The Vine interview

Damndogs has finished their round of gigs in NYC for the CMJ festival. We don't know what their next steps are gonna be but meanwhile I'll leave you with some pics from their first gig in the city on Oct. 18th, click here to check them out.

Finally, I'll post another interview but before that let me just remind you all that the Damndogs EP "Strange Behaviour" is available on the Itunes here. Don't forget to buy it and leave a review. Now let's take a look on a interview for Thevine.com.au:

Not every drummer is content to sit behind their kit while the band gads about, blissed out by beats as their face contorts into strange concentrative grimaces. Some are itching to get out and take control. Some like Chris Cester from Jet.

With older brother Nic and guitarist Cameron Muncey off enjoying Jet's unspecified hiatus, the almost 30-year-old drummer and songwriter has broken away with bassist Mark Wilson, touring Jet keyboardist Louis Macklin and best friend/cousin Mitch McIver, to form a new band distant from Jet’s radio friendly meat and three veg rock. And this time he’s holding the mic.

After playing their first gig in an LA strip joint, one reviewer slapped DAMNDOGS with a “Gorillaz procreating with PiL” label, and it has to be said there is a similarity between Cester and Johnny Lydon’s curt, sleazy vocals. Marry that to dark, fuzzed out bass, sinister dubby synths and catchy dance hooks, and you’ve got a recipe that may leave Jet fans scratching their noggins.

Back briefly in town for a gig to share his new baby, Cester took a break from rehearsals to discuss hash-induced revelry, partying with Scott Horscroft, producing Japanese bands in kimonos and his joy of not being boxed in by Jet.

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How long are you back in Melbourne for?

Two weeks, just for a week of rehearsals and then there’s a week in between the Melbourne and Sydney shows, so I get to go to a footy game.

Who do you support?

(Hesitates) Umm Collingwood, sorry. Everyone fuckin’ hates Collingwood, I don’t understand it. In the modern era, there’s no more bogans.

Well I must know a lot of bogans…So how long have you been back home?

I live in LA. I got back into town a couple of nights ago and I’ve been trying to get back on schedule. It’s horrible that flight. I’ve only been in town for a couple of days and we’re pretty much straight into it. We had everything going pretty good when we did some shows a couple of months back, but you need some refresher courses, y’know? Just like surgeons have to do it.

So you guys played your first gigs in LA?

We just sort of went there on the back of the Aussie Invasion South by South West tip—they take a bunch of bands through LA and they had one band drop out. And since Mark was already in town working on new stuff with me, we went 'OK, we’ll just get the other guys over here and we’ll just do it.'

It was so last minute, we got everything together in a week and because of the few people that have heard bits and bobs of what we’d done, we were all of a sudden getting all these gig offers. We went and played at Crazy Girls (LA strip joint) which was the weirdest show I’ve ever played my whole life. It was bizarre—playing weird, spaced out, ice age like, super refined tunes to a crowd that probably expect Motley Crue. And obviously that’s pretty surreal for me having the background in Jet and everything.

They wanted a rock band to get up there and turn it up, but it was so different. And also trying to concentrate and remember all the new lyrics…they came up to us at the start and they were like, 'Do you want the girls to be grinding on you and stuff?' That was so ridiculous. So the girls didn’t actually get up on stage but it was bizarre to say the least. A surreal gig. That was a warm up and then we did the Aussie Invasion show at Echo Park and then we did a closing show at a place called Harvard and Stone. It was just great, we sort of surprised ourselves, it came up quickly and we got it all together and how natural everything sounded.

How did DAMNDOGS come about?

Louis Macklin was Jet’s touring keyboardist and percussionist for the last few years. So we became really close on Jet tours. And Mitch is my first cousin and has been my best friend since we were kids.

So Mitch and I started the band and I would go on Jet tours and we would talk about it with Louis. And then Mark (Wilson, Jet bassist) perked his ears up and got wind of it and was really into it. So we basically just talked the band into existence for a couple of years. We just didn’t have time to actually get it together. And then finally when Jet decided to go on a longer break…I’m not good with doing nothing, y’know? I can’t just sit at home and wait for something to happen.

So we just ploughed through, kept working, and visiting each other. I’d come down, we went and tracked the EP at Big Jesus Burger in Sydney. And then some of the guys would come back in dribs and drabs to LA and we’d work on stuff. We just slowly put it all together. People just started to take notice so it became real pretty quickly.

Where’s the name DAMNDOGS from?

That happened in Marrakesh… there was one tour I think Jet played a couple of dates with the Stones, and after that there was a little break and I’d just broken up with my ex girlfriend and didn’t really want to come home to an empty house. So Mitch came out and met me in Morocco, and we basically just had the craziest time. It was such a surreal place to hang out on the other side of the world with your best friend.

