If you were around during the late ’90s and early 2000s, and you enjoyed driving around for hours with more people in the car than there were seatbelts, wagging school, partying until dawn every weekend, or taking part in any activity that involved bongs and buckets, dropping tabs, popping pills, or funnelling full bottles of Bundy or Cougar, then there’s a good chance Jebediah were featured heavily on your burnt CDs, mixtapes recorded from Triple J, LimeWire downloads, or your iPod Shuffle.

Although Jebediah were adored right across the country, particularly by those who lived for the festival scene, there was always an extra level of pride that came with being a Jebediah fan from WA, more specifically, Perth, where the band grew up. For countless local musicians, they were the benchmark. They were the band every aspiring rocker dreamed of becoming, proving that a group of sandgropers could make it onto the national stage, and even Recovery, without losing the sound and energy that made them uniquely Western Australian.

But it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. Like all great bands, Jebediah experienced turbulent times, many of which may not be familiar to the average fan. Arlo Dean Cook’s new documentary, Jebediah: Are We OK?, steps in to fill those gaps in the band’s story. It’s a perfectly balanced rockumentary that never shies away from exploring the darker chapters of Jebediah’s journey while also celebrating the rapture and nostalgia of a band that soundtracked a generation whose biggest worry at the time was whether they remembered to take the chicken out of the freezer after their mum had told them to earlier that day.

Having directed and filmed music videos for bands like Tim Rogers, Bob Evans, Phil Jamieson, Greta Ziller and Andrew Swift, there’s never any doubt that filmmaker Arlo Dean Cook was the right person to take on the challenge of putting together such an intimate portrait of Jebediah, a challenge that consumed his life for the better part of ten years. 

In this interview, Arlo discusses how his own life shaped the film’s narrative, the challenge of sifting through decades of archive footage, funding a film that very few saw any potential in (oh, how they were wrong), and how working with his collaborator, co-writer and producer Brooke Tia Silcox, was vital to the final cut of the film.  

If you’re heading to MIFF (details here), or CinefestOZ (details here), you really must add Jebadiah: Are We Ok? to your must-see lists.

“I fell in love with the love that they still had for each other, which was the seed of this documentary.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

I’d assume that there aren’t many people around today who haven’t enjoyed at least one Jebediah song throughout their life. Do you remember the first time you heard a Jebediah song?

Definitely. I don’t know if I could tell you which one it was because my first year of high school was 1997, and that’s when Slightly Odway came out, and that’s when I started playing guitar. So all of that is locked into almost one memory for me. But I think I would’ve gotten that album as soon as it came out, and it probably would’ve been because of the singles leading up to it. I would say it would’ve been Leaving Home, maybe on a Hottest 100 CD or on the radio or something like that. There were around six singles from that album! So it was just that whole year. It was the year of Jebediah.

What was happening for you when Jebediah exploded onto the scene? Did you know what you wanted to do with your life?

When Jebediah came out in ’97, I was in my first year of high school. All I wanted to do was play in bands. My dream throughout most of my 20s was to be a musician. I gave it a good crack and had varying degrees of success with a lot of different bands, and then I realised it was very hard to try and make a career out of it. So I just kept music to a fun hobby. A friend of mine had studied film at VCA and was bored one day and was talking about maybe making a music video. As soon as I made my first music video, I thought, “This is what I should be doing.” And then it went from there.

What kind of bands were you playing in?

It was always very fun and very indie or punk rock. It was a pretty happy team. It wasn’t anything too heavy or gothic or depressive or anything like that. I guess it was similar to Jebediah and Presidents of the United States of America, and I was playing in ska bands as well. I just wanted to have fun.

Were people responding to what you were putting out?

Yeah, definitely. I played in a ton of bands over the years and they did okay, but I was really pushing for a career. I just wanted to play music forever. But as I said, you realise that making a career out of anything artistic in Australia is a pretty hard path to try and follow. After about 10 years of not having any money and keeping myself available for tours, it starts to wear you down a little bit. It was a good decision to step back and to keep it as something that I loved doing instead of something that I expected something from.

