We are slowly loving this new artist. We featured her earlier and she grew and grew and grew. Jess Mills has earned her night world stripes, clocking up countless hours in nightclubs and raves around the world ever since she first discovered the delights of smoky, sweaty clubs in the heady garage times of the late ’90s. The North Londoner, who scored a top 40 hit with Breakage on ‘Fighting Fire’, and who has just returned from a stint on tour with Leftfield, was a self-confessed ‘teenage garage head’ criss-crossing London’s nocturnal hotspots with rave spar Niomi McLean-Daley, aka Ms Dynamite.
Mills and Ms Dynamite would go to all the big garage raves, and all the dingy, divey ones, in the days before the latter started the journey that culminated in her 2002 Mercury Music Prize win with ‘A Little Deeper’. Despite the garage foundation, Mills was always in possession of a multi-musical mind: she’d be out till dawn raving to EZ or Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown, then getting ready for school the next morning with The Smiths or Fleetwood Mac or old Motown songs blaring out of her bedroom stereo.
