Jet singer Nic Cester reveals he almost joined AC/DC
In 2016, AC/DC frontman Brian Johnson needed to leave the band temporarily due to problems with his hearing. Axl Rose stepped into his shoes to perform so that AC/DC could honour the remaining tour dates they had that year; however, it has now been revealed recently that it was almost Jet lead singer Nic Cester who took up the mantle.
Hailing from Australia, the same as AC/DC, and with a familiar sound that marries the hard rock style of AC/DC with a more modern garage rock sound, Cester would have been a suitable substitution. Nevertheless, the call still sent shivers down his spine when he was asked to audition.
“I was staying with my in-laws, and I got up in the morning and read the paper, and it said that Brian Johnson wasn’t in the band anymore,” Carter revealed during a new interview with Australian radio station Triple J.
The Jet frontman continued: “I remember saying to my father-in-law, ‘Holy shit, you would not want to step into those shoes’, and literally 20 minutes later, my phone rang, and they’re saying, ‘Would you be interested in going to Atlanta, Georgia to audition and potentially fill in for this next round of dates that we’ve got?”
Cester was daunted by the prospect of auditioning for AC/DC but knew he had to attend the opportunity of a lifetime. “I was like, ‘I think I’ll say yes just for the life experience’,” he said, “I wasn’t really expecting to get the gig, to be honest, but I thought, ‘How could I turn this opportunity down?”
During the audition, the iconic group made him work as Angus Young tried every tactic to make sure Cester could deal with the pressure of being in one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
He remembered: “Angus put me through my paces. Everything was a test to see how I’d handle it – the volume and him going, ‘Okay, let’s do this song’, and I didn’t know [some of them] off the top of my head, so he’d just go, ‘Go over there and learn it’. And the whole band would be waiting there for ten minutes, and I’m just going, ‘Oh, fuck’. It was pretty intense, but I realise now Angus was a super professional guy and wanted to push me to my absolute limit to see how I would react.”
While Cester would have been an adequate lead singer of AC/DC, he certainly has a voice comparable to their early albums; he admits that while some of the Bon Scott tracks came naturally, he struggled to get the ones Johnson sings to par. “It’s a very unusual way of singing, and someone told me, ‘You’re making the mistake of thinking [Johnson is] pushing out an enormous amount of volume’, which is how I sing. But he’s not, he’s whispering directly into a microphone with this enormous volume behind him so it sounds like the loudest thing in the world but it’s not at all, he’s barely pushing out,” he added.
Jet recently announced they will make a new album, set for release in 2025. Meanwhile, Johnson is back in AC/DC, and they will be embarking on a worldwide tour very soon.
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