Almost Drowning & A Terrifying Filming Experience: Grenadiers’ Jesse Coulter Plays 'Two Truths & A Lie'

I first met Jesse and the Grenadiers gang at BIGSOUND in 2015 after I interviewed them that year, then later bumped into them at the afterparty where we talked about… books? It was 4am, who knows. But Jesse was real interesting to talk to and one of those people that seemed knowledgeable about everything. A good storyteller! A perfect Two Truths & A Lie victim, she muttered to herself as she rubbed her hands gleefully.

Anyway, so Grenadiers are one of Australia’s rarer punk rock acts – not cruisy surf punk or cheeky skate punk, but balls-to-the-walls punk rock with a distinct Australiana edge. It’s good shit – makes you want to crack a cold beer (and I don’t even drink beer).

Last November, they released their third album Find Something You Love And Let It Kill You and now, here we are. Frontman Jesse Coulter dug deep to talk about his unexplained fear of bodies of water, a rather close call with fire and in a very literal exploration of this column’s lie component… being a great white liar.

Truth

Jesse: One thing, that I’ve never really told anyone and I don’t know why it’s coming to my mind right now, but I’m kind of terrified of water, and specifically the ocean. And I have no fucking idea why really, I was just thinking about it just then. I think it goes back to a couple of things: one is that when I was about three or four, I almost drowned and it’s one of my earliest memories. It was in a swimming pool. And one of my parents’ friends saved me. I’d wandered off unaccompanied and didn’t have my floaties on and yeah, got in the pool and it wasn’t a good time, but yeah got dragged out of there. And then I was thinking about another time I was at the beach with a friend of mine, and I was probably eight or nine, and he put a jellyfish down my pants!

Uppy: WHAT.

J: And that was a very unpleasant experience.

U: That’s fucked.

J: Yeah, it freaked the shit out of me.

U: Oh man, that’s rude.

J: But yeah, I don’t know if those things are to blame, or if I just have some other weird like… cognitive misalignment that makes me really scared of water. Like, it’s a weird thing because I love the beach, and I’ll still go swimming and stuff, but every now and again when I’m out in the water, I’ll have a total freak-out. And I was in Hawaii recently and we went to this famous snorkeling bay and I just couldn’t, like, keep my head under the water for more than like 10 seconds at a time without like, freaking out. I had to get out. I just couldn’t do the whole thing. I think it’s the idea that there’s this body of water – like we know less about the ocean than we do about outer space in some ways. The depths of the ocean, you know. The concept of this intense, huge, black body of substance that is FILLED with living creatures, some of which can kill you, and many of which are still undiscovered… freaks the fuckin’ shit out of me!

U: I 100% have the same thing actually, it’s definitely the huge-body-of-water thing, but I have friends who’ve been to like the Greek Islands and Croatia and they do like the sailing shit, and they’ll stop the boat somewhere and jump off, and I’m like, fuck, I can’t do that. The fact that my feet are floating in… god knows HOW deep water, nup. Can’t do it.

J: Yeahhh. Well, I did that on the Great Barrier Reef and I didn’t have too much problem with it that time where it was out in deep water. But this recent snorkeling trip in real shallow water, I had reaaal trouble with. I think it was ‘cause like… I couldn’t hack the thought of putting my feet on the ground. Because A) you’re not supposed to because you can damage the coral, and B) I was really scared I was gonna step on like, some sort of exotic undiscovered crab that would sever my toes or something, I dunno.

U: Or another jellyfish maybe?

J: [laughs] Probably.

U: But yeah, I totally agree and toootally understand where you’re coming from with that one.

Truth

J: I guess the other one – and this kind of makes sense going from water to fire – but this is a story about the band. We’ve got a song from our album Summer, when we did that film clip for the song Summer. We ended up shooting the film clip twice because the first time that we attempted it, it ended badly. Essentially, it was like a 45 degree day, it was scorchingly hot. The film clip revolves around the concept of… we’re sort of sitting in the foreground looking bored, singing the song, while everyone has summer fun around us. One of the things that was happening in the background was that my friend Drew was cooking a barbeque in the background. And he was ACTUALLY doing this, because we thought, eh, why not? We’ll just have a real barbeque going and then everyone can eat sausages afterwards. Something to do with a faulty O-ring perhaps? But whatever it was, the gas bottle from the barbeque just started spewing out flames from the top.

U: Uh oh…

J: These like two metre high flames spewing out of the gas bottle. Drew’s first reaction was to try and close the tap with his foot? And in doing so, kicked over the gas bottle, and because of the force of the fire expelling the gas, the gas bottle started to spin around in circles. And this is on dry grass on a 45 degree day.

U: Shiiiit.

J: Sooo basically within, like, 30 seconds - and this is just being done at a friend’s house who was just renting, by the way – his whole back patio and lawn and shed had gone up in flames.

U: Chaos!

J: Yeah, it was fucking mental. And like… one of our friends whose house it was, was in the shower. We had to like run in and pull him out of the shower, our bass player Phil did that, and he didn’t believe him? Phil’s like, ‘Adam, you gotta get out of the shower, your house is on fire!’ and he’s like ‘FUCK OFFFFF!’

U: Oh my godddd.

