It’s hard to believe it’s been thirty years since Newcastle gave birth to The Screaming Jets. It was 1989 when the Aussie rockers stepped out into the big wide world and by the early 90’s they had left their mark, not only in Australia but with a growing reputation across the UK, US & Europe as well. Over the next thirty years they were to release eight studio albums, two live albums and three 3 EP’s but there were many detractors who thought the Jets would burn out and be consigned to the scrap heap of rock soon enough. How wrong they were!!!! With a thirty-track double CD set to be released shortly and talk of new material for later this year and next, The Jets have no desire to hang their tools up just yet.
Renowned for their blistering live shows and powerful Aussie pub style rock, The Screaming Jets are getting ready to embark on The Dirty Thirty Tour in May, which takes them around the country and with over one hundred songs to pick from, there will be something for everyone in a set that will be littered with classic tracks as well as some possibly more obscure inclusions. The Rockpit caught up with Dave Gleeson as he was relaxing on a rare weekend off after a busy summer which saw him fronting not one, but two of Australia’s top powerhouse rock bands. As always, Dave is charismatic & full of beans, even when supposedly having some chill time, as we discussed thirty years of The Screaming Jets, touring and which two albums he used to play air guitar to with a tennis racket.
Sean: Hey Dave, great to talk to you. Thanks for taking some time out to chat to us at The Rockpit. How you doing?
Dave: G’day Sean, likewise mate. Good thanks mate.
Sean: It’s been a busy 2019 for you guys already and plenty more to come – I really can’t believe it’s thirty years since The Screaming Jets formed.
Dave: Yeah, thirty years is a fair stretch in any man’s book isn’t it [laughs]? I haven’t had long service yet… I don’t know when they tap you on the shoulder for that so that would be nice [laughs].
Sean: How does it feel looking back over the years? So many fantastic albums, songs and live shows over those thirty years… it’s just been incredible.
Dave: Ah thanks mate. It is fantastic but it’s like any job is, you kind of looking forward to see what’s coming next rather than spending too much time gloating on your past successes [laughs]. We’ve put together a thirty-track double CD to highlight some of our favourite songs over the years and not necessarily just the radio hits but also the songs that we’ve loved and that the fans have loved as well. It’s also been great looking back at photos from twenty five years ago and thinking “I remember that day when we were all carrying on like chimps” and all that stuff that comes back to you and feels like it could have been just yesterday.
Sean: I kind of remember the first time I saw The Screaming Jets live and it was back in 1993 at Bindoon Rock here in WA…
Dave: [laughs] Oh yeah I remember that one – the bikie show. I remember being amazed every now and again when this bloke kept bringing this cherry picker down and throwing bags of money in it and then sending back up thirty or forty feet in the air – that was their safe for the weekend [laughs]. They were wild old frontier days them ones.
Sean: Yes they were but it was also great to see these iconic Australian artists like The Screaming Jets, Rose Tattoo & Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs in that sort of environment. I had always been to big glossy festivals like Monsters of Rock at Castle Donington, so to be out in the middle of nowhere and covered in mud, drinking Emu Export & seeing these bands stripped back and pumping out this wonderful rock & blues music was something else for me.
Dave: Yeah awesome, great memories. Like many of those things there were times when we turned up in our board shorts and singlets straight off the beach only to find we’d been booked for a bikies gathering and had to quickly jump in the van and get our band clothes on for the night so we didn’t get our heads bashed in [laughs].
Sean: Before Bindoon in 1993 you had a few spells touring the UK because I remember there were quite a few periods when I saw you guys on many a rock magazine cover lining the shelves.