It sounds a lot like being a film journalist in Australia right now.

I can imagine. [Laughs]. Well, I did anything artistic. I think writers and painters and anyone making art in Australia are going to be doing it tough to a certain degree. Or you’ve got to be pretty savvy and have a couple of different income streams to try and make it work. And that’s obviously the same for musicians. Anyone who’s making a living making music today almost has three careers. They’ve got their rock band, they’ve got their solo band, they’ve got their tribute acts, and they might do radio. Any filmmaker I know is also a photographer or has a part-time job somewhere else.

Were you surrounded by creatives growing up?

My family was very supportive, but I was probably the only creative within my initial family. When I was a kid, I was always writing and drawing. And then once I hit the guitar, that’s kind of all I did for 10 years after. But I’ve always loved movies and I’ve always loved books and anything to do with storytelling. I gravitated towards people with similar passions. All of my friends growing up were definitely creative. But I grew up in Adelaide and I moved to Melbourne around 2009, and that was amazing for me. If I’d stayed in Adelaide, I don’t know if I would’ve fallen into film, but meeting the people I did when I moved to Melbourne, that was when I started meeting my first filmmaker friends and working on my first music videos. There were definitely a lot more opportunities in Melbourne for me.

That’s a great segue into my next question, and please excuse me while I digress for a moment. But how did you come to be the editor for Westgate? I’m an admirer of Adrian Ortega and I love to take any opportunity to get to know about anyone who has worked on one of his films.

A cinematographer who I’ve always worked with is Anthony Koreny, who had shot Adrian’s first film, Cerulean Blue. Anthony and I were working together on a music video, and he’d come and help from time to time on Jebediah: Are We Ok? While he was shooting Cerulean Blue, I would pick his brains about making a real movie and being on a real film set. I just thought that was amazing. I was a big supporter of Anthony and Adrian as Cerulean Blue came out, and when Adrian said he was going to start working on Westgate and would require an assistant editor, I told him I’d love to do it. I was really enjoying editing at that stage. He sent me the script and the reference films for Westgate, and I thought the script was really, really strong. He painted a very, very specific and unique world, and the characters were great. I thought it was a very smart way to make a no-budget indie film. And then I watched the two reference films, Good Time and Fish Tank, and I realised I knew this script, I knew this world, I knew the style he was going for. I was cutting together the scenes and sequences as the rushes were coming through so that he could make sure he was getting what he needed before he was moving on from certain locations. I was editing it quickly and it was fun. I’d never edited dialogue scenes before, but I really enjoyed it, and what I was doing seemed to work. He was happy with what was coming through. The whole experience was just a joy.

Watching Westgate for the first time, how did you rate your work?

It’s really weird to look back on it because it didn’t feel like we did a lot of work. Within the first month, we had the first assembly done because it’s shorter than your usual feature film. He didn’t shoot heaps of coverage, and there’s a lot of long takes. We watched the first assembly thinking, “This works,” and now we get to play. And for anyone who’s seen the movie, the main character is a really tough one. She’s not a very likeable character, so the majority of the work that we did was about really trying to shape and craft her arc to make her more likeable without softening her too much. We held a few test screenings and we came back to it, but we never worked on it more than part-time. But yeah, it was a joy. I loved it. And I’m really proud of the finished product.

Adrian doesn’t like people referring to his main character, Netta, as being unlikable. I learnt that very quickly.

[Laughs]. Well, it’s loosely based on his mum. So I guess it’s like having a dig at his mum. But for me as an outsider, I think she’s a great character. When I eventually understood her, I really understood her because I’m a parent as well. Early on, Adrian was showing the film to a lot of his contemporaries, other 20-year-old filmmakers and friends. At some point, I pulled him up and asked him how many people with kids, how many parents, had he shown this film to. So then we started sending it out to some older demographics, and he started to get different opinions and feedback, which was really important.

