Chris Cester: ‘You Become Somewhat Of A Cliche’

With Jet disbanded, Chris Cester has entered the next phase of his musical career – and, guess what, he still doesn’t care what you think. Words by CAILTIN WELSH.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Not that you were worried about what Chris Cester thinks of you, but he’s also not worried about what you think of him. “Oh, I don’t give a shit about that,” he laughs, when I point out that M+N isn’t exactly the Jet Superfans Clubhouse. “I’ve sold out Madison Square Garden. Those shitheads can say whatever they like. And you can put that in your article if you want … Whatever man. Fuck, Barack Obama hasn’t heard their fucking song. So they can kiss my arse.”

Cester’s not a Gallagheresque cockhead, despite how that comment, made at the tail-end of this interview, sounds. He’s friendly and candid and says these things with the matter-of-factness of a man who made peace with outrageous success a long time ago. Cester may have been in one of the biggest Australian rock bands in recent memory, but with the announcement last month that Jet – who had been lying low since pretty-OK third album Shaka Rock – were calling it quits, he’s concentrating solely on moody new project DAMNDOGS, starting (almost) from scratch.

Cester, who manned the drums in Jet and left frontman duties to brother Nic, is now at the helm. The band have only released a five song EP, Strange Behaviour, but on the strength of those tracks, they were able to pack out Oxford Art Factory when they returned to test the waters last winter. Industry types and fans of both Cester’s projects flooded out of that gig, nodding sagely as others proclaimed with varying degrees of relief, disappointment, facetiousness, faint praise, “Well, it’s nothing like Jet.”

Cester is no dummy. He’s well aware that it’s the association with Jet that gets him more interest than other electro-rock acts making noises around Laurel Canyon studios. He’s resigned to the inevitable, incorrect prefix, “Jet side project”, as well. And while this is a new chapter for him, he can’t seem to help highlighting the contrasts between his current situation and his old one. After all, the cord has only just been cut.

‘It’s been a long time coming’

How are you?
I’m good. Good thanks, yeah. Pretty good. Actually, great – just started doing this new session last Friday, and we’ve been up in Laurel Canyon working at my friend Jason’s studio. And yeah, it’s all pretty exciting.

And are you feeling good about it?
Yeah, feeling great. Mark Wilson, who was in the band – y’know, Jet, as well – he’s not in the band anymore, so that’s been an interesting kinda little dynamic change, where mainly Louis [Macklin] and I are in the studio every day. And it’s kinda good. Less people, less confusion, and more ideas are coming through quicker, and things happen a lot faster. So it’s been a great couple of weeks.

Was everything all right with Mark? Did you guys have a war [of words] or something?
No, no, no battles. Y’know, I’ve never really spoken to him much about why we’ve parted ways. But I just imagine that in the wake of Jet breaking up that it’s probably just a case of cancelling that and going our separate ways, and finding our own paths, and working out what we want to do next.

Obviously Jet is the big news at the moment. Why now? Did anything happen, or had you just been building up to it?
Well, really, I think the band’s been slowly disintegrating and slowly breaking up since the Shine On sessions in 2005 or 2006. We just never really talked about it. I dunno. We never really wanted to drum up any kind of bullshit between us. And we always sort of fell to talking about things in the press, which is ridiculous because we should be able to sort out our own problems. But, god, it was so long ago when all the trouble started. But really, [singer] Nic [Cester’s] the one who is mainly responsible for pulling the pin officially. I think the rest of us were happy to go on and keep making records in the hope that things would get better between all of us. And like I said things have been strained between us for years now, and we just soldiered on because we didn’t know any better. And we’re all still getting a lot out of the music, at least in the studio. But I think touring just became harder and harder, and eventually just caught up with us. So, yeah, it’s been a long time coming.

What was happening? Was it arguing about the music, or more about personal tension?
More personal tension than anything else. But I’d say that if you spoke to Nic, he might have a completely different answer – he might tell you that he wasn’t happy with the way the music was going, and I’d have to leave that for him to answer. But I would say that, predominantly, it was just personal things. And long-standing arguments that never got resolved. Really personal stuff, and between all of us at one point or another. I guess when you’re shouting at each other in airports while your bags are coming around on the carousel, it’s not as much fun as it used to be. You become somewhat of a cliche.

Well that’s what happens I guess. You start as young guys playing in Melbourne pubs and then everything just goes nuts for you. It’s got to be rough on your friendships.
I suppose, yeah. I mean, when you’re in it it’s just your life – the eye of the storm, as they say. And everything changes so quickly, you’re right about that. But when you’re in it you feel like everyone around you is changing and that you’re normal, but obviously that’s not the reality when you go from writing songs in your bedroom and then suddenly you’re making records in LA with these crazy budgets. You’ve got people falling all over you, and lots of other people shitting on you. It’s all a bit surreal.

