Jess Ribeiro Hung Out In Frenzal Rhomb's Van When She Was A Teen

Jess Ribeiro approaches, wearing an adorable red satin Snoopy bomber jacket (which she goes on to explain she's had since she was nine), hair that could even be shinier than aforementioned garment and a warm smile. On how it's possible she can still fit into clothes she wore back in primary school, Ribeiro explains, "I was really tall, but this was really oversized... My dad got it for me from Hong Kong." Ribeiro pulls the back of her collar down to reveal a label upon which her name is written neatly in biro. We entertain the thought of someone stealing the jacket and trying to wear it around the country town where Ribeiro was raised. "Well, it's pretty conspicuous. Like, if someone tried to steal it — c'mon, seriously!"

She's been on a few road trips in her time and Ribeiro shares, "My uncle is, like — my family have a truck business, so they've driven for a very long time and all over Australia. I think when I was a kid I probably thought, 'Maybe I'll be the first girl truck driver,' but I only got my [driver's] licence a year-and-a-half ago, so it was mostly my bandmates who used to do all the driving. So I could just sit there and, you know, daydream out of the window. There was one occasion from Darwin to Adelaide where I got to do a bit of the driving; that ended in tears, 'cause I couldn't really drive. But I can drive now, so... [laughs]."

"I had already had a ciggie and, you know, a swig of vodka before good old Peter Clark showed up."

It was during a long drive that Ribeiro heard a song produced by Mick Harvey and she knew immediately that she just had to work with him. So what was the song? "It was actually a PJ Harvey song from Let England Shake. We were driving through the Moab Desert and, yeah! The drums sounded really cool and there was just these really atmospheric sounds and I think my friend was, like, 'Oh, yeah. Mick Harvey produced this album'. And I was like, 'Oh, imagine if we worked with this guy!'" Ribeiro admits she was "pretty confused about who Mick was... I thought he was related to PJ Harvey — it's really embarrassing," she laughs. "And it turns out that actually I had been teaching Mick's son on and off for a couple of years! So when Mick worked out the link, he sent me an email, apologising, 'Oh, I hope my son's class hasn't been too horrible for you!'" She didn't join the dots in the classroom at the time, saying, "I only ever knew everyone's first name, because I was a relief teacher."

And Harvey, Jr isn't the only celebrity spawn Ribeiro has ticked off on the roll over the years, either. "A lot of the children that I work with, their parents are musicians. I remember the first time I met Tim Rogers and we were going to do something on RocKwiz together, and [I] met him at a festival and he was kind of, you know, 'G'day, how you doing?' Not really interested. Then when I sent him an email and I said, 'Oh, you know, I teach your daughter at school,' he picked up the phone and was like, 'Whoa, I'm coming over!' And he wanted to talk about his daughter. It's like, people trusted me a little bit more 'cause I know their kids."

When Ribeiro was a teenager, she was lucky enough to meet Frenzal Rhomb after a show they performed in her home town of Armidale, NSW. Something about drinking vodka and orange... "In their white van!" Ribeiro jumps in. "That was, like, so naughty. And it was at the Cathedral Hall, which was, like, our primary school Catholic hall where we would have discos. So, as a teenager, going there and seeing a band from out of town was pretty exciting." Ribeiro establishes that the gig was "on a weeknight" and "must have been some kind of all-ages event that didn't go very late because when it finished it was still daylight". "It was probably daylight saving. And my mum sent the neighbour down to tell me to come home and I was so embarrassed." She's relieved that the band was not present when her neighbour rocked up to break up the party. "I had already had a ciggie and, you know, a swig of vodka before good old Peter Clark showed up," she chuckles.

"With Hurry Back To Love, let's not say it was about an argument anymore, let's just erase that. It's about coming back to love as a community."

On another occasion, Ribeiro saw Frenzal in Newtown, Sydney. "I asked Jay [Whalley] for a cigarette — I must have been 18 or something. He gave me his last Peter Stuyvesant cigarette and I remember I kept that, that cigarette packet, and I put it in a photo album." So has Ribeiro had an opportunity to discuss these memories with the band now that she's all grown up? "Yeah, I've spoken to Lindsay [McDougall] about it," she confirms. "I don't think I've ever seen Jay since I was 18, but, uh, Lindsay because he was, you know, The Doctor at triple j." When asked whether McDougall remembered the occasion, Ribeiro replies, "Absolutely, because I think they got into big trouble afterwards. You know, they trashed a hotel room and they videotaped it and, like, they did all this silly stuff so they had to come back to go to court and things like that.

"I wanted to go with them to the hotel but, you know, I would have been like, I don't know, 13, 14 or something." Had Ribeiro wound up in Frenzal Rhomb's rock'n'roll home movie, she reckons "it would've been great". "Thirteen-year-old girl in a hotel room with this raucous, you know, bunch of young boys trashing a room. It's very '90s," she laughs. The bloody internet has taken the fun out of everything, eh? "I don’t do things like that, no," Ribeiro agrees, "Yes. Maybe that was, like, the end of — do you think people still behave like that?"

Dave Faulkner of Hoodoo Gurus recently interviewed Ribeiro and she marvels, "I said to him, 'I should be interviewing you about your life and your songwriting'." Faulkner asked Ribeiro about her song Hurry Back To Love, the inspiration for which (it has already been widely reported) was a disagreement she had with her boyfriend over the phone. "I kind of just said that because someone wanted me to say something about the song," she laments. We discuss how far, and quickly, an offhand comment can travel these days. "You put it in a sentence and then you see it and, ugh," she bemoans. "I feel terrible about it." So let's set it straight, shall we? "Set it straight!" Ribeiro encourages. Ribeiro and her boyfriend are still very much together.

Lyrics shouldn't be taken too literally, Ribeiro believes. "I read something that Paul Kelly said: why should you have to explain what your song's about? If it's good enough to stand on its own then, you know, who cares? Leave it up to the listener. So with Hurry Back To Love, let's not say it was about an argument anymore, let's just erase that. It's about coming back to love as a community.

"We're too much in our heads now," she continues. "I said to Dave: 'My next project I want to just make quick, dumb puns; you know, just music that people can move to and they're not thinking about the lyrics too much'. I think that with the Kill It Yourself song, someone put, like, maybe an animal activist post up. I thought, 'Oh, no! I think you've missed the point.' Like, it's not necessarily literal."