Well, let’s get back on track. When did you first meet Jebediah?

I was making music videos, and that’s when I met Ness [Vanessa Thornton, bass], who was a part of one of those music videos that I was working on at the time. Ness suggested that I help make a music video for one of her other bands, Axe Girl, who are great, by the way. We were doing pre-production on this Axe Girl music video, and then she casually mentioned that Jebediah were doing a 20-year anniversary tour and asked if I would want to come along and help them film some content. It was hard to try and be cool and calm and collected and suppress the inner fanboy. [Laughs]. But I did everything I could to make sure I was available for Jebs for whatever they needed in that first year during that tour. I was around as much as I could.

How quickly did you hit it off with the band?

I remember meeting them at their rehearsal room. I said something like, “Oh, I don’t want to let my inner fanboy out.” And Brett [Mitchell, drums] was like, “No, no, dude, let’s hear it.” So I gave them the spiel: “Oh, you were my favourite band in high school! I used to cover this song and this song.” And once that was out of the way, they were very good at making me feel at ease and relaxed because they’re very nice, natural sort of people. There’s no pretentiousness. Within the first month, I’d gone to Sydney with them and I was staying in hotels with them while we did a promo tour. I got to know them all really quickly, and I fell in love with the love that they still had for each other, which was kind of the seed of this documentary.

Why was it the right time to make a documentary about Jebediah?

Well, I remember vividly the end of that first week of travelling with them and staying with them, how amazing and unique their story was. I’d never thought about making a documentary at that point, but I remember thinking, “Yeah, this is amazing. I know I can make this film and tell this story.” I had a very strong sense of how I wanted the documentary to end. I was in awe of the fact that they’d made it. And it wasn’t about success or fame. They had made it in the best way possible in that they started as teenagers hanging out and playing music together. That very innocent and very beautiful, youthful dream, that bubble had never burst over 30 years. At that point, it had been 20 years, but that alone was a really, really beautiful story to tell, especially when documentaries tend to get very heavy, or they’re told so one-sided, or they’re made posthumously. I was really excited to put something beautiful out into the world. I wanted to celebrate this really positive story, this win. That’s something that I would want to see. But believe it or not, it was a very hard one to pitch. Trying to get people on board over the next couple of years was tough because it didn’t meet any of the standard dramatic criteria. It didn’t have any of the points or any of the drama that everyone needed in their stories.

When I think of music documentaries, my mind always goes back to Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which is widely considered as being one of the best. What are some of your favourites, and did any in particular inspire the vision for this documentary?

I watched everything, and there’s a lot that I loved. I love Some Kind of Monster. I thought that film was amazing, and it was very brave of the band as well. I wasn’t a fan of the band before the documentary, but LCD Soundsystem’s Shut Up and Play the Hits was a great one. And that’s half a concert film, but the other half of that documentary was really, really inspiring to me. I love documentaries with a lack of talking heads. When it’s just the audio narration accompanied by this absolute wealth of archive footage, you can do something really cool with what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing, and the story you’re telling can take you to this third place. It’s a little more poetic. I loved Sam Jones’ I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco. I also enjoyed films that were a bit more abstract and punk rock, like Jem Cohen’s Instrument about Fugazi. It was really, really great. But there were a lot. In those first couple of years, I pretty much watched every music documentary I could get my hands on.

What was the band’s reaction to having a documentary made about them?