But when you begin, all you want to do is make music and hang out with your buddies, but then there’s all this other shit that comes in to it that you never foresaw. And I definitely spent moments on tour having a moment of realisation and going, “Wow, this isn’t what I imagined it would be like to be in a famous band.” [Laughs] Everything goes haywire really quickly. But with that – and I know I’m crapping on a bit – but with everything going haywire, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s all doom. We were just talking about the breakup of the band, and I think that’s why I was getting gloomy. But that crazy stuff propels you artistically, and you really grow really quickly in that scenario, and everything is accelerated – including relationships going badly, or getting better. Everything just feels like it’s on Mach speed.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

‘Our rise was so meteoric, it was so fast’

Was there a moment, around the iPod ad maybe, that you realised that ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’ was blowing up, and that everything was going to change pretty quickly?
Uh, well, the iPod commercial just blew the band up overnight. I think Get Born had come out and we’d debuted somewhere in the 80s, and we were ready for the slog. And we had all these tours booked, and we were in America in a little minivan when that iPod opportunity came up. And we took it, and then literally in the next two weeks all of the big radio stations [in the US] … had added the song. And it literally took about 10 days after the commercial, and suddenly it was everywhere. And when the radio plays go up suddenly everyone’s buying tickets to your shows. It just went from zero to 60 in about a week once that iPod commercial came out. I don’t think we realised what was happening to us until about two years later. I dunno. From that moment forward it was all pretty blurry. We’d drink a lot, and party really hard, and we took that to all the extremes you can take it as well. So put that all up into a net and it’s all quite blurry.

You guys were one of the first acts, as far as I can remember, to be “The Band From The iPod Commercial.” After that it was kind of a huge deal to be in an iPod commercial or an iPhone one.
And people applaud it now, and it’s this super-credible thing you can do, and people think you’re great. I remember when we did it though it certainly wasn’t, and people thought it was that old ’70s idea of “selling out”. But they didn’t really pay us! It wasn’t about making money, it was about getting our music out to as many people as we could. And in America, the way it works here is that there’s 50 states, and it’s like touring 50 different countries. It was just the fastest way to get our music in to people’s minds. And yeah, you’re right, now it’s the done thing, and if you get that then you’re on your way.

Would you do it again?
An iPod commercial?

If you could back to whenever it was, and could give yourself advice…
Um. Well there’s one misconception that people have is that it was our biggest song. But that really was mostly a door-opener, and after that we had really big songs with ‘Cold Hard Bitch’ and ‘Look What You’ve Done’, and they were just as big. And with certain radio stations ‘Cold Hard Bitch’ was even bigger than ‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’. So, yeah, I would [go back].

Touring around in the back of a van for two years sounds like fun - you can definitely have fun doing that [laughs] … But even triple J, certain radio stations in Australia were being really irresponsible with the way they reported news, like we’d just made $3-million out of this record deal. But everybody with half a brain realises that it’s just a loan – and we didn’t want to be in fucking $3-million debt to anybody, so we were happy with the development. I would do it again. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Well, the flipside of that was that even as you guys were killing it, there was a pretty serious critical or media backlash starting – as if you were the first rock band to ever sound like other rock bands.
Yeah, that’s funny. I don’t know what it is – maybe our faces. We were just sitting there going, “Wait, wait – but The Strokes sound like that song…” You’re kind of going through it in your mind thinking, “Why is it us?” And I racked my brain for years trying to think of why things turned so quickly, but I think that when you compare us to those other bands that did stuff like having their songs in commercials or sounded vaguely like other bands or whatever, that our rise was so meteoric, it was so fast … For example, when I hear that Adele song now, I’m just like, “Fucking turn it off, wouldja?” Because it’s so annoying, you hear it every five seconds. It’s a great song, but people just want new things, and when it’s just being shoved in your face all day you have a natural reaction to it.

And I’m the same. To some extent I understand why people were really shitty with us, and why we experienced that backlash, because I feel the same way when things are shoved down my throat. And we were everywhere! You couldn’t open a newspaper, get in your car, couldn’t turn on your TV without hearing that fucking song. It was everywhere … It makes sense, don’t you think?

“You’ve got people falling all over you, and lots of other people shitting on you. It’s all a bit surreal.”

