Screaming Jets interview, unpublished for 30 years, shows the Aussie guitar-rockers highly skilled at pissing people off

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED SEPT. 22, 1991; STORY FIRST PUBLISHED MAY 15, 2021

By Steve Newton

With a jarring, guitar-heavy sound influenced by such gritty Aussie bands as Angel City, AC/DC, and early Midnight Oil, Newcastle, Australia’s Screaming Jets are capable of causing quite a ruckus. They did so on their debut album, All For One, and they”ll probably do it at the Town Pump this Sunday (October 13).

But the youthful band (average age 23) doesn’t have to plug Gibson SGs into Marshall amps to get a strong reaction–like the one from Divinyls vocalist Christina Amphlett that ended with the two acts parting on bad terms.

“There’s a lotta stories goin’ around about that,” says guitarist Grant Walmsley, on the line from France between gigs in Paris and Amsterdam. “But the thing is….we’d been on tour with them for two or three weeks, and they hadn’t even said hello. If we walked past ’em it was like a handshake with the head the other way–they wouldn’t even look at ya so you could say ‘G-Day.’

“And when we finally got to Sydney, which is their home turf, our album had been out that week, so we were pulling the crowd as well. So they decided to watch us play one night And [singer] Dave [Gleeson] said to the crowd, ‘Are you here for a rock and roll show or just a tasteful flash of the vag?’ And I think that’s what did it. She really lost the plot and went to her manager and said, ‘Look, they’re not playin’ tomorrow night.’

“So they asked us not to play tomorrow night, but they still wanted us to do the tour. We told ’em to stick the whole tour up their ass and we went out on our own and did better business than they did anyway. They were a bit of a laughing stock in Australia for that; it really came back in their face.”

Then there’s the time the Screaming Jets insulted LA. glam-rockers Warrant during another show.

“Can you blame us?,” laughs Walmsley. “I mean they came to a gig in a club near our place in King’s Cross in Sydney, acting like the big fuckin’ rock-star dickheads that they are, I guess. They walked in goin’, ‘Hey man, hey–we’re Warrant. We’re from the United States of America and where’s your pussy?’

“So when Dave introduced our song, ‘Stop the World’, he said ‘This one’s for all those guys who put their makeup on first thing in the morning; who put their rock and roll on in front of the mirror.’ He just gave them a bit of a bangin’, and they couldn’t take that.”

The Screaming Jets’ ability to offend isn’t limited to Gleeson’s onstage one-liners, though. There’s one tune on the Canadian version of All For One–an anti-capitalist diatribe called “F.R.C.”–that stands for fat, rich, and a word the Georgia Straight‘s High Sheriffs won’t allow me to use in this family publication. The song didn’t make it onto the American version, and almost got cut from the Australian one too.

“They didn’t want to put it on when it was released in Australia, and we just said, ‘Look, this is our first album, and this album represents what we’ve been about for the last two or three years–it’s gotta be on it.’ So they put it on. But apparently in America, the c*** word is big to-doo. I mean they can say fuck a million times, but they won’t say c***.”

During my 40 years as a music writer, it’s been extremely rare that I’d write a story and then not have it published. It only happened two or three times that I can remember–usually having to do with a canceled concert or, more likely, a canceled newspaper ad.

Not sure why this Screaming Jets story never ran, because as you can see they were booked to play the Town Pump in Vancouver on October 13, 1991. Anyway, I held onto the finished story until now, so here it is. I also kept the cassette tape with the 30-year-old conversation, so you can hear that as well.

Man, is there anything I won’t do for you Ear of Newt readers?

To hear the full audio of my 1991 interview with Grant Walmsley of the Screaming Jets subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.