J: So we got him out eventually and funnily enough, there were no injuries EXCEPT FOR burns on one person. And those burns weren’t from fire, they were from being barefoot and he couldn’t get past the flames to exit by the front door, so he ran out the back and jumped the fence, and the concrete out the back was just baking in the 45 degree sun all day. So he just got secondary burns on the bottom of his feet just from how hot the concrete was.

U: Faaaaaa…

J: Apart from that, nobody was hurt. It was a fucking terrifying experience. And it was with no small degree of hesitation that we reshot that film clip. And the second time, the barbeque was merely acted. [laughs]

U: So how did you put it out and everything?! Did you have extinguishers?

J: Firies came! Two firetrucks came and they took the bloody firehose into the backyard and it was the full deal. There were a couple of eskies full of beers and they full melted into a puddle of plastic, which these exploded beer cans melted into this… morass of melted plastic.

U: WOW.

J: It was pretty nuts.

U: Are you a bit hesitant hanging out fires and fire pits and stuff now?

J: Nah, not at all. I have no problem with fire. Because I’m a redhead.

U: My fear with fire in that instance would be if you had pets inside, like having to run in and get them. That scares me.

J: Yeah, we did have a couple of dogs there actually. The guy whose feet were burnt, they were his, and he got rid of them. He took them out the back and chucked them over the fence.

U: Man, I’m so glad everything turned out okay because it could’ve been SO bad. So much worse.

J: It was one of those life moments where… you step outside your body and it doesn’t feel real. You’re looking at everything and it just feels like… you’re looking through someone else’s eyes. Or a recording of something that happens to someone else or you’re recording a movie. It doesn’t feel right or real. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling.

U: And was everything still filming by the way?

J: I wish we’d got more of it on film but there’s like a brief second of footage where you can see the gas bottle start to flame up and a couple of people start to run away, but it stops because the guy who was filming, he was filming on a rented $20,000 camera that he didn’t own. So his first instinct was to take the camera and get the fuck out. So we didn’t capture much of it on film unfortunately, because if we could’ve kept rolling and had THAT be the film clip, that would’ve been fucking cool!

U: That would’ve been mental! Sheer panic on everyone’s faces.

J: It might’ve been worth the damage bill we had to pay for our mate’s backyard. What was a simple and cheap concept for a film clip, quickly turned into the most expensive film clip we’ve ever made.

Lie

J: What I was gonna say for this, I don’t think I am any more, but as a kid, I was a CHRONIC white liar. I would never tell any lie that was important, or could really hurt someone, or about anything that mattered, really. But I just had this chronic knack for lying about little things all the time, exaggerating, making things up. I had to have a justification or a story behind everything? I couldn’t just… let something be. Like, I walk a little bit weirdly. My feet stick out at almost right angles and I can almost put my feet at a 90 degree angle, which not a lot of people can do. It’s just a weird thing about how my legs are built. There’s no reason behind that, but I remember telling people when I was kid that it was because I’d stepped on broken glass when I was young? Or that like, I’d broken my ankle in some weird kind of accident? I would tell everyone different stories so that if ever anyone asked me why I walked funny, I couldn’t just tell them… that’s just how I walked! And like… I remember my friend was doing martial arts and he was doing karate and he was talking to another friend who was doing taekwondo, and I remember making up a martial art and said I was doing it? Like some strange martial art that no one else knew about!

U: Too funny. And how old were you around these times?

J: Oh, I’m talking about up until I was like 10 or 12. Once I became a teenager I guess, that proclivity left me a little bit. And yeah, I would never tell anyone a lie that would really hurt anyone. Although I DO recall once, I said a naughty word and someone dobbed me in, one of my sisters, and my mum was like, ‘did you say this?!’ and I was like, ‘nah, Tessa said it.’ And she protested loudly and I was like, such a convincing white liar to the extent that… I had said this word, she had done nothing wrong but SHE was the one that got her mouth washed out with soap.

U: Jesus!

J: She never forgave me for that!

U: Were you older or anything?

J: Yeah, I’m older than them. By three years. I dunno! I don’t wanna paint myself as an image of this compulsive liar because I’m not, at all, I’d never lie about anything important. BUT WHEN I WAS A KID… yeah, I just couldn’t let anything exist without some weird back story. I couldn’t just let simple things be simple things. They always had to be complicated and my imagination would always run away from me.

U: Maybe we can pin it down to that – you had a crazy imagination and wanted your story to be way crazier! So how old are your sisters, you said they’re three years younger and you have two? Are they twins?

J: Yeah! They’re twins. I guess it’s weird when I only give one age but say ‘sisters’ plural but yeah, they’re twins.

U: Did you piss off the other one, not Tessa, in any other similar way?

J: Oh, I’m sure I did. I don’t recall a specific incident like the mouth-washed-out-with-soap story, that one just popped up as I was talking about my weird compulsive lying as a young child.

U: Do you remember what the naughty word was now?

J: Oh! Who knows. The F word… or the S word… something very prosaic by today’s standards.

U: Oh no! Not the S word!

If you’re a musician and have some stories to share and some secrets to tell – be it hilarious or heartbreaking, humiliating or honourable – send us an email at twotruthscolumn@gmail.com.

We might be telling the whole world about the time you accidentally killed your brother’s pet snake and replaced it without anyone knowing in no time.