When Jet’s debut album, Get Born, was released in 2003, it rode in on the wave of a rock revival.
Led by Melbourne brothers and songwriters Nic and Chris Cester, they weren’t the first Australian band to join the movement: the stage had been set by the Vines the year before, who were featured on a cover of Rolling Stone magazine under the headline “Rock is Back!”, lumped in with the White Stripes, the Strokes and the Hives.
But Jet had a commercial crossover appeal that the erratic Craig Nicholls of the Vines either never wanted or never maintained. Jet’s singles Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Cold Hard Bitch and Rollover DJ – itself a call to arms for rock musicians – were as good for the radio as they were for the moshpit. The music was licensed for ads and film and game soundtracks, and the album – which charted at No 1 in Australia, No 14 in the UK, and in the top 30 in the US – went on to sell 3.5m copies worldwide.
Hitting that sweet spot between commercial viability and good old fashioned rock’n’roll is no mean feat, but in the early 2000s the world was ripe for it. As drummer Chris Cester tells Guardian Australia: “There was a feeling that you could really do something big.”
Like the so-called rock revival itself, that feeling didn’t last long.
The Cester brothers’ father died in 2004 but instead of taking a break, Jet went straight back to writing. Their follow-up album, Shine On, came from that time – and while it wasn’t a commercial flop, it did beget one of the most infamous burns in the history of music criticism: a Pitchfork review containing nothing but a video of a monkey urinating in its own mouth. (Their take on Get Born wasn’t much kinder.)
Following a US tour with Oasis and Kasabian, Jet released 2009’s Shaka Rock – but by then the bubble had well and truly burst. Just one year later, they played their last show.
“Burn out,” Chris Cester explains over the phone. “Full. Time. Burnout ... it’s an omnipresent feeling that you can’t explain.”
Cester remembers the moment he found out that Jet was over: “My brother called me one afternoon when we were in Melbourne, and asked me for lunch. I probably should have seen it coming then, because we weren’t really having lunch at that point. But yeah, we went and had lunch, and he basically just said he didn’t feel like doing it any more.”
The breakup was announced in 2012. “I should have seen the writing on the wall. We weren’t really getting along, and it had been a long time since everybody was having fun ... but it was a real shock for me.”
Six years after their last show, the band are back in Melbourne rehearsing for a string of upcoming reunion shows supporting Bruce Springsteen. Cester was delighted by the invitation – “If the Boss calls, you answer!” he laughs – but he didn’t expect the rest of the band would actually get on board. Particularly his brother.
“To be honest with you, I’d – not given up, but I hadn’t even thought about the idea of Jet in a long time. I’d just been kind of living my own life.”
Cester lives in LA and has a new band, Mystic Knights of Amnesia, which was named as a joke by Noel Gallagher. (Cester describes the Oasis guitarist as a “fucking loon”, but in a fun way; the pair have been friends since their shared US tour.)
“I was doing my own thing, and I get a call out of the blue from my manager asking if I’d be interested in [reforming Jet for Springsteen’s tour], and I was like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, of course, absolutely, 100% I’m interested! But fuck, call Nic! Fuck!’, you know?”
His manager told him they already had – and Nic had said yes too. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! OK! Shit! Maybe this actually will happen!’ Yeah – I was pretty pumped.”
It’s telling that, instead of finding a current Australian rock band capable of supporting Springsteen’s high-octane stadium shows, the powers that be opted to reform a band that has been dead for six years. While Chris Cester is a fan of the Boss, he is by no means a fanatic (“Mark, our bass player, is probably his biggest fan ... you should be doing this interview with him!”), and the band sonically owe much more to past tourmates the Rolling Stones and Oasis, and Australian rock royalty INXS and AC/DC.
But in a music landscape now characterised by midtempo electronica and the millennial whoop, perhaps there wasn’t much to choose from. Does Australia even do rock’n’roll bands any more?
It’s certainly not as easy for the genre these days, Cester admits. “When we were getting together ... bands like You Am I made us feel that there was a chance; that you could have a career and you could do what you loved to do, and that people might be interested. That’s gone away.”
Without guaranteed album sales or a clear pathway to success, old-fashioned rock bands these days have had to find new ways to keep touring and production costs down – and many are turning to technology.
“A lot of bands just use backing tracks now,” Cester says, referring to a practice among musicians to layer recordings of vocals, and sometimes instruments, under their live sound. “I got used to it a long time ago but it’s the most soul-sucking experience at first. A lot of people who are reading this probably have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about. Sorry to burst the bubble, but most musicians don’t even play what you’re listening to when you walk into a venue – it’s coming off a laptop. And that’s probably – for me, that’s probably where you can feel the [industry pressures] the most.”
It’s not the only thing that’s changed. In 2003, Jet topped the Hottest 100 with Are You Gonna Be My Girl. The day before our interview, the poll was won by Flume – a producer and DJ who created his debut album on a laptop.
The Cester brothers put their ill-feelings towards DJs on the literal record in 2003: “I know that you think you’re the star / a pill poppin’ jukebox is all that you are”. Cester didn’t listen to this year’s countdown, but he’s familiar with the electronic-driven genres that dominated the top 10 – and he’s a little more generous towards them these days.
“You have a lot more people now who have found a way to make music on their own without the use of a record company, or a budget, or a recording studio, or a mixing desk. None of that shit is really necessary any more, and I don’t hate it at all – it’s just the way that things have progressed ... But I think that people are always going to want to see a band as well.”
Refusing to single anyone out, he does admit that “there’s a certain style of production that has just worn my ears out, which bores me”. It started around the time Shaka Rock came out in America.
“[That record] was a hard sell, you know? It was like, unless you sound like MGMT or Empire of the Sun then fucking forget it. And that stuff’s great – I love Empire of the Sun, and I loved that MGMT record like almost everyone on the planet did. But after a few years, when people start watering it down and everybody starts doing it, it just gets more and more boring – there’s not as much evolution. And then you start to crave something a little bit more real.”
Cester cites the example of his six-year-old daughter, who has already started defining her tastes. “She’s only like two years into listening to [music], and all she wants to do right now is listen to Jet. Obviously she knows we’re playing these shows, but I think for her it also sounds so different to hear a [rock] band. To her it’s like the freshest thing that she knows.”
“People have been saying the record business is disappearing for 10 years, and I suppose in terms of record sales it is,” Cester says. “But the hunger to see live music has never gone away – and it probably never will.”
• Bruce Springsteen’s tour, supported by Jet, continues through February in Australia and New Zealand
