‘Get Born was a whirlwind of success’ - Aussie retro rockers Jet mark 21 years of hit debut album in Belfast tonight

HI MARK, did you enjoy the start of the Get Born 20th Anniversary Europe/UK tour last night in Milan?

Oh yeah, it was amazing. Last night was a huge sold-out crowd and it was really fun. It’s really nice to start off with a big show.

Did you play your ‘Italian song’, Un’Avventura, the B-side of the current single Hurry Hurry?

We did actually, yeah - and they sang it for us. Nic [Cester, guitar/vocals] speaks very good Italian as he’s been living in Italy for the past 15 years, but he let the crowd sing all the verses, which was pretty amazing.

We just recorded it because we thought it was a cool song. You know, it’s based on a Wilson Pickett cover version of Italian song by Lucio Battista from the 1960s. We just loved the Wilson Pickett version, so we sort of did our own take on that.

Honestly, I’d never even heard it before, you can’t find it on Spotify or anything - there’s only, I think, a live clip on YouTube of Wilson Pickett singing it in San Marino or something. We had to learn it from that.

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What about the A-side, Hurry Hurry, how did that go down?

Yeah, that was great as well. It really resonated. We got a few guys up to play with us from pretty well-known Italian bands. I’ve got to be honest with you, I’ve never heard of them, but they were mates of Nic’s. One played the Moog and one played the guitar solo, so it was pretty fun.

You know, Hurry Hurry’s only recently come out on all the streaming services. We put it out just on vinyl first, but you can definitely tell that it’s now streaming because actually people know it now. It’s much better playing songs people know, for sure.

So is that a little bit of a taster for the new album you’re working on?

Yeah, I think so. We’re still working through [the album] but I think that song’s got that slightly psychedelic soul vibe which we’re into.

What’s it like making new music together again after so long? You’ve had a couple of goes at playing together again in recent years, but this is the first time you’ve decided to work on new songs.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty important to us. I mean, we’re out here playing an album that was very successful and paying homage to its 21st year. We love our old songs, but at the same time what we love more than anything is playing new stuff and seeing new reactions. That’s what motivates and inspires us.

Like, even adding two new songs to the set refreshes it a lot for me.

It sounds like Jet are going to stick around for a while then?

We’ll just do it one step at a time: work on the new album, put it out, and then we’ll obviously be touring it. The thing is, we’re from so far away, so like for us to sit down at the bottom of the world and jump up and down and say we’ve got music and not actually come visit the places we’ve played before - you know, we need to go out there and play and remind people that we’re a great live band as well.

What has it been like revisiting Get Born by playing it in full the past couple of years?

We’ve been playing a lot of these songs throughout our whole career anyway, but yeah, it’s been interesting because you know, the way you sequence a record isn’t necessarily the way that you would sequence a set. I mean, one of our biggest songs, Are You Gonna Be My Girl is the second song in the set, which you wouldn’t normally do.

But, if you’re doing it that way on purpose, it’s actually quite cool, because people know what’s coming and they get excited. You know, like they’ve probably been listening to the record all week getting ready for the gig.

We are so used to playing Are You Gonna Be My Girl at the back of the set, it’s actually quite nice to put it in the front. It sort of gets it out of the way, almost.

Are there any songs on there that you haven’t played in years?

Yeah, there’s a few that we played less. I’d say like, Timothy and Radio Song, we played less and they’re definitely ones that every time we come back out and do them, I’m like ‘oh, I gotta remember these’ - and they’re both similar chords too, so you gotta watch out.

They definitely take a bit more thought than the ones you’ve played a thousand times and you can kind of just play in your sleep.

When you first wrote Are You Gonna Be My Girl, did you immediately realise it was going to be a hit?

We kind of did - but also at the same time, I don’t think anyone could see it coming that it would be such a global hit that’s still getting played today.

Like, I still get friends visiting the far corners of the world and sending me through videos of that song playing on, like, a little radio in a little shop in the backwaters of Thailand. It’s pretty cool.

From the outside, Jet’s success seemed to be meteoric and come out of nowhere. What was it like from the inside when Get Born became such a big hit in 2003?

I mean, things did happen fast, but they also in a sense happened slow, for us, because we would’ve been working away at it for so long and playing to nobody and stuff. That’s what people didn’t see. But when it broke, it broke fast and broke big, definitely.

Did you have time to enjoy it or was it all just a bit of a whirlwind?

It was a bit of a whirlwind, to be honest. I mean, it was fun, because we were all like 21-years-old, you know, but at the same time, I think you appreciate it more now. We’re definitely grateful for still being able to do this as our career sitting here 21 years later.

Jet play the Telegraph Building in Belfast tonight, tickets via ticketmaster.ie.