It’s funny, I remember pitching the idea to them. I went away and wrote this document about what I think their story is and what I would do. And I remember getting the thumbs up from everyone straight away, which was kind of surprising. Brett had said a few people had tried to make a documentary over the years and it hadn’t quite felt like the right thing or the right time. He said, “It doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.” I always took that as a good compliment, that they felt safe enough that they could trust me to tell their story at that point. But they were never particularly comfortable. Brett was never particularly comfortable having a film made about his life, and it took him a few years to really warm up to it. I think he’s still a bit uncomfortable about it. Chris [Daymond, guitar] loves the idea that there’s a film about his life, which is great because he shot most of the archive footage for the band. He had a camera for a couple of years there around the late ’90s, early 2000s. And Ness just goes with the flow. [Laughs]. She’s cool as. And Kev [Mitchell, singer and guitar], I think he’s excited by it, but he’s an introvert, and he can be quite private. He’s got a lot going on upstairs, and he’s a sensitive guy. The relationship between all of us making the film together has definitely changed a lot over the years, but ultimately they were really great about opening up their lives and their worlds to me in the film. And I’m really thankful for that, but it wasn’t always easy.

I’ve spent time with bands. Kev’s a frontman. Even though he’s an introvert, there’s no doubt he would love the idea of a film being made about him.

[Laughs.] I think he’s definitely excited because he loves movies as well as books. There was definitely a good level of excitement there. But Kev’s not the traditional egotistical frontman. He’s an interesting one. All of them are interesting. I think they love being part of the group more than anything.

Going back to Brett for a moment. What was his biggest concern? Was he concerned about revealing too much of himself?

If you get Brett alone and talk to him, he’s the funniest and wittiest guy in the world. Now that you’ve seen the film, you will remember him saying that he never wants to be on stage, ever. That’s not what he makes music for. The public side of being in a well-known band is something that he’s had to work hard to try and ignore or deal with because he just wants to be with his mates making music, but he has no interest in being in the public eye. It’s just something that he has to suffer through, which is great because I think that really helps ground the band as well. I think that’s really important for the band’s dynamic, having someone like that in a band who’s not concerned at all with the bells and whistles of the entire thing.

Jebediah: Are We Ok? opens with the line, “I have a funny relationship with the whole concept of growing up. Because in so many ways, I don’t think I have.” Between addiction, poor management choices, corporate pressures, deaths, marriage breakdowns, and everything in between, I thought that line was an interesting choice to open the documentary with because it’s quite contradictory considering all of that. Was that the point?

There is something paradoxical about the way that music and your day-to-day life entwine when you’re a musician. And it took us a long time to really settle on the theme of this film. For a long time, the theme was family. But once we found the theme of growing up, it really just made everything click because there is a well-documented Peter Pan-type aspect to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Everything we were looking at and discovering and exploring within the film all fit within that. I think that everyone grows up, but at what point? Everyone in Jebediah grew up, but in different ways and at different times. And I thought that was really, really interesting. And I thought it was a very sensitive way to deal with topics like addiction and family and some of the things that can be a little more sensitive and vulnerable. If you’re looking at it through the lens of growing up, which is something that everyone does, that makes it more of a universal theme. There’s definitely some contradictions and some paradoxes in that opening line, but I like that personally in film when you’re looking at both sides and there’s not really a clear answer on some of the issues. And that changes over time because films are inherently about change.

Throughout the research process, did you learn anything new about the band that you may not have known prior?

Oh, heaps. And half of it was learned in that first weekend just travelling around with the band while they were telling their story. I was always in awe of how they had managed to navigate all of the pitfalls that most other bands had fallen into. For some reason, at every fork in the road, they seemed to have made the right decision. And that decision was to protect the core group, to protect their family unit, to protect their integrity. Because I think it’s one thing to have four musicians that can still be friends and could still make music, but can still make good music and can still make music that is similar to how they’d started. I think that’s pretty incredible as well. Their relationships and their friendships never suffered, but neither did their music or their integrity. There were so many ways that that could have gone wrong over the years. I’d ask myself, “How did they survive that?” And after I interviewed them all separately, it became pretty clear that it was all about all of the decisions that they made to protect that core.

How nostalgic was it for you to dig into all of this archive material? Was it easily accessible?

