Dave Gleeson: Screaming Jets, Angels frontman finds domestic bliss in the Adelaide Hills

For decades, he’s been the front man for two of Australia’s favourite rock bands, so how did Dave Gleeson end up living a life of rural bliss in the Adelaide Hills?

Up in the Hills, tucked away in a picturesque but chilly little valley, Dave Gleeson tends to a small flock of sheep. There are several tiny new lambs, and while the mothers do a pretty good job of looking after their babies, well, sheep are sheep and sometimes they need a little help.

Occasionally Gleeson will fire up the chainsaw and take care of a fallen tree, sometimes he’ll help his father-in-law Algis fix a leaky roof. If he’s not doing a school run he might even find time for a game of eight-ball at the pub.

It’s a million miles away from what Gleeson is known, and loved, for across Australia – fronting two of the country’s favourite rock bands in The Screaming Jets and The Angels.

Just how this former rock ’n’ roll wild man ended up in the genteel countryside outside of sleepy old Adelaide is a great yarn and involves, naturally, the love of a woman.

That woman, however, initially thought Gleeson was the ruffian singer of a ruffian band and wanted nothing to do with him. Literally refused to work with him.

Somehow he changed her mind and even convinced her to marry him.

And now he gets to look after the sheep.

Rock and roll couple Dave and Katie Gleeson with their kids James, 13, Bella, 16, at their Adelaide Hills home. Picture: Tom Huntley

Gleeson hails from the NSW city of Newcastle. It’s reinvented itself as a pleasant and arty beachside enclave two hours north of Sydney where a humble home will set you back about a million bucks.

In the seventies and eighties, however, Newcastle was a workingman’s town populated by coal miners, steel workers and wharfies. It was a town that didn’t tolerate bullshit.

This is the Newcastle that Gleeson grew up in, one of six children. If that somehow wasn’t hard enough, Gleeson’s parents adopted two special needs children to add to the brood. And just to top it off, his mother Glennis – tragically killed in a car accident in 1992 – also volunteered to look after newborn infants in the time between their birth and their moving in with their new families.

It’s fair to say there wasn’t a whole lot of room at Chez Gleeson.

By high school Gleeson was at the local Marist college (St Francis Xavier, where he’s the first name on the school’s online alma mater list), and refereeing rugby league on the weekends.

It was there at St Francis Xavier that Gleeson met guitarist Grant Walmsley, laying the foundations for The Screaming Jets.

And it was there that a hip teacher named Brother Bill would take his young charges out at night to see bands like Mondo Rock and Australian Crawl.

Dave Gleeson sans top...

... and fully clothed.

The seeds of a rock ’n’ roll life were sown, seeds that took root when a young Gleeson later went into a local tattoo parlour and had the emblem of Sydney punk pioneers Radio Birdman indelibly inked into his skin. He was in it for life.

Meanwhile, though, the budding singer was cutting his teeth at assemblies, formals and school masses before he and Walmsley formed a band called Aspect.

“Once Aspect broke up in 1988 we got together with some guys who were in other bands and said, ‘right, let’s have a real crack at this’,” Gleeson says.

“Having a crack” involved buying a PA, buying a truck and hitting the pubs and clubs until somebody took notice.

“We did 300 shows in three years,” Gleeson recalls.

But it was Triple J’s Battle of the Bands that really threw the Jets into the national spotlight.

“I remember that all the heats were at Selina’s in Sydney, and we’d bring buses of our fans down with us,” Gleeson says.

“At first it was like one bus with 20 people on it. By the time we got to finals it was five buses and we just stacked the crowd. (Singer) Lisa Edwards was brought out to provide some entertainment but the crowd wasn’t having a bar of it – they were just chanting Jets! Jets! Jets!”

Whether it was their performance or the no-doubt frightening sound of hundreds of boozed up Novocastrians, the Jets won the trophy.

Gleeson with Screaming Jets members Jimi Hocking, Grant Walmsley, and Craig Rosevear.

Triple J championed the band (a situation that continued until the band gave rival station Triple M an exclusive drop on a new single) and before you could say Long Way to the Top, The Screaming Jets were being hailed as the saviours of Aussie rock.

