Gem, God becomes less deity than metaphor for power, omnipresence, and the fantasy of being able to see your life from above.

“With ‘If I Had The Hand Of God’, I was in Nashville on tour,” Julia explains. “I wished I could rise above where I was staying and have a bird’s-eye view of everything going on in my life, so I could figure out what I should prioritise. The music industry can feel very serious and all-encompassing. You really have to fight to put your feet on the ground.”

SONGWRITING HEROES

Final track ‘I Wish’ features multi-award-winning Melbourne contemporary folk outfit The Maes.

“The Maes are this incredible sister duo from Melbourne,” Julia outlines. “They’re my songwriting heroes, I just love them so much. I saw Maggie, one of the sisters, at an open mic night when I was testing out songs for Crushing and she blew me away. Maggie also opened when I played downstairs at The Gem to test out the songs. They’re my favourite songwriters in Australia, they remind me of what good work is.”

Later that hot afternoon, Jacklin turns up at Spindizzy Records for a very special in-store performance and signing. The place is absolutely wedged. Not industry-wedged either, but properly alive – a beautiful, attentive, hip crowd, the kind of audience who don’t merely recognise the songs, but seem to have lived inside them.

By showtime, Julia has ditched the beautiful blue outfit from our interview and borrowed her manager Ari’s T-shirt instead. It’s a surrender to the weather, and a very Julia Jacklin sort of move – practical and completely without pop-star theatre.

The songs land softly but deeply in the packed room. Between numbers, she thanks Some Neck Guitars on Francis Street in the Liberties for lending her guitar after British Airways waylaid hers – another tiny Dublin detail folded into the afternoon. Outside, the city bakes.

Inside, for half-an-hour or so, Jacklin draws the whole place inward – no grandstanding, no big gestures, just that voice, those songs, and the lovely hush that falls when an audience knows it’s getting something real.

• The Gem is out now. Julia Jacklin plays the National Stadium, Dublin on February 15, 2027.