Interview: We Were Promised Jetpacks

You realise you’ve reached your mature years as a pop fan when it’s not so much that the bands are getting younger but – as in the case of the four lads in front of me today – you know the guitarist’s old man.

I contemplate mentioning to Darren Lackie and Sean Smith that in Edinburgh’s Roseburn Primary School they share an alma mater with Ian Anderson, the codpiece-clad and fruity-of-flute leader of 1970s folkie-proggers Jethro Tull, but decide there’s no point as they’ve probably never heard of him.

All of which makes me wonder why Lackie and Smith together with Michael Palmer and Adam Thompson, all 23, decided to call themselves We Were Promised Jetpacks. That’s a phrase which really belongs to children of the 70s, maybe even the 60s, who remember Raymond Baxter and Tomorrow’s World predicting a space-age future for us all, very little of which came to pass.

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“The name came about after we heard a Ricky Gervais podcast,” explains Palmer. “The actual quote was ‘We were promised hovercrafts’ but we thought jetpacks sounded cooler.” So these guys took a Gervais gag and improved it? I’m liking them more and more.

The rumbustious indie kids are on their second album, In The Pit Of The Stomach. It was recorded last November but is only coming out now. There’s a very good reason for this. Just after the album was finished, Palmer was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, undergoing four months of chemotherapy and, in June alone, 17 sessions of radiotherapy. “That’s the bad side of cancer,” he deadpans, “but there’s an upside that nobody likes to talk about.” He means all the sitting around, watching hypnotically trashy daytime TV, being brought crisps and ice-poles by his mum. “Great, eh? Discount all the vomiting and it would have been the best time ever.”

Palmer’s way of coping, it seems, is to crack jokes. He doesn’t mention his illness when I meet the band on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, and then only briefly on the phone after he’s explained the album delay to fans on the Jetpacks’ website – where he cracks more jokes and hails staff at the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre in Glasgow as “superheroes” before promising no more serious posts. “From now on it’ll just be stupid photos and other nonsense.”

Possibly he’s trying to minimise discussion of his condition – “I’m better,” he insists – in case it overshadows the record, a storming affair and a big step forward for the band, of which they’re all proud. But there’s also a sense of wanting to avoid self-indulgence, like all good Scots. WWPJ are Caledonian; you’d never confuse them with Californians. And Thompson, who sings in the vernacular, provides another reminder of this when discussing his lyric-writing technique.

I tell him I’m intrigued by the track Act On Impulse with its refrain “We died alone, we died on impact.” “That’s not about anything,” he says. “It was just a phrase I had in my head, which I then built on. I don’t stress about the words. Usually if they all fit, they’re not too cheesy and they’re a wee bitty mysterious, that’ll do. It’s not as if our songs are sacred or these beautiful pieces of art. We’re just four idiots. I always get my kill when I see folk in bands with big notebooks writing down their feelings – pages and pages of the stuff. You’ll never catch me doing that.”

At this, his bandmates hoot with laughter. The Jetpacks have a tight, banterish, infectious bond and they’ll probably cringe when they read that, but you can imagine that for Palmer, the other three must have been a huge support recently. They’re constantly teeing up each other’s gags – about still living at home (though Lackie has just flown the nest), about the “Guess whose mum and dad?” game they invite fans to play backstage when their parents attend gigs, about their self-consciousness over their combo’s name. Says Thompson: “We kind of regret it now. It’s too flash and we’re not like that.”

The associations go back a long way – Thompson and Palmer were at another capital primary together – and each instinctively knew without the need for a band meeting what they wanted from the second album, not least for it to improve on their debut. Thompson speaks of being “pretty devastated” when he heard These Four Walls back; Smith was too embarrassed to hand out copies. It was recorded more or less live in a studio in London, a city they didn’t know. Their mistakes – “It was an impossible record to mix,” adds Lackie – don’t sound so different from those of many first-timers, but Palmer says they were determined to grab the second chance that many bands – who end up as indie landfill – don’t get.

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WWPJ are even less familiar with Iceland but that’s where they ended up for In The Pit Of The Stomach, at the studio owned by Sigur Ros. They were very conscientious, sampling Reykjavik’s famed nightlife only once. So they can’t testify to the near-scientifically proven theory that Iceland’s women are the world’s most beautiful? The Jetpacks didn’t know about this; they look sad.

With touring about to begin again, they’re now swapping stories about treks past: their stunned surprise when 900 people came out to see them the first time in faraway Seattle, the near-riot in Brooklyn when they wouldn’t play an encore (they never do), and, again in America, the bemusement their togetherness provoked in another band met at an airport who, through time-honoured musical differences, had just been reduced from five to three.

“They thought we were freaks,” says Thompson, to another chorus of laughter. v

In The Pit Of The Stomach is out tomorrow on Fat Cat. We Were Promised Jetpacks play Edinburgh’s Liquid Rooms on Thursday and Glasgow’s ABC on 16 December