Tim Hughes looks forward to seeing indie rockers The Big Moon at this year’s Truck Festival

FUN, insightful and just a little bit bonkers, all-girl indie-rockers The Big Moon are re-writing the rule book and striking a blow for sisters everywhere – both in bands and in the crowd.

“Playing to girls feels so good,” says singer Juliette Jackson. “We’ve supported a lot of big indie boy bands who have a lot of female fans and it’s great to go on stage and by being there, showing them that they can do it as well.

“People have come up to us after shows and said, ‘We want to start a band now!’ That’s great because we were those kids once too.”

The London four-piece of Juliette, Soph Nathann, Celia Archer and Fern Ford are revitalising indie with noisy guitars, scatty rhythms, lush harmonies, zany videos and intelligent real life lyrics – with a powerful, albeit fun, message.

And they are not leaving anything to the boys, as music-lovers heading to next weekend’s Truck festival will discover. The girls play the main stage on Friday, alongside Franz Ferdinand and Slaves. They are in good indie company; also on the bill for the weekend at Hill Farm, Steventon, are The Libertines, The Wombats, The Vaccines and Maximo Park.

And, in stark contrast to any number of commercially motivated, manufactured bands, their origins are wholly organic.

“I didn’t just want to start a band, I really, genuinely needed to,” says Juliette.

“I was working in a fancy cocktail bar in north London where they made stupid drinks flavoured with soil and tomato skins. I had to get out of there. So I started writing songs about love and hangovers, robots and the fourth dimension, ran around London asking everyone I knew if they knew anyone who wanted to be in a band with me.”

She set out to recruit some kindred spirits.

“I’d blind-date people in a pub in Islington and suss them out,” she says. Drummer and organist Fern (she plays the two instruments simultaneously) was the first to join, then guitarist – and sometime graffiti artist – Soph.

“Celia joined last,” says Juliette. “It was just us three for a while and then one afternoon she came to our practice room. I answered the door and immediately said, ‘I love you’. She joined us the next day.”

She laughs: “The first time we all played properly together, I actually had a little cry. “We barely knew each other, but it just instantly made sense. I’d always had a four-piece band in mind and now these songs suddenly sounded so huge. I wanted us to sound like a garage rock band, but with hooks.

“It’s what I’ve always listened to – White Stripes, Pixies, Kid Congo Powers, but also a lot of really gorgeous melodic stuff like Elvis and Roy Orbison and The Kinks. Stuff that sounds scuzzy, but that you can still sing along to.”

That was three years ago. The band has become inseparable ever since.

“It’s kind of magical that this happened,” says Juliette. “We had such an instant connection with each other and we were all at a place and time in our lives where everything just synched and we were able to totally commit to being The Big Moon.”

There first gig was at the Windmill in south London’s Brixton.

“I was so nervous!” says Soph. “Even though we initially just played to our friends and we didn’t even have a band name.”

Jules agrees: “It was so hard to decide on a good name. When we put our first song online we were The Moon, but there were so many other bands that were called Moon or Moons or The Moons that we decided we wanted to set ourselves apart a bit. We agonised over different variations but The Big Moon just stuck.”

The first track they shared with the world was Eureka Moment. “We put it online, and people actually listened to it” says Celia. “And then we started getting loads of emails from people. We got shows. It was crazy.

“It’s been kind of a whirlwind. One minute we’re playing the Brixton Windmill and the next we’re playing Brixton Academy multiple times.”

They have subsequently toured with The Maccabees, Ezra Furman and Truck festival mates The Vaccines.

Their debut album Love in the 4th Dimension came out in April.

“I don’t really think of an album as a thing that has to be listened to all at once,” says Juliette. “I’m a big believer in songs by themselves. I wanted every song to be a journey in itself rather than it having to rely on the thing before or after it.

“So we wanted to make sure every single song on the album was the best possible version of the song that could ever exist. I don’t want to feel like anything could be improved upon.”

And, they say, they want to make sure their music reaches as many people as possible. “I can’t wait for people to hear all the songs and to get to know every lyric and every intricacy,” says Celia.

And what next? They are all agreed on that: “World domination!”

* The Big Moon play Truck Festival at Hill Farm, Steventon, next Friday, July 21. Tickets have sold out