Dave: Yeah, between 1990 and 1993 we did do quite a bit of touring in the UK. We picked up slots on tour with Ugly Kid Joe. We also did a huge one through the UK and Europe with Thunder who were a pretty big deal at the time and obviously a bit chalk & cheese with us musically – but they were great to us & such nice guys too, which was great. We also had a great tour with The Quireboys or The London Quireboys or whatever incarnation of their name they have had and they were a good bunch of blokes as well. And then we had The Almighty come out and they continued our UK connection… hey look, the UK is the spiritual home of Australian rock obviously. Back in the day people didn’t go “Oh, we’re making it big – Let’s go to LA” it was more like “Let’s not go there” so it was a return to mother England to the birthplace of Sabbath, Zeppelin and Purple and all those seminal bands that created the genesis of what would be the foundations for a lot of that Australian bluesy pub rock.
Sean: Back then I was a subscriber of Kerrang! Magazine and you seemed to be in it all the time – great exposure at the time.
Dave: Yeah they were heady days. Neil Jefferies who ended up as Editor of Kerrang! well, he was one of their chief writers back then and in a big splash of cash, our record company brought about eight or ten international magazine writers over to Australia just to see The Jets. It was a huge thing and Neil Jefferies wrote a piece stating that not since he’d seen Guns n’ Roses at the RIP Magazine party in late 80’s had he seen a band with so much ferocity – and that was a huge rap for us from him. So as a magazine Kerrang! was real good to us for a while.
Sean: I’ve been listening to ‘All for One’ again and I have to say, it’s just timeless and still as fresh as the day it was released.
Dave: We were lucky because that came off the back of some live shows – and every band used to say this – you’d be so tired from touring that when you went in the studio, you would be so on the money that you would be nailing it in two or three takes. It was all about getting in there and capturing the live performance. We’ve just remastered a bunch of tracks for this new double CD that will be coming out in May and Steve James who recorded the originals and has been a big part of our recording over the years, he’s remastered them and has said they have all just come to life again, which is great and I can’t wait to hear it.
Sean: Music has that amazing ability to take you back to where and when you first heard some of these wonderful tracks as a fan…
Dave: Oh and it does for me too. First a foremost I grew up like a lot of people listening and loving rock music – I used to devour it. I’d hear a song and want to know every word. Back in those days you go to the local radio station and they’d have the words to the hit of the week printed out so you’d learn the words to songs like ‘The Power & The Passion’… just so many. So now to be on the other side of it is so unreal – and doing it for thirty years is even better.
Sean: Every rock fan has sung in front of a mirror in their bedroom and into the ‘hairbrush microphone’ at some point or another [laughs]…
Dave: [laughs] I wasn’t allowed to listen to anything real heavy at home so I remember my mate got ‘The Number of The Beast’. Strangely enough the two albums we used to jump around on his bed playing tennis rackets were “The Number of The Beast’ by Iron Maiden and ‘Ant Music’ by Adam & The Ants [laughs]. It was a mixed up crazy old time.
Sean: So, the Dirty Thirty Tour kicks off on Friday 3 May and with eight studio albums to choose from I’m guessing you are all going to have your work cut out picking a set list. Will you be pretty much sticking to a settled list or changing it up through the tour?
Dave: We’ve got a good week of rehearsals to work out the set list. Once you do work it out we tend to stay with it because it just gets better each night you run through it rather than tinkering around. Sometimes the way things run just doesn’t work like how songs run into each other or the tunings aren’t right so we play around with that in the studio and try & nail it each night better and better. We’ve been going through all the albums and picking the eyes out of them to try to select a set that will be loved by the fans as much as by us.
Sean: Have you got a favourite that maybe isn’t one of the more mainstream hits that you would want in the set?
Dave: Yeah, probably ‘Silence Lost’ which was on the ‘World Gone Crazy’ album. I just love it because it’s reminds me of like a Fischer-Z kind of song, punky but not trashy, almost a pop-punk kind of thing. It was written by Paul Woseen and he’s a fantastic songwriter. So, I’m pushing to have that one in and also ‘No Point’ from our first album because I love doing that song.
Sean: I can picture you all having a few beers and pulling song names out of a hat [laughs]
Dave: Dead set, I’ve just sent a message to the boys about this. I’ve been having three weekends off in a row for the first time in twelve months so enjoying some rest time.
Sean: Can you remember what was it like when you were recording your debut album?
