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 SHAUN NANCARROW discovers that JET bassist MARK WILSON is just an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation.
Life changes somewhat when you find yourself a member of one of the biggest rock bands Australia has produced in the last decade. A humble trip down to your local cafe or restaurant, for example, can become a mite more uncomfortable than it once was.
“Back in the early days when our first album was blowing up,” says Jet bassist Mark Wilson of his group’s ARIA Award-winning debut, Get Born, which has sold 3.5 million copies worldwide and even received platinum certification in the US, “sometimes I’d go out with my friends to a restaurant – and everybody in Australia’s got that album, one in 15 or one in 20 people own that album. I’d go out for dinner with some friends, and every now and then, the person who ran the cafe would go ‘ah, the guy from Jet’s here. I know what he would like to listen to – let’s put his album on’,” Wilson says with a vaguely flabbergasted chuckle. “I tell you, man, it’s crazy that someone would go, ‘I know what he wants to hear, it’s his own album.’ That was the weird thing – it happened so much, and every now and then it still does.”
Not all of Wilson’s chance encounters with his own band’s music are quite so embarrassing, however.
“Being in Australia, I hear my friends whinging to me that it’s hard to turn on the radio without hearing us every few minutes. But you still get a real buzz from hearing your song on the radio, because it just sounds a little different: it’s in the car or whatever. If you can’t get excited about that – I don’t know. I generally tend to turn it off, though,” he adds with a laugh, “because I wouldn’t want anyone to see me driving down the road listening to myself on the radio.”
While Jet have never matched the overwhelming success they achieved with Get Born, they still retain a more than respectable fanbase in 2009, both in terms of album sales and packed out gigs. I wonder, given the often transient nature of success in the modern music industry, whether Wilson thought back in 2002 that Jet would still be charting in the Australian top five – as they have with their new album, Shaka Rock - in seven years’ time?
“The first album was so big that we thought the second album would be just as big or bigger.” Wilson says. “It wasn’t, but still, we’ve got a lot of fans. I don’t like to take anything for granted because, once you do, there’s no fun anymore. I still worry about whether we’re going to sell out shows in Melbourne – we always do. Or in Japan, I say ‘I hope people come along’, and then you play to 10,000 people – of course they came along. I guess it’s just part of my nature.”
In some quarters, Wilson notes, Shaka Rock has been received much better than its predecessor, 2006’s Shine On, which drew a somewhat mixed critical reaction, with one famous review on Pitchfork Media consisting of nothing more than an image of a chimpanzee urinating in its own mouth.
“I was on this buck’s night … and the cover band in there – one of the classic shit Australian cover bands – must have recognised me, because they started playing every song of ours they knew. Badly, mind you.”
“That was good, that was funny,” he says of that particular piece. “Obviously they didn’t like it – it’s a pretty good bad review, if you ask me. You can’t get personally offended about that stuff; it’s just one dude’s opinion. If you can’t laugh at that, you’re a pretty boring person. We just have fun making our music. There’s a lot of stuff I’d probably put that review on,” he chuckles.
To Wilson, the sound of Shaka Rock is the sound of Jet finding their own voice, an important development for a band that has been accused in the past of being overly derivative of musicians ranging from Iggy Pop to the Rolling Stones.
“I feel like it sounds like Jet, rather than sounding like Jet influenced by other people,” he says. “Everything comes from something – nothing just appears out of nowhere on its own anymore, but I guess it’s us finding our sound, finally.”
Unfortunately, though, it seems Jet aren’t the only band out there trying to find Jet’s sound, as Wilson discovered one dismal Wednesday night in Ballarat.
“This is a funny thing,” Wilson begins. “I was on this buck’s night, and I knew the guy, but I didn’t really know any of his friends. And the buck’s night took us to Ballarat from Geelong, to this fucking pub, and the cover band in there – one of the classic shit Australian cover bands – must have recognised me, because they started playing every song of ours they knew. Badly, mind you. And there’s not really many people who can sing like Nic,” he says, referring to Jet vocalist Nic Cester. “And then they were trying to get me to come up and play a song with them. We had the worst day: I’m in a pub in Ballarat on a Wednesday night with this bad cover band playing my songs, butchering all the parts they could butcher. And they were doing half songs, as well,” he adds in an amused tone, “not even finishing them off because they couldn’t really remember how to play them.”
Instances like these serve Wilson as a stark reminder of the surreal aspects associated with the whole experience of being in a successful rock band.
“When things like that happen, it really makes you laugh, man – it makes you realise what you do is really weird, and how people think about you. Because you’re just a normal guy, walking around, doing what you’ve always done, into the same things, with the same friends – but people have this other expectation of what you are, who you are or what you’re going to be like. And it’s pretty amusing sometimes.”
JET play Brisbane Entertainment Centre with Green Day on Tue Dec 8 and Wed Dec 9. They also appear at the Big Day Out at Gold Coast Parklands on Sunday Jan 17. SHAKA ROCK is out now through EMI.
     
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