One night we’d been up drinking wine all night and we were at our hotel watching the sun come up. It was first light and the call to prayer would come over the loud speakers and in Marrakesh the dogs in the city aren’t domesticated; they’re just scrawny, demonic little retches. And when they heard the loud speakers crackling to life in the morning they just went absolutely beserk! There’s like thousands of wild dogs just roaming around the streets looking for scraps.

The combination of hearing the mosque prayers and the dogs going absolutely mental with the sun coming up, it was just such a surreal combination. That’s where the name was born from. And that was the first thing—we’d named our band before we’d even made one note.

I think that’s probably a good thing. Because the whole coming up with the name thing can be so frustrating—i you’ve already got your sound and then you can never find the name to fit. I think it’s good to come up with the name first and then make the sound.

I agree, it’s a real pain. Especially when you’re sitting there with a handful of songs and you’re trying to find a name that encapsulates what you do. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense. When you’re having a baby you normally name it before you see it, otherwise you’re going to have a baby with no name. It’s the same thing, it makes sense to name it first.

Although I’ve known people who’ve had a nameless baby for quite a few weeks.

Me too. I didn’t do that. I have a daughter, her name’s Coco. She’s 10 and a half months.

DAMNDOGS is a pretty major departure from Jet. Do you and Mitch share a similar kind of love of that dark electro rock stuff?

It’s funny, Mitch and I never even really discussed what the band would sound like. Because we’ve been friends for so many years… we just started talking about the band, doing something together. And there was a couple of loose riffs that were hanging around that I’d been working on that really didn’t fit...it wouldn’t have worked with Jet. And definitely more leaning on the stuff that I fell in love with from Primal Scream’s records like XTRMNTR and stuff like that.

And we never even talked about it. All we did was name the band, basically, and then smoked hash in Morocco for a week. That was pretty much the formation. And then when we got in a room together it sort of naturally went where it went. The weirdness...the difference in the music between this and Jet was obviously pretty staggering. But we never talked about it, we just kept pushing it through and refining it. And taking things off the table, because this band is more about what we weed out rather than what we put in. It’s more sparse, like what I was saying before about the Ice Age. I always think of that. I suppose now that it’s sort of progressing and we have fourteen or so songs. Its funny I don’t think this band is really influenced by bands and sounds, as [much as] it is by a kind of feeling of a song. I won’t tell you which ones they are but there’s about five songs and they all have a connection to each other.

Something like David Bowie’s Fame for example. They’re sort of cynical and it’s dark a little bit, but it’s also funny. It’s a combination of those flavours. It’s not happy dance music. It’s like the last couple of years the electronic sounds that have been coming out are quite sugar-coated and for me they don’t make me feel anything.

Very 80s….

Yeah exactly. It’s like that revival of attitude and that’s fine. But I just don’t get anything out of that. I didn’t get anything out of that over the last few years of popular music. And so it’s just a reaction to that I suppose.

You mention cynical and listening to the lyrics of single 'Very First Century', it’s definitely got a cynical edge to it.

I suppose it does. But like I said, we don’t sit around and think about it. Often times with DAMNDOGS, a lyric will be born out of how you push the words out of your mouth rather than in the beginning what you’re saying. And then gradually over time, you work those syllables into real words that mean something to you. And that’s really a different approach to how we did it with Jet—or how I would write with Jet. Which is more of a classic thing, where you sit down with a guitar and work out a song in that way. But DAMNDOGS is all about the percussive elements, so the lyrics would be born out of that. As opposed to sitting down and thinking about something to write a song about, y’know?

A bit more organic. What do you mean when you describe it as the Ice Age?

When I hear our stuff—especially the new stuff we’ve been working on the last couple of days—it makes me think of the ice age. It reminds me of…the song we all really love is 'The National Anthem', I think it’s the first track from Radiohead’s Kid A record [It's the third track - Ed], which is really tough, and [has] a really defined beat. But the soundscape behind it is really minimal. It still feels like it’s right on your eyeballs, but there’s nothing really happening. And that always makes me think of an ice age when I hear that song.

And you recorded with Scott Horscroft, have you worked with him before?

I’ve worked every bar, restaurant and pub in Sydney with him for the past few years (laughs). But we did do some work with him. How we met Scott was Mark and I—it wasn’t public knowledge in Australia—Mark and I started a production company and just did this one job, we produced a Japanese artist. I can’t even remember what the band’s called now. So we booked time up in Sydney and this Japanese pop group came out to see us and we made this really weird…they wanted us to get them a Jet sounding kind of record, but Mark and I wanted to use it as an opportunity for our stranger musical leanings. So we kind of pulled them in there and they were a bit surprised when we came up with the song that we came up with. Because it didn’t sound anything like Jet.

