Jebediah rock on for 20th birthday

“We never set out to change the world, promote any particular message or be the biggest band in the world,” Jebediah bassist Vanessa Thornton says.

“We set out with these really modest goals of getting a gig or playing a venue we love. We just wanted to play music with each other.”

Twenty years after three school friends formed a band at Leeming Senior High School, later recruiting the singer’s brother on drums, Jebediah has played plenty of gigs at many venues.

Inexplicably not yet inducted into the WA Music Hall of Fame despite four ARIA Top 10 albums and a string of alt-rock hits, the awesome foursome still plays music together. On June 4, the mighty Jebs embark on their national 20th anniversary tour, which includes three Astor Theatre shows.

Sitting on a couch next to Thornton at Sony’s Perth office, guitarist Chris Daymond recalls meeting lead singer Kevin Mitchell when they played footy for the Bull Creek Bombers under-12s. While Ben Cousins was the star player, Mitchell distracted his future band mate with impersonations.

“I hated footy, so Kev used to entertain me,” Daymond laughs. “As an 11-year-old he did a great impression of that naturalist dude – the guy that did the ad for peaches.”

The guitarist is referring to David Bellamy and the acting extended to theatre arts classes, where they befriended fellow “alternative kid” Thornton. She turned them onto Nirvana. Daymond returned the favour by lending her a bass guitar his dad picked up at a swap meet.

Mitchell’s older brother Brett took over on drums from Almin Fulurija, who missed one too many rehearsals. The new line-up wrote the first Jebediah original, Superhero 6 and a Half about their tardy ex-drummer.

After making their live debut in May 1995 at the Leeming High School formal at the Sheraton Hotel, Jebediah played a heat of the National Campus Bands Competition at Murdoch Uni. The nascent band’s ambition was to play Planet Nightclub, now the Dollhouse strip club, where the semi-finals and State final were held.

Heath Bradby, then a local venue booker and now head of A&R at Warner Music Australia, was one of the judges at Murdoch.

“I gave them a very high score and one of the other judges took offence given they didn’t play every note correctly, which I pointed out was what I actually liked about them,” he recalls from Sydney. “Different to a lot of Perth bands at the time, they actually looked like they were having fun.”

A verbal agreement was made soon after the performance and Bradby managed Jebediah for 12 years.

The band made their first trip east to Lismore, NSW, where they won the national final. Meanwhile Bradby fanned the growing heat surrounding the scrappy quartet, getting Pete Carroll, then State manager of Sony Music, to attend Jebediah’s second gig.

“It was obvious to me that this band could sell an awful lot of records,” Carroll says. “It didn’t take more than the first viewing, the first hearing to connect.”

Carroll harangued Sony’s top brass in Sydney to sign the Perth youngsters immediately or miss out. John O’Donnell heeded the advice (and a phone call from Tim Rogers, whose You Am I took Jebediah on tour), signing them to the Sony imprint Murmur, already home to Silverchair, Something for Kate and WA’s Ammonia – another band Carroll championed.

For O’Donnell, it was also love at first sight. “They reminded me of a cross between the Britpop bliss of Blur and a stack of great US slacker punk-pop bands,” the EMI managing director says, “but with their own twist.”

The Murmur deal sealed in 1995, the following year turned out to be a watershed for Jebediah. The wide-eyed foursome kicked off 1996 with a performance alongside Beck, Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth at the Summersault Festival before releasing their Twitch EP and touring nationally with Something for Kate and Bluebottle Kiss.

Daymond says he realised things were snowballing when hundreds of young fans packed into 78 Records for an in-store performance.

“Three gigs before we were playing to 20 people,” he says.

“We had to stop because the crowd was jumping through the floor,” Thornton adds. “In the shop below, bits of plaster were falling off.”

The momentum continued with the 1997 release of their first full-length album Slightly Odway, which Jebs will play in its entirety at the anniversary shows. The debut crashed the ARIA Top 10 and spent more than a year in the Top 50 en route to double platinum sales, almost unheard of for a WA act in those days. Five songs from Odway featured in Triple J’s Hottest 100 – Leaving Home was No. 10 in 1997 and Harpoon No. 7 the following year.

Via low budget music videos often made by friends and house mates, Jebediah compiled a priceless document of Perth share-house living of the 1990s. Murmur were stoked to only pay $1000 for the clip accompanying debut single Jerks of Attention, while Jebs’ mates were stoked to get that much (and may have spent most of it on weed).

Despite 1999 follow-up Of Someday Shambles peaking at No. 2 and selling platinum, the record company were less pleased with the band turning down two offers to play Hey Hey, It’s Saturday. Appearing on the high-rating show was an easy way to boost sales but dent credibility.

“We said no a lot,” Bradby says. “We said no to things that other bands would be very happy to say yes to, so it caused a fair bit of conflict.”

After their self-titled third long-player completed a hat-trick of Top 10 albums in 2002, Jebediah went independent for fourth outing Braxton Hicks, released via their Redline label.

Bradby describes the whole experience as a “f...ing nightmare”, while Daymond considers it a financial failure but artistic success. The guitarist is rightly proud that Redline also released great albums from contemporaries Front End Loader, Blue Line Medic and Adam Said Galore plus early Gyroscope EPs.

The Redline experiment only lasted one album, and Jebediah parted ways with Bradby. “I was out of ideas,” the former manager admits. “They needed a fresh approach and fresh ideas.” Eskimo Joe’s Catherine Haridy now looks after the band.

Most recent album Kosciuszko, released by Dew Process, climbed into the Top 10 (this is news to Thornton during the interview) and gave the band their first gold single in She’s Like a Comet.

Reflecting on the 20 years since thrashing Green Day, Nirvana and Pearl Jam covers at the Leeming High ball, the band and their former manager agree that the two-and-a-half months of 2000 spent on the road through the US were a career highlight.

Jebediah toured separately with pop-punks the Get Up Kids and emo outfit Jimmy Eat World, who were both blowing up. They played legendary New York venues CBGB’s and the Bowery Ballroom. Alternative icons Death Cab for Cutie supported them at a Chicago show. The four friends drove around the US, often sleeping overnight in the tour van.

“I do remember there being a sense of ‘Let’s give it everything we’ve got, we may only get one chance’,” Daymond says.

“And as it turns out, we did – we never went back,” adds Thornton, who considers the US tour, and perhaps the whole Jebediah story, a grand romantic adventure.

“It certainly is and I think you realise you get out of it what you put in,” Daymond says, “but we also realised how strong we were as a group.

“We were enjoying each other’s company and were having these new experiences as young people, seeing the world and having a riot of a time.

“I don’t think we were unimpressed by that,” he says. “We drank that down.”

Twenty is out now.Jebediah plays the Astor Theatre on June 26-28, supported byTurnstyle ,Red Jezabel andBeaverloop .