Jet

It's been a rollercoaster ride, being Jet. Feted as the Next Big Thing when their Dirty Sweet EP appeared in 2002, it didn't take long for critical opinion to turn against them. By the time they were wowing audiences in the US and Europe as one of the most successful Australian bands in recent years, writers were dismissing them as retro graverobbers and making snide comparisons between 'Are You Gonna Be My Girl?' and Iggy Pop's 'Lust for Life'. (A charge, incidentally, that the Strokes somehow sidestepped for 'Last Nite' and the Jam dodged for 'Town Called Malice' – and all four artists avoided despite taking their bass-drum interplay from The Supremes' 'You Can't Hurry Love'.)

Jet's chart-topping 2003 debut album Get Born was followed by the lacklustre Shine On the following year, during which the band suffered a perfect storm of second album syndrome, record company meddling and personal tragedy with the death of John Cester, father to Jet's founding brothers Nic and Chris (frontman/guitarist and drummer, respectively).

"Shine On just happened to be a particularly unhappy period in our lives," sighs lead guitarist Cameron Muncey. "Because we were in weak personal state, we allowed the producer [Dave Sardy] the time to overcook things."

"There was too much of a temptation to tweak things to make them perfect," Nic adds.

"And Sardy had just been working with Oasis and there was too much crossover," Muncey growls. "Some sounds were exactly the fucking same; same studio, same equipment. I don't think that helped things either."

The resultant touring schedule took its toll too. "The last tour we did in the States was really dark and horrible," Muncey explains. "We played places like northern Florida and southern Georgia. In some ways it was cool but in other ways it was bad. We couldn't continue after that anymore. That was the first step in realising we needed to change shit up. We started breaking it down; instead of having that big fanfare and bullshit we decided we should get together and just play music and keep it small; not invite anyone else and get to know each other again. Be friends again first and then do the record."

After announcing that they were taking some time off – which was interpreted by many journalists, not unreasonably, as a veiled announcement of a split – the members went their separate ways. The first suggestion that rumours of Jet's death may have been exaggerated was when they backed Iggy Pop on a cover of Johnny O'Keefe's 'Wild One' (which Pop had covered himself in 1986, thereby giving Rage its theme music for the next 20 years). And it's that playfulness that lead to album number three, Shaka Rock, where the band seemingly rediscovered an important truth: playing rock'n'roll is actually pretty damn fun.

"You're right. I mean, we're a fun band," Muncey shrugs. "Now we're just back to being normal. First of all we were excited again, and so we started to write exciting music."

The album was also one that, first and foremost, sounds made to play live. "Oh yeah," Cester nods. "'She's a Genius' is pretty fun to play."

"And 'Goodbye Hollywood' is really fun to sing," Cester enthuses. "I enjoyed ripping into that one. And I really wanted the chorus in ‘Seventeen' to sound like Boston's 'More than a Feeling': that is monumental power in that chorus," he laughs. "I think it's cooler and more fun to have strange goals and strange ideas about where to take things. It should be unexpected.'"

"In the past, one song was very genre- and era-specific," Muncey adds. "In one song now we can go from 1964 to 1983. We really had fun with going to some really unexpected places rather than following our formulaic past from Get Born."

Which might explain Jet's oddest song yet: the spacey dub of 'Beat on Repeat', which features Chris Cester doing some, ahem, "toasting" in the thickest suburban Melbourne accent imaginable.

"We hope our Australian listeners will see that Chris sounds very Australian and not British, because Americans will think, ‘You put on a British accent!'" Muncey laughs. "My favourite part is when the song hits its last movement, and Chris goes [puts on an Australian accent thick enough to saw in half] 'on and on and on forever'. Oh, I got such a kick out of that."

Cester nods. "We were all pissing ourselves laughing."

Shaka Rock is out now through Horrorshow/EMI, and Jet play at Homebake at the Domain on Sat 5 Dec.

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