But anyway Scott Horscroft was operating those sessions. In fact I was just up in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and I was sitting across the table from Scott and I was…when we hang out, basically my life just gets shut down for a week because we just basically party.

Oh one of those friends…

Yeah. And I said to him, 'How did we first become first good friends?' And he lost it. And he recalled this story of us in BJB sitting around with a VB in a kimono…because all the Japanese record company had flown out, there were about 28 people in this tiny little studio: costume designers, A&R people, managers, agents—they were all there. They’d all flown in. It was the most ridiculous thing, they must have spent so much money on this one song. And they gave us these kimonos as gifts. And basically we just wore them the whole time making the record. So that’s how we met Scott, somewhere between surreal and bizarre.

So you’re obviously a fan of his work with people like The Presets?

That’s right. So after we’d done the Japanese record, we talked about getting in the studio and doing another project. And [about how] Scott was such a great guy to do it with. We just get along so well and, I think, trust each others instincts. And obviously that element coming through from [his work with] The Presets. It was good for us because we didn’t want to go with somebody who was going to make us sound like Jet. And it worked out really well.

And is it good to get out from behind the drum kit? Does it feel freer or a bit weird?

It feels great. Because I’ve written songs in Jet for years and, honestly, it’s difficult sometimes to write a song, and then almost give it up—you’re watching it happen from back on the drums and you can’t deliver it the way you want to. Nic’s been killing that for years, he’s been doing a great job. But it’s like you have to let go of your song in a way, and now I don’t have to do that. And I get to control every moment and every aspect of it; from the creation through to playing in front of an audience. So there’s a lot of freedom that comes with that and I’ve really been enjoying it.

You’re not nervous to be out the front?

I guess I get nervous before DAMNDOGS shows where I haven’t gotten nervous before a Jet show. I couldn’t even tell you when, because we’ve been together for so long now. But with this project I get nervous about it running exactly the way we have it rehearsed. But I don’t get nervous about standing in front of a crowd. I think if you’re nervous about standing in front of a crowd and you’re a musician then its probably time to reconsider your life.

So what is Nic up to? Is he based in America as well?

Nic lives in Como (Lake, Italy) and he has a place in Melbourne. Honestly I think the break [with Jet] has been really good. We haven’t really kept up with each other so much. I think we’ve been enjoying going off and living our lives for a minute. I mean, we’ve been together for so long as brothers. People normally go away from each other in families— like when you leave school and stuff—but we went straight from school pretty much, into a tour bus. And we’ve been doing [that] for years.

So I don’t really know. I know from all reports, from my friends that have run into him, he’s doing really well. And he’s really happy to be having his own time, as I am.

Much needed…. and I guess you’ve seen since all the DAMNDOGS stuff started coming out all the fans are in a total panic thinking that Jet’s broken up?

I suppose so. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell them that you’re not. Obviously people read into a new band and they think that means they can’t exist in the same world, but that’s ridiculous. Its good, I don’t know what’s on the cards for Jet at the moment. We literally haven’t spoken about what we’re doing and it’s been the first time, like I’ve said, in 8 years, that we haven’t had a plan. So it remains to be seen when we’re going to get together again. But for sure it will happen.

The more time I get to work [DAMNDOGS] into something on its own steam...that suits me down to the ground, y’know? I’m really enjoying this work and I’m really enjoying the difference and the freedom that it gives me. There’s no barriers here. There’s no world that we’ve boxed ourselves into. It’s a fresh start and it’s a new opportunity to grow.

So when’s the EP out?

We’re meeting our manager about that later today actually. There’s no deadline date locked in but it will be in August.

You mentioned before there’s 14 songs so there’s obviously an album planned after that?

Yeah, absolutely. And we haven’t mapped out where and who we’re going to do that with. So far I’m just enjoying this so much, because in Jet we’d have had that conversation 4 months ago and gone into the studio.

We’re listening and as the music changes, so too do the names that come up for production. And also just floating around and having other producers put their two cents in, there’s some really interesting people in the mix. And I can’t wait to get back into the studio to see how far we can stretch this, and how wild we can make it.

So you’re playing the Toff in Melbourne? It’s such a hot spot for bands now.

I wouldn’t know. Whenever I do interviews now, especially in America, people ask me “What’s the scene like in Melbourne?”. And it’s really hard to say. Whenever I’ve come into town it’s changed so radically. I swear the last 8 years Melbourne has been changing faster than ever. Places go up and go down in a matter of weeks now I feel like. But I like the Toff, I’ve had some good times there. There’s always Big Day Out after parties there. I’ve been kicked out of there a few times which is usually a good sign. Hopefully we won’t get kicked out on gig night. Maybe afterwards though, you never know.

Annika Priest