Jessie J, the English pop star and newly added coach on the fourth season of the hit reality singing show The Voice, doesn’t pause when asked to recall her own worst audition. It was a casting call for the stage musical Annie and an excited eight-year-old Jessica Cornish sang Tomorrow so loudly that she was one of just two young girls, out of more than 100, initially asked to leave the hall.

“I cried my heart out, but my mum said to me, ‘When a door closes in your face it means that you have to find another door’,” remembers Jessie, who has had a pair of top-five singles in Australia in the past 12 months. “Soon after, I was cast in my first lead, in Whistle Down the Wind, and the show ran for two years. That failed audition was one of the most awful, but insightful, moments of my life.”

Now it’s Jessie’s job, alongside this year’s fellow coaches, Ricky Martin, Delta Goodrem and the partnership of Joel Madden and his twin brother Benji, to bring the same sense of satisfaction to what has been one of Channel Nine’s biggest hits since it debuted in 2012.

“I’m very honest and very constructive. I like people to go home with something,” she says. “With me, if someone tells me no, whether now or when I was eight years old, I wanted to know why. The artists don’t want to be told, ‘You’re amazing, but no thanks.’ That doesn’t make them any better.”

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