THE SCORCHING ADVENTURES OF THE SCREAMING JETS
“We’ve been around so long that people’s kids are coming to see us now. Unfortunately, if a young pretty girl comes up to ask for an autograph, I know it’s for her mum or her dad.”
Screaming Jets frontman Dave Gleeson grins his irrepressible grin, which doesn’t leave his face for all of the hour or so that Classic Rock is chatting with him and guitarist Paul Woseen, and seems about as chipper as one can be, given that Australia has only recently been plunged back into a national lockdown as new Covid strains wreak havoc.
“We live on a property near Adelaide, so there’s plenty of places to roam around and stuff like that,” the singer continues. “We’re not stuck in an apartment or an inner-city place. But it’s shitty. It’s killing everything. You get ready to do a gig and it happens again. It’s like a kick in the nuts.”
Yet despite the shadow of the pandemic that continues to hang over the world, there are cheerier things to discuss, all of which makes Gleeson’s grin grow bigger, while the more laconic Woseen plays with his dog and nurses a vodka at his home in Melbourne.
The Australian quintet are celebrating the 30th anniversary of their debut, for which they’ve re-recorded the entire thing. At the time, the album breezed into the rock scene chock-full of the Jets’ natural bonhomie and with a healthy dose of front and cheek. On an album originally released in 1991, the good-time groove of , the big single from the album, and , not to mention the tongue-in-cheek riposte of (an acronym for Fat Rich C**ts), served as a perfect antidote to the more dour and austere approach taken by many of the grunge bands who were beginning to command the front covers of rock magazines at the time.