Dave: Oh man it was wild [laughs]…. Just wild. We had people coming over from Newcastle and staying at our house – we moved down to Sydney pretty soon after we got our record deal. So we moved into two units over the road from each other and just had a constant stream of friends and people staying over. It really was wild… we was just running amuck. We thought we were just like the big boys and our mantra was ‘Go Big or Go Home’ [laughs] so we just went the full shmear. Sadly, it was all over in two weeks then we went into Rhino Studios to do some vocals after that, which was pretty cool because it was just after Barnesy & INXS had done ‘Good Times’ so that was some great history… and we were still gigging all the way through it so it was a still pretty much a blur.
Sean: When you write & record those big hits that become almost iconic Australian anthems, how does it feel to see and hear thousands of fans singing the words back to you in unison?
Dave: Incredible. A song like ‘Better’ that was written by Grant Walmsley and when he brought that in we loved it immediately. Only recently I was just remembering we had half a dozen songs that got us first noticed by Steve James and by the record companies in the first place and I don’t think even one of those songs made it to the first album. We kind of really went into writing mode with Grant & Paul writing a bunch of songs between them and I was writing a bunch with Richie Lara, you know living all together helps. That where you sit there at four o’clock in the morning and go, “Hey, I’ve just come up with a thing” and we’d write some stuff down. When we were all living together, song writing certainly came to us a lot easier and served us well on the first two albums.
Sean: Travelling to the other end of The Jets album timeline I really enjoyed your last album ‘Gotcha Covered’. There are some real great tracks on there…
Dave: Yeah, that went really well for us. We were very surprised just how well it went to be honest. It even made it to #1 on the Australian iTunes Rock Charts [laughs] so I got a screen grab of that don’t you worry about that [laughs]. After twenty nine years in the biz and to see a #1 next to a Screaming Jets record, I’m taking it [laughs]. We also managed to get three months of touring out there around Australia with the album which was great, then it was straight into the Red Hot Summer Tour, getting up in front six to eight thousand people every night for twelve shows – Suzi (Quatro) got me up to sing with her so it was just all so bloody awesome. She’s killer – we’ve become good friends and my wife & I went out to dinner a couple of times with her – Can’t get much better than hanging with Leather Tuscadero [laughs]. We were looking at recording something together but you know how it is, time just got away from us unfortunately. The first lady of rock and she’s still up there strutting her stuff at sixty eight years of age – magnificent.
Sean: She’s back in October & November so maybe time to record something then with her?
Dave: We’ll be catching up with her on the Rock the Boat Cruise in October which goes up through Vanuatu I think. Looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun – fifty four bands on a boat, what could possibly go wrong! [laughs] Jon Stevens is there, Chocolate Starfish, Moving pictures… just a cast of thousands! There’s cover bands & tribute bands too who you bump into around the traps so it’s going to go off. I’ll be trying to bunker down in my quarters so I don’t get into any trouble – I’m taking the family so that will help [laughs].
Sean: Mr Chocolate himself, Adam (Thompson) and I were messaging earlier today about something completely different and I said you and I were talking and he asked me to send his best wishes and give you a “G’day mate”.
Dave: One of the best is Adam. He’s a lovely bloke. We had a fierce rivalry with them back in the day – not fierce in that way but we just thought, “Who are these blokes?”, “What’s this blokes look all about?” and “What are they doing?”, you know like you did with every band. But now they are my mates they are unreal. I’ll send him one back so “G’day Adam”.
Sean: We touched on the thirty-track CD but I read somewhere that there is a new album in the pipeline. Anything you can share there?
Dave: Yeah we’ve started the process but with me being a little bit busy between the two bands it’s been hard but I’ve been recording a bunch of stuff on my phone and Paul has got a bunch of stuff. So, hopefully when we are up in North Queensland maybe in June we’ll be spending some time up there without having to come home so I imagine we will be able to get some stuff locked away while we are up there. I’d hope we can at least get an EP out by the end of the year and hopefully an album out next year. Then 2020 is the thirtieth anniversary for the release of ‘All for One’ so we’ll do a bit of a tour for that as well. So many plans going off for the future and as long as we can find stuff we still find fun then we’ll keep going and keep creating new stuff – we just love it.