Of course.
And people expect you to pay your dues and all that sort of stuff. My opinion about that is that the best songs rise to the top. A song like that [‘Are You Gonna Be My Girl’], it’s a once-in-a-lifetime song. I don’t think we ever had anything that happened so quickly for us after that. But I think you’re lucky if you get one in your career, and we had a few.

It’s good that you’re philosophical about it. I mean part of it might just have been The Strokes have that sort of “New York art rock” thing to them, whereas you guys always had those big, dumb choruses.
It was. It was like that. The choruses were big, and they were like pop songs, almost. It’s not a dirty word, but you are right. And it’s funny when the people – the auteurs and the people who decide what’s cool – I mean, look at The Strokes. Is it really cool to come from a background of wealthy families, and you met at a ski resort or something in Switzerland? At a private school that only percent of the world’s population can afford? Is that cool? Well, I don’t really know, and I don’t really care. I don’t give a shit where they came from because they make great music. That’s all that matters to me.

But I think one thing that people don’t understand about this is that I think people on blogs who write shitty things about you think that it matters to you, and to the band. But the reality of that situation is that when things happen that quickly, and you have massive success like that, you don’t have time in your day to A. remember all the people who are lining up to congratulate you and slap you on the back; or B. all the people who are lining up to shit on you. There’s just not enough time. And things are just happening, every day. And you don’t really take notice of it. But obviously we did notice that there was a significant backlash against us while there wasn’t against bands who were in very, very similar situations to us. Maybe we should have acted more detached?

Or smoked in interviews more?
Yeah, exactly. And don’t celebrate your success, either. That’s a big no no. Especially in Australia.

Oh, no. Tall poppy syndrome.
Yeah.

‘The food is awful, but the silence is golden’

You guys have spent a lot of time in the States, and you are based there now. Do you feel detached from Australia a little bit?
I do when I come back there. Absolutely. When you’re away from a place for a year or two, except on tour – which isn’t real life, that’s its own little world, travelling through your country. But you do miss it, absolutely. People ask in interviews all the time, “What’s the music scene like in Australia?”, and for many years I couldn’t answer that question. I guess, personally, I just put myself in a bit of a bubble over here. I enjoyed being a little bit anonymous in Los Angeles when all the crazy, crazy success was happening – my brother couldn’t even go out without someone trying to start a fight with him in a bar, or something. That’s the bad side to it. But he would just go out and be accosted by people. So I really enjoyed being out here in the bubble, and it really helped me focus creatively, as well, and learning and honing my own songwriting craft, because I didn’t get caught in that web. Because Australia is a small country, and news does travel fast over there. But I was here, being anonymous the whole time, and learning how to write, and how to push myself.

You didn’t have the urge to be like Tim Rogers or Daniel Johns, and come back and lope around your home town just doing your thing?
No. Not really. I guess one thing that’s great about having success at an early age is that it gives you the freedom to live your life how you want to. And that’s what it was for me. It took me years to settle in. I was just over here, like I said, just hiding out here in Los Angeles. And I really enjoyed that. So I never felt that urge. And anyway, when touring started up again, if you missed the limelight it was back on again when the tour started. So it was good to be able to get away from that all the time, and not be surrounded by sycophants or people who hate you.

I can imagine that’s probably a bit more pleasant.
Yeah. Yeah it was. The food is awful. [Laughs], but the silence is golden.

But you call it home now?
Uh, yeah. I’ve been here for 10 years, you know? So I guess that kind of makes me a bit of a local. It was an accident. I didn’t plan to spend the rest of my life here, and I still don’t. I really want to come home some time soon. But one thing leads to another, and when my father died I needed that anonymous feeling to survive. That was around the Shine On times, and if you spoke to Nic he would probably say that that was the marker for when things went horribly wrong for us in our personal relationships. So I got to be away from all the crazy, crazy circus, and then when my father died … I really enjoyed not having to face how I felt about that at all. I could just be here, and just keep making music, and keep that in the background. But it all catches up with you eventually. And then I met a girl and was in a relationship for five years, and then you blink and you’ve been here for six years.

‘It sounds like space junk!’

You’ve still got your accent. It sounds like you left yesterday.
Well, that’s good. [Laughs] But that’s because I’ve always been in bands with Australians. And you are always around Australians – that’s your little bubble. So that’s why.

So you are in a band with all Australians again, aren’t you?
For the time being, yeah … It’s me and Lou Macklin, who was Jet’s touring keyboardist for a long time, and my cousin Mitch McIvor, who was never involved in Jet at all … Even with Lou being Jet’s touring keyboardist, I don’t think it’s really correct to even talk about it like that. Because when they read that, people think, “Oh, it’s like Jet.” But you’ve heard it, it’s nothing like Jet. So I’d hate to give people the wrong impression, it’s just that Louis and I write really well together, and we have a lot of the same ideas about what DAMNDOGS should be. So that’s why we work. But yes, all Australian. So my accent’s here to stay.

