Interview: Jet drummer Chris Cester
Aussie rockers Jet recently released their second album, which suffers a bit from the dreaded sophomore slump. It has none of the biting rebelliousness of Cold Hard Bitch or Are You Gonna Be My Girl. Have they gone soft? We found out recently from drummer Chris Cester.
CC: We have written a lot of ballads, but that's because we live on a bus, man. It's not like you can set up the drums and the amps in the tour bus and get a rock'n'roll album happening.
The album hasn’t been selling as well as their first, Get Born, but then again it hasn’t benefited from the immense publicity Are You Gonna Be My Girl received at the time in iTunes commercials. Cester explains:
CC: That was a huge thing for the band. It's got nothing to do with money, it's about getting a chance to make another record. The bands who don't like to do that sort of thing, good on them, man, it's a good fight to fight. But we're in the fight for the long haul, we want to make lots of records and unfortunately the way it works now on a major label is if you don't sell enough on your first one they throw you off.
They were well on their way to getting dropped before the commercial rescued them. Nobody knew who they were, let alone buy their record, and they were playing in near-empty clubs. Luckily, they had drugs to rely on. (Note to kids: drugs are bad.)
CC: It was hard. We dealt with it by nearly drinking ourselves to death and taking large amounts of speed and cocaine and whatever else we could get our hands on. It nearly broke the band up, too. We were trying to live up some kind of cliché, we wore ourselves out really quickly.
CC: When our band started, we had a simple plan: just to bring it back to basics. We’d had enough of bands like Creed and Nickelback, as well as mindless and mind-numbing techno music, which was taking over everything at the time. We're not a garage rock band, we're a rock'n'roll band. What is a garage rock band? We don't even have a garage.
At this point, Stereo Warning decided to ask the really important questions: what’s up with the hip haircuts and cool denim jackets?
CC: You just look in the mirror and you put a shirt on and you make sure you look good when you go outside, it's not very deliberate. It's just the way we like to look. It's inspired a lot from the bands in the 70's, because to be honest I don't think there's been a better decade in music.
Come what may, Chris says he’s in it for the long haul in the U.S.. With the cash from Jet’s first record he bought himself a condo in California and does not shy away from professing his love for his adoptive country.
CC: I’m gonna live here, I got an apartment in West Hollywood. I prefer America because it's such a big country. It's so much more comfortable here. The buses are huge, the roads are big, and it’s easy to get around. They like everything big here. My breakfast nearly killed me yesterday.
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