Sean: You spoke about Red Hot Summer just now and for the second year running it’s been a split shift for you performing with both The Screaming Jets and then later on in the day with The Angels. Do you find it fairly straight forward or is it a bit of a workout?
Dave: It’s actually not too bad because back in the day it was kind of natural to do three or sometimes even four sets in a night. I certainly don’t cry and make out it’s something harder than it actually is because there are bands out there still doing those three or four set shows. It’s more of a persona thing for me – that’s the hard thing. I have to go from t-shirt wearing Dave to jacket & tie wearing Dave… its funny because one guy actually said to my brother at one of the shows, “Geez, that guy in The Screaming Jets look just like your brother” and he’d watched The Jets before and was confused by the huge transformation [laughs].
Sean: It must be a wonderful feeling to be singing with The Angels now, when in the early days you actually supported them.
Dave: To be able to get up there and help keep The Angels songs alive is just unreal. I was a huge Doc (Neeson) fan, as anyone is who is an Australian rock fan would say exactly the same. I think he was the most mesmerizing and brilliant front man I’ve ever seen – I mean I never got to see Bon (Scott) live but I’ve seen him on video and he was amazing too but Doc certainly had a very mystical presence which he played to the hilt.
Sean: Well, it’s a band that has eluded me so far so I hope to get to see The Angels soon. I have a few regular questions I love to finish with – What was the last album you listened to, Dave?
Dave: Funnily enough, it was The Angels latest one ‘Symphony of Angels’ which we recorded last year. It’s just been mixed so I put it on the other day as loud as I could while the kids were out and it’s just magnificent – that’s the word for it. Those Angels songs coupled with the orchestral arrangements & choirs just takes it to another level – you can’t do it with every song and every band but because The Angels have classical leanings in their movements and to their songs it is just magnificent so I suggest all you reader’s source a copy of that and hear The Angels in a whole different experience.
Sean: I will have a listen. If you could invite three guests from the music world, either dead or alive, to join you for dinner for a couple of hours, who would you like to invite?
Dave: Bon Scott… Jim Morrison [laughs]… and who else… dead or alive? I know, David Lee Roth [laughs]
Sean: That is one hell of a lively table [laughs]. I wouldn’t want to have a reservation on a table too nearby…
Dave: [laughs] That’s exactly right!
Sean: Finally Dave, if you could be credited with writing any song ever written what song would you choose?
Dave: “Ridin’ down the highway, Goin’ to a show, Stop in all the by-ways, Playin’ rock ‘n’ roll”… it would have to be ‘Long Way to the Top’ by AC/DC. That’s my whole… well, every time I’ve done a million miles on the road that songs in my head, I don’t even need to sing it out loud, I don’t have to because everyone knows I’m singing it [laughs]
Sean: An Australian rock anthem right there to finish with – fantastic. Dave, thank you so much for your time and we wish you and the rest of the band all the best for the Dirty Thirty Tour and the release of the double album. I’m coming along to see you on May 18 at The Astor so can’t wait.
Dave: Love playing The Astor – great venue. No wukkas mate. Catch you there, thanks Sean.
TOUR DATES
Fri 3rd May – Wests Cardiff, Newcastle With The Poor
Sat 4th May – Wests Cardiff, Newcastle With The Poor
Fri 10th May – Doyalson RSL, NSW With The Poor
Sat 11th May – Metro Theatre, Sydney With The Poor and Special guests: CELIBATE RIFLES
Fri 17th May – The Triffid, Brisbane With The Poor
Sat 18th May – Astor Theatre, Perth With The Poor
Fri 24th May – 170 Russell, Melbourne With The Poor and Special Guests: BOOM CRASH OPERA
Sat 25th May – The Gov, Adelaide With The Poor
Tickets: thescreamingjets.com.au/the-tour