So what’s the new material sounding like?
Well, the stuff that we are working on right now, which are the beginnings of the record – it’s impossible to describe. Thank god. For once in my career I don’t have to link it to another band because it’s fucking impossible. It sounds like space junk! It’s so crazy. I mean, it doesn’t really live in any world. I think there’s a really great sparseness to the sound, and with DAMNDOGS it’s all about what we leave out rather than what we put in. And there’s a lot of room left in these tracks. They can be groove-based, they can be electronic, and they don’t really conform to anything. Whether that be whatever’s big right now – Cut Copy, or Empire of the Sun – it’s not electronic in that sense. It’s much more brooding, and has a lot more, I dunno, it has a lot more of a dark sort of feel than any of that stuff…

As far as bands go I hate dropping them out there. Because as soon as you do then everybody just says that you sound like them. So I’m going to be really interested to see how people label this music we’re making. Because I’m really proud to say that I don’t think it really owes a debt to any one band in particular. It’s just corralled influences, and all my favourite stuff, all of my favourite influences from my entire life that I’ve been refining as I get older and older. And boiling it down to the crystals that I love.

Well, obviously you are very wary of naming influences. Because that was always one of the issues people had with Jet, that you wore your influences a little too much on your sleeve.
Yeah. I mean, I don’t like doing it, but honestly I would find it really impossible to describe it. I tried just now, and it’s really difficult. If I name one band then it’s neglecting 50 other names that I should mention. And then I’ll hang up the phone and wish that I could call you back about the other 49. So I think it’s better to just leave them out and just let people make up their own minds.

How are you recording? Do you have fully-formed ideas about how it should sound?
We’ve gone in with vague skeletons, and quite deliberately on this occasion. We’re working with this producer, Jason Hill, who was in that band Louis XIV. He wrote a lot of the songs for them, and produced their records – he’s just one of those sort of studio geeks. He put all of the money that they made in to a studio that he has been collecting gear for 10 years, and it’s just the craziest collection of awesome analog gear.

Are you aware of keeping it democratic? Doing this the second time around after a few Jet records, are there pitfalls that you are aware of when you are putting a record together?
Democratic in the songwriting sense, I suppose. I think one thing that I regret in Jet – and I think all the guys would probably tell you the same thing – one of our biggest problems is that we had four songwriters, and so everything was picked over with a fine-tooth comb. And that’s kind of not how I want this to be. I’d rather this had a little bit more distinction, and a little bit more drive, and one clear voice. So I think the important thing is that everyone in the band is going in the same direction. Not that no one can contribute, but that everyone has to have the same vision. And if it’s not working for one song then we scrap it and go on to something new. Whereas with Jet we would labour through that and make it work somehow, and then everyone would be 25 percent less satisfied.

‘I’m willing to sit in a van for two years’

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Is it more everyone’s band rather than your project?
No, no way. I didn’t want to do that – it would be a solo record if that were the case. And everybody’s contribution – without them, it wouldn’t sound the same. So it’s a real band, not a dictatorship. And it’s certainly not a case of me being “the guy who was in Jet” and throwing my weight around. It’s music – it’s much more sensitive than that. And that’s how we treat it.

But the fact is you’re not starting from scratch again and doing pub gigs, and even if you want to start from the bottom again and do things slowly, you are still starting with name recognition and money in the bank. Didn’t you guys sell out Oxford Arts when you played out here last time [in July 2011]?
I don’t think that was a sell-out. It was mainly an industry thing. And that is one of the problems with DAMNDOGS … Every one of our first shows has everyone in the record business coming out to see it, which really sucks. And there’s really no way for me to avoid that. At the end I don’t even think we were selling tickets. We were just giving tickets to people who wanted to come to the show. Our guest-list was so retarded that, in the end, we just wanted to do the show. But, you know, all these people want to get in for free anyway. But it’s a little bit of a curse having that, because I don’t want people to expect anything from this music. I don’t want people to think of Jet when this name comes up. But obviously I can’t ignore the fact that that’s going to happen – it’s just natural that people are going to connect those dots together…

There were a couple of deals on the table when it started, but we didn’t want to go down the road with those major labels straight away, so we’ve kept it DIY all this time just to give the project room to turn into something on its own. I would hate to abuse all of those connections, and the friends that I’ve made on the business side by just jumping out and doing that. And I’ve been really persistent in telling whoever’s interested in the band that it is definitely not going to be a situation where we do all those things that record companies do, like “tapping in to the fanbase”, and exploiting that. So I’ve been persistently telling anyone who is interested in the group that that is not where we’re at.

