‘I was madly in love with post-punk’: Jessica Adams recommends London Calling

Inspired by The Clash and her love of the post-punk London music scene, Jessica Adams finally managed to return to the city of her birth when she turned 21, writes Christine Manby

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

Some of us were better prepared for this tumultuous year than others. Australian astrologer Jessica Adams knew quite a while ago that 2020 was going to be interesting, in the Chinese proverb’s sense of the word. Consulting the ephemeris (charts which plot the movements of the planets) late last year, Adams announced that March 2020 would be “Clean Up Time”. She wrote “those nations at the top of the world order, will go through a critical clean-up in March 2020, similar to a detox…” Sound like a lockdown to you? With a “final delivery in November 2020”. Adams continued, “This is obviously the month America goes to the polls and she will be electing a completely different class of politicians, a new system, a new constitution…”

When I talked to Adams on the eve of the American election, she assured me that Biden would carry the day with “good news on Sunday 8”, which equated to Saturday 7 US time, when Biden’s victory was indeed called. However, she also warned that Trump’s attempts to overturn the result would rumble on until at least November 20th. “It’s all about Mercury Retrograde,” said Adams. This year’s US election had the same horoscope as Bush/Gore 2000 and the Truman election of 1948 when Thomas E Dewey was erroneously named president elect by the Chicago Daily Tribune, which went to press just a little too early. Remember Thomas E Dewey? Exactly.

Anyway, thanks to the ephemeris Adams was ready for action when a lockdown was announced in spring 2020, taking just 90 minutes to decide to leave Melbourne and head for Tasmania, where she has been holed up ever since. Talking to panicking friends about the upcoming confinement, she advised several of them to “get a chicken”. Days after arriving in Tasmania, someone threw a huge black hen over Adams’ own fence. Though it’s a “total pain in the arse”, the hen has been Adams’ companion ever since. She predicted a lockdown and manifested an emotional support chicken to go with it. Things like this happen in Jessica Adams’ life.