“Personally, for me, no,” says guitarist, Chris Daymond. “I’ve never felt like I could be standing on the edge of it not ever happening again. So that’s just a gut feeling, because there’d have to be some reason for that; some catalyst that would mean that the end is nigh. And that hasn’t occurred to me.”
“I can’t even foresee the end,” says bassist, Vanessa Thornton. “Or how we would ever get to the point where we would say to each other, ‘OK this is it. This is going to be the last show’. Imagine going out to play a show, knowing it was going to be your last.”
Anyone that surmised the three Bob Evans albums would distance Mitchell from Jebediah has been proven incorrect. If anything, the folk-country climes of his alter ego made sure that there was plenty of room for Jebs in his rock’n’roll heart.
“The other interesting thing about that is he started playing Bob Evans shows before we even released Slightly Odway,” Thornton says. “So that has always been there and always been a part of what he does.”
“It depends on what your outlook is on it as well,” says Daymond. “If you’re optimistic then you don’t think that that kind of change will have a negative result on the band. You think it’s going to have a positive result – which it has done – and you encourage each other to pursue those things. It’s really important.”
If anything, allowing Jebediah to take a back seat for certain periods of time has ensured that all four members remain passionately interested in the band. “It takes the pressure off as well,” says Thornton, who also plays in Axe Girl and The Tommyhawks, and previously with Felicity Groom & The Black Black Smoke. “The band was totally a hobby, and it was not something that we had all invested every facet of our life into. The whole journey’s been fun and I wouldn’t change anything, but there was definitely a feeling, when everything else was taken away, that it’s come back down to this basic thing – us four want to be in a room together and play music.”
“That’s an important point,” says Daymond. “[It’s] the four of us. Whereas if you compare it to something like Silverchair, where it was emotionally driven by Daniel [Johns], his investment in playing those songs every night, emotionally, it takes a lot out of him. So to keep that momentum going, obviously is very, very difficult from an output point of view.
“Because our music is a shared creative exercise, you can all step away from it and it won’t necessarily disintegrate,” he continues. “When you pick up your guitars again in the same room together you can just jump back into it.”
The 20th anniversary tour will see Jebediah performing their debut album, 1997’s Slightly Odway, in its entirety, along with other hits and fan favourites. “The element of revisiting an album like Odway obviously brings an attention to the show which we haven’t had recently,” Daymond says. “But also it’s really humbling that people want to come along and celebrate that with you as well. When we did the predictions, budget-wise, for the tour we were very pessimistic about attendance, so we’ve been blown away by the fact that we’re doing four nights at the Corner Hotel. It’s never happened in our career.”
BY BOB GORDON