Oh, it was amazing. Around two or three years into this project, Chris dumped 60 or 70 MiniDV tapes on me and said he’d started digitising them, but that I could finish them off. They were all out of order and there was some weird stuff on them. [Laughs]. But watching them back the first time and seeing them backstage at a Big Day Out, touring Australia, touring Canada, and then this famous person would drop in. It was wild. It was so much fun. And I sat with that for a few years, and every time I would recut a scene or I needed to get a piece of footage or something like that, I could come back and go through the archive again and just keep digging out little bits of gold right up until the end. Maybe a year or two before we finished, Jenni Wetters, who had made all their music videos in the ’90s, was moving stuff out of her parents’ house and found her box of all the old rolls of film and film transfers and all the Beta tapes from all the rushes from all their music videos. And that was way more exciting because here I had all this beautiful footage shot by cinematographers on film. I had all the rushes and extra takes from Please Leave and Feet Touch the Ground. A lot of it was shot on either Super 8 or Super 16. Getting all of that and sifting through that was just incredible. The footage for Feet Touch the Ground, which opens and closes the film, was just gorgeous footage to use. It was really fun to have really well-shot footage archived next to the really raw, fun, energetic footage that Chris was shooting on tour. And then 10 years of my footage. We were pretty spoiled for choice visually.

Considering you had so much footage, how did you settle on this final version of the film?

It was a lot of work, but over the course of a lot of years, I think we had close to 49 versions. 50 by the time we got down to post-production. And we were exploring a lot of scenes in a lot of different ways. We also had different durations, but we always wanted a 90-minute duration. That was the perfect length for this story. But for a long time, I was dealing with a film that was two hours and 20 minutes long. I was never dealing with a five- or 10-hour cut like some documentaries, but getting it down from two hours to 90 minutes was a bit of a task. But we shared it with a lot of really great creatives along the way, and there were a couple of really, really great writers who helped out. And we did some test screenings, and there were a couple of people that had some really, really important feedback, which helped. So yeah, it was fun. It’s kind of hard to think about the tough or traumatic times now because it’s all over. [Laughs].

I know it’s not a massively important part of the documentary itself, but where did all of this awesome ’90s aesthetic come from? I spotted Simpsons VHS box sets, the analogue TV, CDs, posters, and I think I even spotted a He-Man figure in there.

It’s all their stuff. [Laughs]. Some things were just lying around, but most of it was theirs. Recreating that ’90s aesthetic was huge for us. If the film’s about growing up, then nostalgia is a big one. And nostalgia for the ’90s is so massive at the moment. I still love the old CRT TVs and VCRs and things like that. There’s a shot in the trailer of lifting the lid off a VCR and inserting the tape, which I still get a huge thrill from. I was at Chris’s house one day and he had a couple of VCRs, and I just got the screwdriver out and took the top off and put one of his tapes in and was filming it. I really wanted to follow that progression of technology from VHS to CD to Discman to iPod, then back to vinyl. I think it’s a good way to mark time as well.

One of the great pleasures of my film work has been watching the career of Brooke Tia Silcox blossom over the years. I have so much genuine respect for how she conducts herself professionally. Can you talk to us about working with Brooke, and what she brought specifically to this project?

Brooke is the best. I always knew that we needed a really good producer to help pull this off. And I went to AIDC [Australian International Documentary Conference] in 2019 to try and find someone, and pretty much everyone had suggested Brooke because she had made Meal Tickets. Meal Tickets was very similar to our experience in that it follows a WA band and was made over ten years with director Mat de Koning. I knew that that was enough. I needed someone who had just been through the process as well, who could help champion our film. And then she made RocKabul, which I also thought was amazing. And everything else she does is great. So it’s been a long, hard road, and I won’t speak for her, but the job that she had of financing the film should be the subject of its own podcast because that was years and years of really, really hard work trying to get people to believe in the film and to try and raise the kind of funds that we needed to finish it off. There are so many costs in the film that we just couldn’t get around. Paying for the music rights was always going to be massive, and we wanted to have all of that archive vision from ABC and Channel V and everything else. So there wasn’t really an option for a super-low-budget version of this film. You couldn’t have this film without Rage and Recovery clips in there. If we couldn’t afford the rights to Leaving Home, it just wouldn’t work. So there was always a figure that we needed to hit, which was quite a lot of money. And like I said, it was not an easy film to sell until it was finished. So we literally had to make the film off our own backs just to show it to people, to prove that this is an important story and here’s why, because it just didn’t translate very well on paper.

