Walking through the urban debris that constitutes most of Shepherds Bush I found myself confronted with a king-size billboard of four lovely fellas sporting modern-day mullets and very tight trousers indeed. At first glance the uber-cool quartet looked every bit as rock’ n’ roll as any one of the big name troupes from the seventies. But as I later discovered, Jet – as the handsome foursome is known – is just another band in a very long line of bands on the retro-rock scene. What makes this lot different, however, is the fact that they 'don’t give a shit' as, the allegedly multitalented, Jet vocalist/guitarist Nic Cester put it in a recent interview. Funnily enough, I suspect that Nic was being a little disingenuous. Only a few months ago he told a London audience ‘We’re gonna reclaim the whole fucking country piece by piece.’ So much for not giving a shit. And as for reclaiming Britain – I think these lovely fellas have their work cut out. The gritty pub rock in the style of Jet with vocal servings of whiny snarl, pioneered by Liam Gallagher, is a little tired . We’ve heard it all before, thus Jet should give us something new or jet off. But they won’t, not for a while.
Though their music is crap – and I suspect this might be because the boys have invested all their efforts in to looking like rock stars rather than rehearsing – the Jet-ers have a certain amount of appeal. Nic Cester’s cocky swagger and moody demeanour fills stadiums, so what do I know? Not that much, except that maybe Nic and the rest of the Jet boys are going a little bananas from wearing their pants a little too tight. And so I feel that vacum-tight trousers should come with a health warning or else we’ll have a load of really not very good wannabe-rockers saying crazy shit like: 'We’re here cause we fucking earned it and we deserve it cause we’re a fucking good band.'