The band found themselves being courted by rooArt, an Australian label founded by INXS manager Chris Murphy.

It was an odd fit – rooArt was all stripy T-shirts and floppy fringes, the home of bands like Ratcat, The Hummingbirds and The Fauves. It was hardly the place for a bunch of rough and ready Novocastrians with a frontman that UK music mag Kerrang described as “a tattooed madman, hell on heels … a real horror show cross between Alex from A Clockwork Orange and, in part, Mike Patton. Between songs his patter is a hilarious cocktail of equal parts vitriol and obscenity”.

But the late Murphy wanted The Jets, and Gleeson speculates that it might have been as much about pissing off Michael Gudinski, who’d also shown interest in signing the band, as it was about a love of their music.

“We didn’t know there was a longstanding rivalry between Murphy and Gudinski,” Gleeson says. “Gudinski had done all the legwork, then Chris came in with this ridiculous offer.”

Suddenly the young rockers were literally sipping champagne in the clouds, signing contracts on board a private jet. It’s the rock ’n’ roll dream, but Gleeson says in hindsight none of them had the faintest idea about contract law, entertainment lawyers or any of the intricacies of the dark arts of the music industry.

Gleeson, singer, Jimi Hocking, Grant Walmsley, Craig Rosevear in 1994.

“We had no idea,” he says. “You can’t cry over spilt milk, but the fact that people can make so much money out of signing kids up to these contracts is pretty dodgy when you think about it.

“And we had so many mixed messages from rooArt. We were not a rooArt band, and the people in the office hated our guts. We were recording downstairs, running around the office having fights with our BB guns … they weren’t on our side.”

A classic example of this was the recording of the track FRC, which of course stands for Fat Rich … well, you know.

The Jets brought in a stack of mates to help record the shouted chorus, with members of The Angels, The Choirboys, The Baby Animals and Mortal Sin. It’s not hard to imagine how a label focused on jangly guitars might have been perplexed by a studio crammed full of tattooed rockers screaming “Fat, fat, fat rich c---s!” at the tops of their voices.

“They (rooArt) didn’t want FRC on there at all, and we fought tooth and nail for it,” Gleeson says.

“Then, after all that, it’s the very first thing they release in America. America!

“Were they trying to kill us or what? I was trying to explain to people that it’s a word you use for your friends in Australia, but every time you say that word it’s like a dagger through the heart of the American audience. In England it was all right.”

But it was Better –debut album All For One’slead single – that really put the Jets on the nation’s radar. It had all the elements of an Oz rock classic – a catchy guitar riff, an earworm chorus and just the right amount of “get rooted” swagger.

“Better went to No.3 and the album went to No.2,” Gleeson recalls. “We were kept out of No.1 by frigging (stripy T-shirt-wearing jangly indie act) Ratcat.”

The Jets were the real deal, and even the coolest cats at rooArt had to admit it.

Gleeson, right, with singer Slim Dusty at Iron Duke Hotel in Alexandria in 1998.

Well, most of the cats at rooArt. Katie Snarskis still wasn’t convinced.

After quitting her job as a DJ spinning discs at The Toucan and Limbo, the 18-year-old Katie had hopped on a bus to Sydney with no plans and $100 in her pocket. Basically Axl Rose in the Welcome to the Jungle film clip.

She fell in with a musical crowd, ended up working with Richard Wilkins on the Australian version of MTV and, when that folded, found herself applying for a job with the aforementioned rooArt Records.

“So I’m in this interview at rooArt with the managing director Kim (Frankiewicz) and she said ‘you’ll love working with our bands, and you’ll really like working with the Screaming Jets’.

“And I was like, ‘well here’s the thing. I REALLY don’t want to work with The Screaming Jets’. I said this in a job interview! I said, ‘I don’t like the band and I don’t like Dave Gleeson’. She said, ‘you’ll change your mind when you meet him,’ and I was like, ‘I honestly don’t think I will’.”

When it came time for Katie to finally call Gleeson she did everything she could to get out of it, asking her colleagues to make the call for her. They refused.