And Brooke has a writing credit as well.

She does. For many years, it was just me and Brooke on the team. So I would cut together a rough cut and I’d send it to her, and she would give notes, and we’d sit around, we’d talk about structure and scenes and things like that. I was very open to the collaborative process in those years where we were trying to figure out the story. There were countless phone calls and emails about what was resonating and what was working. Brooke was contributing to the writing, even if it was just as a sounding board and a devil’s advocate.

I may be getting older, but I do still keep up with what’s happening locally, and I know there are certain challenges facing the local music industry, as there are facing the local film industry too. You’ve been involved in the music industry for years, so from your perspective, how much has the Australian music scene changed in your time? Has it changed for the better, or for worse?

It’s changed a lot. [Laughs]. I don’t know if it’s better or worse. It’s just hard. Being a career musician in Australia is a really, really tough gig. If you want to just play music with your friends and start a band and have a good time, there’s a lot of really supportive people out there, and there are a lot of great scenes that you can be a part of, and I think it’s quite beautiful. Everyone really helps each other. So the community aspect of the Australian music scene is incredible. The finance aspect from a government point of view is pretty lacklustre, especially when you look at the way other countries and cities of the world handle it. It’s not great in Australia, unfortunately. Anyone working as a career musician is on the road nine months of the year, and they’re playing, and they’ve got their band, they’ve got their solo act, and they’ve got their tribute acts, and they’re doing radio. It’s a hard life. Most people either give it up professionally and just do it for fun, or it’s very part-time and everyone’s got to go work full-time jobs and maintain that work-life-hobby lifestyle. It’s just so fascinating to me that music is such an important part of everybody’s day-to-day life. I couldn’t exist without music in my life, as I’m sure you couldn’t either. We really do take the music industry for granted. Imagine having something like Screen Australia for the music industry, where they’ll give away a million bucks to a band like they do for someone to make a film. I don’t see any difference between the two industries, but that financial support just doesn’t seem to be there. There are great organisations like WAM and Music Victoria and stuff like that. There are a lot of really great organisations and people out there doing really great things, but it’s just not enough, really. Especially when you consider how many musicians there are in Australia and what that brings to the economy. I didn’t really want to bring up COVID, but I think COVID was a really great microscope on the country’s creative industries. I don’t think anything’s changed at all since COVID. Everything is just as tough.

If at all, how did making this documentary make you reflect on your own life and your own personal journey?

That’s a great question. It was very interesting for me, especially in the beginning of making the film, when I was thinking back on my life as a musician and how that changed, and how my relationship with music changes. But over the course of making this film, Brooke and I both had two kids with our own partners. We spoke a lot about parenting and balancing our creative lifestyle and family life. When our second kids came along, we were talking about the difficulties between having two kids and supporting our partners as well. We’re both really, really lucky that we have very, very supportive partners that put up with all of our crap. [Laughs]. Especially to be making a film for this long, virtually unpaid. Our partners alone deserve some serious accolades and awards. Our own life experiences really altered the true essence of the documentary along the way. That’s what I’ve been reflecting on a lot over the course of this journey. In the beginning, the documentary was all about the music. I was creating their story as a B-story to my own. My life in music was almost like the Bizarro World version of theirs. But then it became all about family and kids and, ultimately, growing up.

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