Chris Cester On "Relearning How Lo Live" After Jet

Recalling the phone call he received from his manager asking whether he'd be up for re-forming Jet to support The Boss during his upcoming Australian tour, drummer Chris Cester chuckles, "I was like, 'Yeah, but has anyone asked Nic [Cester, frontman] yet?'... [He] told us that he wanted to stop doing it six years ago, so I was surprised that he had agreed and obviously really excited that he had." Cester then confesses, "For the longest time I was really confused as to why Nic didn't wanna do, or take up, any of the other offers we've been getting over the years, and then finally I guess I just sort of gave up thinking that it would ever happen. And then suddenly here it is!"

When told this scribe had lost all hope of a Jet reunion given that so many years had passed, Cester admits, "I had lost all hope. It's funny… I mean, I just wasn't even thinking about it, you know; if enough time - six years - go[es] by, you sort of go on to your other projects… It's like when you're trying to find a girlfriend, you can never find one and then the second you stop...

"Can you give me one second, please?" Cester addresses his six-year-old daughter: "I'll play with you after I get off the phone, okay?" Then he explains: "My daughter doesn't know what interviews are... She's never even seen me play." So will Cester bring his daughter on The Boss tour? "You know what? I'm gonna bring her, because I don't know if we're gonna do more shows or not so it could be, like, the last opportunity that she has to see, you know, what I did with my 20s."

"You know what? I'm gonna bring [my daughter on tour], because I don't know if we're gonna do more shows or not so it could be, like, the last opportunity that she has to see, you know, what I did with my 20s."

We can't help but wonder how hard it was for Cester to adjust to life after Jet. "It was really hard," Cester allows. "It put a big strain on my marriage, to be honest, because it's really difficult when it just switches off, you know? And, look, the truth is… the last six years have been, creatively, probably my best years; I'm really excited about the new project [Mystic Knights Of Amnesia], so I always filled that part of me — the writing part — but obviously the part that I've missed — and the part I've been dying to get back to — is the live thing. Because it's true what they say about it being like a drug and to go from touring pretty much ten years straight to suddenly just being at home all the time; I almost had to relearn how to live my life."

On whether Jet realised they had a hit on their hands with Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Cester shares, "I think we all had a pretty good idea that Are You Gonna Be My Girl was special and that we were gonna have something with it." Are You Gonna Be My Girl was the first song to be used in an iPod commercial and its corresponding album Get Born propelled Jet to international superstardom, which saw Cester relocating to LA. "Once we came out here to make Get Born I basically never left," he tells. "We kind of just went on tour for ten years and then when the music stopped I was still here."

In 2004, Jet were part of The Aussie Invasion tour of the US and Canada, together with The Vines and The Living End, about which Cester recalls, "That was one of the most fun tours, I guess, because we were just hanging out with our mates... It's always a little strange at first, you know, when you're sorta just feeling each other out and working out where everyone's ego slots into the whole equation," he laughs. "It was definitely like that when we did the Oasis tour with Kasabian and there was definitely a little bit of hesitation there in the beginning." Cester adds that tensions disperse after a week or so and then the bands "all support each other and watch each other's shows every night". A tour such as this "gets really competitive", according to Cester, who remembers, "It was really hard to go on after The Living End who had been, you know, performing and smashing it for so long. And they're such great musicians and performers and stuff, and we were kinda new at the game at that time as well. So it was really good, it was important, actually; we needed that motivation."

On The Vines' performances during this tour, Cester observes, "They were havin', like, a hard time of it I think sometimes; you know, Craig [Nicholls is] an interesting guy... Sometimes he would go on stage during the Aussie Invasion tour and he would be absolutely blinding and he would be brilliant and he would be hitting everything and playing everything great. And then the next night, he would literally be standing there with his fingers in his ears and like, you know, shouting at the crowd," he laughs. We discuss the alluring sense of rock'n'roll danger Nicholls brings to the stage - a sense that everything could implode in an instant - and Cester considers, "I think we all miss Craig, he definitely brought something exciting back into it and, if you sorta think about the rock bands that are around right now, it's hard to think of someone who could give you that… surprise." When told The Vines recently performed some shows in Australia, Cester enthuses, "I hope they're playing shows when I'm over there… Maybe if we do a headline show we could maybe do it with 'em."    

Also in 2004, while Jet were on the relentless international touring conveyor belt at the height of their fame, the Cester brothers lost their father to cancer. Reflecting on this difficult time, Cester reveals, "It was a challenge, for sure. I think we just sort of turned the tap off for a minute and actually it was something that Nic and I — I would say we probably disagreed over this, you know? But I think we were scheduled to play Glastonbury maybe a couple of weeks after he died and I sort of wanted to do it. I didn't really know what other mode to be in and I figured that Dad would probably have wanted us to keep doing it, since that was kinda what he was saying to us in his final days, like, you know, he was always telling us not to come home and to stay out on tour and not to worry about him and all that kinda stuff. But we cancelled it and, yeah! To be honest with you maybe it would've been better to wait a while to get back into the writing and stuff like that, but we just sorta dove back in there and, you know, I think it's just like anything: when you don't face a problem, it comes out in one way or another and I think that's ultimately what happened to us. You know, we just sorta kept goin' and swept it under the rug in a way… I think we didn't really have much choice at the time but to sorta keep goin'."

Were they worried that if they took some time off another band would fill their shoes? "Yeah," Cester laughs. "It's good to keep things going. We weren't a very introspective band, you know what I mean? So I can't say that, like, we would've been sat around writing about it. We were more about an atmosphere or a party — just a general feeling — rather than being sort of introspective in that kind of way… It was almost like not looking at it, in a way, and sort of pretending it wasn't there. And I guess at the time, you know, when you're just on tour every day and you just drink until you pass out, ha ha, you don't really know what you're doin'."

The discussion turns to how "some band's fans just want them to do the same thing over and over again," and Cester ponders "I think people probably expected or wanted us to just keep puttin' songs out like Are You Gonna Be My Girl or Cold Hard Bitch and I know that that sort of became a little bit of a strain for Nic. And that's one of the reasons why he wanted to stop doing it was because he felt like he'd just been sort of put into a corner." When asked whether it was exhausting to constantly turn on the rockstar attitude that goes with the style of music Jet play, Cester chuckles, "Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I dunno how exhausting it can be to be travelling around the world… It is what everyone wants and, you know, we were lucky to live that fantasy."