So are you going to come out and tour DAMNDOGS in a van for two years, if that’s what it takes?
If that’s what it takes, absolutely. Luckily for me, because it’s a new band we don’t have any of those problems, or anything stale. So I can sit in a van for a couple of years with these guys and we can do that without hating each other. So absolutely I’m willing to sit in a van for two years. We all are. We’ve actually got some plans to do some stuff in the States, just to warm up before we go down to Australia. But obviously until I lock it down it’s silly to talk about it … We’re ready to go on the road as soon as we get done in the studio and we have some new songs to put out.

Are you going to pay special attention to Australia?
Well, yeah. Yeah. That’s been discussed as well. One thing that was really hard to hear when I was in Jet was that people were disappointed that we didn’t play in Australia enough. People who were into the band felt that we had neglected Australia in favour of doing well in America. But I think that if they were in our situation, then every single person who had that complaint would have done the same thing that we did … In 2003 everything wasn’t as governed by the online machine, and I think that we had to be over here, and putting in all this work in America to grow what we were doing. In America, that’s what it took. Now, it doesn’t take that. I’m very conscious of being in Australia, and not being in America for six months and not try to make it happen in the States before I go back to Aus. Because, like I was saying, at the moment you can be everywhere at once.

“It’s certainly not a case of me being ‘the guy who was in Jet’ and throwing my weight around.”

I think Gotye’s proving that at the moment – that song is our primary national export right now.
Oh, yeah. It’s massive. And he’s going through the same thing that we were going through in 2003. His song [‘Somebody That I Used To Know’] has just absolutely taken over everything. And he probably hates it. I don’t know. But it’s a funny thing, because on the one hand this incredible thing is happening to you, but on the other hand you are trying to get people to look at all your other songs. It’s out of your control, and you can’t do anything about it. People can hate all they want, but if a song of yours gets picked up and people really love it on a universal level, then what are you going to do? Complain? I don’t think so.

But people talk about it as being good for Australian bands as a whole. And the same thing was happening with The Vines in 2003 – Australian rock music was on a higher plane all of a sudden, and you guys perhaps capitalised on that. And so now there’s mainstream interest in Australian bands again because of Gotye. Kimbra is doing really well, and apparently there was a good bit of buzz around the Australian bands at SXSW.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. And you are 100 percent right about what happened with The Vines and us being in the right place at the right time to capitalise on the interest that was coming for Australian bands because of The Vines. And I hope that Australian bands can capitalise on Gotye.

So you’ve got this little window, maybe, that might help you. Have you got a deadline for yourself in terms of a release?
Not really, no. This is the great thing about being unconnected to any companies: you get to make it right, and you get to make it the way you want to make it. So we don’t, really. We’re going to get it right, then think about all that next. As it should be with all bands … We put out the DAMNDOGS EP by ourselves at some point last year. But we’ve got a remix EP coming out – well, at the moment we’re just going to be giving it away on our website. And that’s just something to tide us over, and to put something new out there with the band’s name while we’re in the studio. That’s a remix from A Place To Bury Strangers, a remix for ‘Very First Century’, and Chris Karloff – formerly of Kasabian – did another remix. They are just really off-the-wall remixes that we are going to put out through our website, and give it away just to keep new things out there in the world.

[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] DAMNDOGS - Very First Century (A Place To Bury Strangers Remix) by Mess+Noise

That A Place To Bury Strangers remix is mental. There’s just so much noise in there.
It’s mental, I know. It’s crazy … He makes pedals – he’s a mad genius is Ollie [Ackermann]. He builds pedals for bands and stuff, and I think he does really well with that. But you’re in some pretty serious control when you are actually building the instruments that you are using in the studio.

Anyway, I should let you go so you can relax on your Friday night.
Well, no, I actually came back down to my house to do this interview, and I’m going back the studio now. So there will probably be some wine involved later. You’re right about that. There’s a great [David] Geffen quote about musicians, where he’s talking about how most people talk about going out on a Friday night. But the differences between musicians and everybody else is that a musician will go in to his studio, or into his bedroom with a guitar, and he’ll have a mate there and get absolutely hammered, and telling each other that they had a massive night on the town, but they didn’t really go anywhere. They just sat there getting wasted. And that’s so true – all my musician mates are exactly like that. They say they had a massive night when they sat on their couch, wrote a song and got smashed.

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