Sometimes dismissed as a pale imitation of Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life, Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl has, nonetheless, carved out its own place in music history. Now more than 20 years old, it remains a house party and wedding staple, having ridden in the slipstream of The Strokes to become a millennial anthem.
Now, in conversation with The Guardian, Jet’s lead singer and co-songwriter Nic Cester has revealed that, even before it was finished and became a hit, Are You Gonna Be My Girl seemed to resonate with a couple of very famous names.
“I remember demo-ing the song before we recorded it,” says Cester. “We were courting the producer Rick Rubin, who told us he’d listened to it with Tom Petty. ‘Wow!’ Tom said. ‘Now that’s something you don’t hear every day.’ Just thinking about that gives me a buzz.”
Are you Gonna Be My Girl’s commercial cause was ultimately helped by Apple’s decision to use it in an advert for its iPod. However, Cameron Muncey, Jet’s lead guitarist and the song’s other co-writer, says that the band were initially wary of getting into bed with the tech giant.
“I don’t know how the iPod ad happened, but our managers wanted to do everything to make the song a hit,” he recalls. “We said: ‘This isn’t very punk, all this commercial business.’ But they convinced us and history probably vindicates them. There was this groundswell and, once enough people heard it, it had its own momentum.”
What of those Iggy Pop comparisons, though? Muncey says that, in reality, the musical inspiration for Are You Gonna Be My Girl actually goes back a lot further.
“People talk about the song’s similarity to Lust for Life,” he says. “It has that rhythm - but so do You Can’t Hurry Love and Town Called Malice. I’m not bitter though. You’ve got to be able to take that.”
While Muncey might be fairly relaxed about the Lust for Life comparison, in a 2009 interview with Uptown Magazine, Jet drummer Chris Cester suggested that it wasn’t really accurate - and that Iggy Pop himself agreed with him.
“It's funny because I asked him [Pop] point blank about that,” said Cester. “He said I was crazy. He said that when he and David Bowie were writing Lust for Life, they were ripping off Motown's beat. It's funny that he said that to me because we also thought we were ripping off Motown more than Lust for Life.
“To be honest with you that kind of annoyed me a lot, because I always thought it was really lazy. People just go, well Lust for Life is more well-known so that's what they go for, but if you listen to a song like You Can't Hurry Love (The Supremes) I think you'll find it’s closer to Are You Gonna Be My Girl than Lust for Life ever was. And that's what Iggy said as well.”
Jet are currently on their 20 Years of Get Born tour, which celebrates the double-decade anniversary of their debut album.