“The Jets were overseas and Rolling Stone needed to do an interview,” she recalls.

“This was pre-internet and I needed to talk to Dave to set up this interview. Anyway, I finally called him and he was in South Africa and he wasn’t really enjoying it and he was missing home. So we ended up having this really long conversation and he was really funny. Next time I called him I called him from home and we spoke for ages.”

With cricketer star Dennis Lillee.

There’s a golden rule in the record industry that says label employees don’t date label artists, so despite Gleeson’s regular pleas to go out with him, Katie stuck to her guns and said no. And she kept saying no until Frankiewicz told her it was fine if nobody found out.

After a clandestine romance Frankiewicz eventually decided it was safe to tell Chris Murphy that his promotions gun was dating his top-selling artist. It didn’t go down as well as they hoped.

“She came down from Chris’s office and I said, ‘how did it go?’,” Katie says.

“Not good,” the MD replied. “He told me to sack you.”

But Katie dodged that bullet, moved to PolyGram Records and, 25 years ago, tied the knot with Gleeson on a summer’s day at St Mary Magdalene Catholic Church in Sydney’s Rose Bay.

After getting pregnant with first child Bella the couple knew that the rock ’n’ roll life was not that compatible with parenthood, and a move to Adelaide became a real possibility.

Bella is now 16 and learning to drive, little brother James is 13 and obsessed with horror movies. Nan and Pop live in a converted stone barn next to the house. Life is good.

Gleeson with children James, 13, Bella, 16. Picture: Tom Huntley

And that’s how Dave Gleeson ended up tending to the sheep.

A 30th anniversary re-recording of All For One is in the can, and a supporting national tour is on the cards.

He’s also been flat out working on 40th anniversary projects for his other band The Angels, where he took over the frontman role in 2011.

Gleeson grew up with posters of The Angels on his wall. The band, with the manic Doc Neeson out front underpinned by the tough-as-nails guitar work of the shades-wearing Brewster brothers, may have been from Adelaide but they perfectly suited the Newcastle aesthetic. Part punk rock, part pub rock, all energy.

So when an unwell – and since departed – Neeson left the band a decade ago, John Brewster knew he needed someone who could not only tackle the vocals but also bring some of Neeson’s famous presence to the role. He phoned Gleeson.

“I rang Dave and said, ‘we’re looking for a new singer’,” Brewster says.

“He said, ‘you’ve gotta be kidding!’. I thought that meant he wasn’t interested, but then he said ‘I’m a huge fan and it would be an honour’.”

Gleeson barely had to learn the lyrics. These songs – Take A Long Line, No Secrets, Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again – were ingrained. Part of his upbringing.

“The thing about Dave,” Brewster continues, “is that he actually has a timbre in his voice that’s not that dissimilar to Doc’s.

Plays up to the crowd while fronting The Angels.

In fact he probably has a bigger range than Doc. But for the keys that we wrote those songs in, he’s just perfect. I can’t think of a better guy for the role.

“And he’s a great frontman – he’s got that mixture of a dramatic actor and a clown. There are certain clowny things he does that are just brilliant, and he has a sense of drama that just suits the band.”

The fans were, naturally, a little sceptical at first. And you can’t blame them – rock ’n’ roll is littered with cautionary tales of bands attempting to replace iconic frontmen and failing. INXS failed. Van Halen succeeded when they swapped out David Lee Roth for Sammy Hagar, but failed when they attempted the same trick with Gary Cherone. AC/DC pulled it off with Brian Johnson, although plenty would argue that the Bon Scott era remains the band’s high point.

But any scepticism surrounding Gleeson as frontman of The Angels was soon melted away by the singer’s ability and unbridled enthusiasm for the job.

“It’s funny, because growing up I always thought The Angels were so much older than us,” Gleeson, now 53, laughs.

“As you get older you start to look at age differently. I remember being a young bloke when Roy Orbison died at 52 and thinking, ‘aw yeah, he had a fair crack’. I don’t think that anymore.”

All For One 30 Year Anniversary Edition is out on October 22 and can be preordered at screamingjetsofficial.com.au