Interview by Kris Peters
What should have been cause for a celebration for The Screaming Jets with this week's release of their latest album Professional Misconduct has been negated substantially by the recent passing of everyone's favourite bass player Paul Woseen.
But, Paul would want us all to focus on the fantastic music that makes up the Jets tenth album, and what better way to do that than to speak with half of the band's electrifying lead guitar powerhouse duo in Jimi Hocking.
This is a bit of a different interview for HEAVY, completed the day before Paul's farewell and after struggling to come up with a respectful way to delve into Professional Misconduct we thought it only fitting to run through the album track by track, starting with what HEAVY wrote in the review and testing Hocking to see how close we came to getting things right.
But, of course, there are always the pleasantries of catching up with an old friend to set the scene.
"I'm excited," Hocking quipped when asked how he was feeling in the lead-up to Friday's release. "Obviously it's been a strange couple of weeks in the ranks of the band, so we've had a lot to deal with, but really this has been an album in the works for a couple of years. I think the genesis of this record started in the lockdown days. We were experimenting with some remote recording when we did the re-release of All For One 30th Anniversary record and the Bitter Pill EP, and Scotty Kingman, our other guitar player, he had started the ball rolling. He was trying to get Pauly to get motivated with some writing, so Scotty came up with a bunch of guitar riffs, and he sent them to Pauly to get things under way. And that's kind of the starting point. We started bouncing around these cut-and-paste riff ideas and banging them into some kind of arrangement shape and that was really the genesis of what became this Professional Misconduct album three years later. It started such a weird way, but it came up with what I think is a good record. It's actually quite rewarding."
Professional Misconduct isn't quite the constant balls-to-wall slab of rock goodness that many would expect from The Screaming Jets. Yes, it does have moments that take you back to the early days of one of Australia's greatest ever rock exports, but it also fleshes things out a touch more and allows over three decades of experience to dictate in areas where in the past they may not.
"It's an interesting thing," Hocking measured. "I think that for a band that's been around for as long as we have, we've just tried to pick songs we think are the most worthy. Sometimes it just so happens they might all be heavy rock songs, but sometimes it's not always the way, but I've got to say when we came to selecting material - I think we recorded about 18 songs, or parts thereof as we approached the deadline for this record - really the tracks that get legs are the ones that are across the line first, in some respects. There's some things we thought we had a good idea here or there, but I don't think we were ready to just say that's finished, let's just release that. There was things we wanted to work on a little bit more and that's just the kind of process of songwriting and creating a record now."
In the full interview Jimi talks more about the music on Professional Misconduct, the album name and how fitting it is to the band, how some of the songs came together, Paul's lasting legacy, finishing the album tour without him and how hard that decision was, and we also run through each track blow by blow and find out what they mean individually and collectively to the band, including a surprise reveal about the last track Speed Quack.