It was on the front verandah of his mum and dad's suburban Newcastle home that Grant Walmsley wrote the hit song Better.
"I wrote it in five minutes with my dad's old guitar. That was three or four years before it came out as a single. I would have been 17 or 18," Walmsley told the Newcastle Herald in an interview to mark the track's 30-year anniversary.
The Screaming Jets song became a rock anthem for Newcastle and beyond, peaking at number four on the ARIA singles chart. The track was released on March 1, 1991, ahead of the band's debut album All for One the following month. The album, recorded at the iconic Paradise Studios in Woolloomooloo, peaked at number two on the ARIA chart.
"It might have been my 21st birthday - it was around that time - I remember getting a phone call from our manager. He said Better's just gone top five," said Walmsley, who played lead guitar in the band and wrote the music and lyrics on Better.
"The first time we ever played it was at The Cambridge Hotel [in Newcastle West] on a Wednesday night. I just remember half the crowd coming backstage, saying 'What's that new song? That's a cracker'."
The song was making waves at gigs in Sydney, too.
"There'd always be famous musicians or record company people at gigs. They'd say, 'that's the song'. It was instant," he said.
"It's funny, it was one of the songs that took five minutes to write and five minutes to put together and it really never changed. We just recorded it and away we went."
The lives of the band members changed forever.
"That single took us from playing to about 10 people in Sydney to selling out the Hordern Pavilion," Walmsley said.
"Sometimes we were accused of being an overnight sensation, but they didn't count the 700 shows we'd done prior to that. We'd had six or seven years of working hard to get somewhere. We'd been doing Monday nights in a pub in Crows Nest or the Cross."
In Newcastle, the band's momentum had been growing.
"We filled every venue we played in Newcastle. You could feel this groundswell. It was a force."
Nonetheless, the band knew they had to move to Sydney or Melbourne.
"We moved to Sydney and said, 'We're gonna do this and take on the world'. It was like special forces on a mission and no one could stop us or get between us. That album was five guys that were very tight," he said.
The inspiration behind Better related to a mate of Walmsley's.
The iconic opening lyrics went like this: "Still didn't know what happened when you knocked upon my door".
"It was about a really good mate of mine who turned up at my door. He'd been hard done by and harshly judged."
The lyrics: "That you know, and I know better" referred to his mate being unfairly portrayed, along with the start of the chorus: "Now you can see the reason why not everyone's the same. And you don't have to please them, or try hard to save your name".
"It was a snapshot of how judgmental and bitchy people can be without any knowledge of the facts or context," Walmsley said.
The chorus continued: "They said you'd never get anywhere, Well they don't care and it's just not fair, that you know, and I know better."
This concept became a metaphor for the band.
"I can't tell you how many times I was told personally by people that 'you'll never get anywhere'. I heard it just about every day. It really fired us up as a band," he said.
"It was literal in the sense people said you'd never get anywhere."
The band adopted a never-say-die attitude and had "the Newcastle spirit of don't put us down or we'll f***ing show you".
"If you want to judge us and say we're just another band from Newcastle, we'd show them better.
"In Sydney we were treated like country cousins. We were hillbillies from Newcastle back then. We were treated like that by most bands and most people in the industry in Sydney."
Proud Novocastrians
Walmsley said both his grandfathers worked at BHP.
"Our band was as Newcastle as you could ever get. We were very proud Novocastrians. We had a serious work ethic. It didn't matter what was going on in the rock'n'roll world. If we had a 9am lobby call, the band was in the lobby at 9am.
"We were working class and we worked hard. We were a well-oiled machine, a champion team that had magic about us. If you've got that magic at any time in your life, hold onto it. It's as rare as the rarest diamond."
Music journalists who praised the likes of Guns N' Roses were now touting the Screaming Jets as the next big thing.
"We were never heavy metal fans. We were absolutely blues rock and rock'n'roll. We were definitely more Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and, from an Australian perspective, Cold Chisel," Walmsley said.
"Paul and I were serious songwriters. We were not into the flair and the facade of it all," he said, referring to the band's bass player Paul Woseen.
"But we weren't so far down the road of being like AC/DC with the black shirts. There was a show to it, but it wasn't metal. At the time metal was Motley Crue and Bon Jovi. We definitely didn't come out of that field."
The other band members on that first album were charismatic vocalist Dave Gleeson, guitarist Richard Lara and drummer Brad Heaney.
Walmsley and Gleeson, who co-founded the band, met at St Francis Xavier's College, Hamilton in the 1980s. It's no secret that the pair had a dispute in 2006 that led to a legal settlement.
"Part of the magic of that first album was that Paul, Dave and I had been together for quite a while. Then we got Richie Lara on second guitar. We had been a one-guitar band. But I was into the Stones and I loved two guitars working together," Walmsley said.
"Midnight Oil had the best double guitar I'd heard. You couldn't miss AC/DC because I grew up with that. Two guitars seemed like a very Australian rock thing. That was the lineage we followed.
"So Richie and I played really well together. We created a guitar sound that was really unique and very involved. The nuances of it were not accidental. They took years to put together."
A few years ago, the two guitarists played together for the first time in years.
"We both had to stop, the hair was standing up on our arms," Walmsley said.
"We hadn't heard those sounds since the last time we played together. We didn't have to practice, we just knew what to play. You can't put a value on that kind of connection."
In those early years, the whole band collaborated.
"Paul and I wrote a lot of the songs but the other guys contributed too. Brad Heaney at the time was one of the greatest drummers in the world. That first four years of the band - the first two albums - was a magical time," Walmsley said.
The band rose from Newcastle to national acclaim and the international stage.
"When we went through Europe and America, the first shows we played were with Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam and all those bands," Walmsley said.
"They were starting to be big and you could feel the Seattle thing going. When [Nirvana's] Smells Like Teen Spirit came, it went through the world like a tsunami and changed everything. Then grunge took over and heavy metal was cast away for 15 years and no longer cool. We didn't really fit into either grunge or metal, which I loved because we were a unique Australian band.
"All the Australian bands from INXS to Midnight Oil to Hoodoo Gurus to Cold Chisel - they were unique and didn't sound like anyone else. I think we had a bit of that about us, too."
Asked about the feeling of playing live in front of big crowds, Walmsley said: "Man, when you play every day it's a bit like a sportsman at the height of their career. You get in this zone."
"Our attitude was to give everything we had and just take over. As a live presence, it was like a hurricane every time we walked on stage. The energy was insane. We were completely invested in every song and every gig. There was a lot of personal things going on in people's lives. It was as dangerous as rock'n' roll is supposed to be. You just didn't know what was going to happen each night, but the energy was so fierce that whatever happened it was going to be monumental, whether it was someone falling off a speaker or the stage or collapsing, or there was going to be a riot."
Not long ago, Walmsley heard a Screaming Jets song on the radio in the car.
"It was like, I remember that guitar and the amp I used and I remember playing it. It just took me straight back 30 years. You go wow, I'm really glad that art was captured."
Years ago, someone told Walmsley they pulled up next to Andrew Johns listening to Better cranked up in a car. "If that doesn't personify Newcastle, I don't know what does," he said.
