Back when Australian garage-rockers Jet were dominating aughts FM radio with their attitudinal, riffage-heavy bangers “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” and “Cold Hard Bitch,” drummer Chris Cester was sort of the Tommy Lee of the alt-rock scene — in the sense that his huge rock-star personality (which has not diminished even slightly over the past two decades, judging from his boldly hilarious new interview for Licorice Pizza’s LPTV) often outshone his big brother Nic Cester, Jet’s lead singer.

“Honestly, a lot of people in the past have said, ‘He leads from the back,’ that kind of thing. And the truth is, I’m pretty vain. I always enjoyed the show part of the show, really selling the show and going for it.” So states Chris as he sits with his new-ish band, the ferocious and swaggering Mystic Knights, at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, where they’re celebrating the 7-inch vinyl release of their second single, “Count.”

“I’ve never really said this before, but it often bothered me, because I’m a songwriter, that I would write these [Jet] songs and I’d play them in front of thousands of people, and it would be my brother singing them, not me,” admits Chris (whose many Jet co-writes include “Cold Hard Bitch,” “Rollover DJ,” “Get What You Need,” “Move On,” and “Take It or Leave It”). “When I was in my mid-twenties, I probably selfishly thought, ‘Nobody even knows it’s me,’ all the time. … It was a little bit frustrating to have done the work and not get the rewards, the recognition. … I have no qualms with that now; it was what it was, is what it is. But now I get to perform all the songs that I write myself. It’s been a long time coming, and yeah, I enjoy it!”

Mystic Knights is a supergroup featuring the Soft White Sixties’ Aaron Eisenberg and film composer/self-described “road dog” Manny Castro, and originally known as Mystic Knights of Amnesia. (There’s no connection to the Danny Elfman-fronted new wave band once fully called the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo; the name was actually a “smart-ass” suggestion from Chris’s pal Noel Gallagher.) “I met Chris out one night and I gave him a ride home from somewhere and we were talking, and he’s like, ‘Dude, your girl’s older than you. You must have a big dick,’” Castro laughingly recalls. “And I was like, ‘This guy’s my new best friend.’”

That was obviously an auspicious (and for Cester, on-brand) start, and Mystic Knights’ early L.A. show were packed. Cester opted not to do the Phil Collins/Don Henley/Andy Sturmer-from-Jellyfish schtick (meaning, he didn’t sing while playing drums, although he and his bandmates joke that they might “still get him a headset” in the future). But despite having all the bravado and bluster that would make him a natural frontman, he surprisingly confesses, “To be honest, the first show Mystic Knights ever played, I was really nervous. I know I’m not very shy, but I remember going to, um, extreme lengths to overcome my shyness that night — let’s just put it that way.”

Manny Castro, Chris Cester, Aaron Eisenberg

However, this actually wasn’t the first time Chris had been up in front. His centerstage debut technically took place in 2017, when another supergroup he was involved with, the Jaded Hearts Club (a rotating-member, all-star Beatles cover band also featuring Muse’s Matt Bellamy, the Last Shadow Puppets’ Miles Kane, the Zutons’ Sean Payne, and occasionally Nic Cester, Blur’s Graham Coxon, and Ilan Rubin of Nine Nails/Foo Fighters) played a party for their musician friend Jamie Davis.

Chris confesses again, “I was so nervous. I’d never felt nervous like that before. I’d been so lucky in my career up until that point, to be able to be in the back. It actually gave me a lot of respect for what my brother does for a living, being the frontman. I always just sort of took it for granted when you go onstage every night, and we had a pretty lucky quick road to success with Jet. It gave me a lot of respect for him because I went onstage, I was like, ‘Oh damn, this is a whole different ballgame.’ But something happened after that. It was just fun. We’d gotten together because it was a friend’s birthday, like, ‘Let’s just do some Beatles covers,’ and we just had such a good time. … So, I got to go onstage and really learn how to perform.”

The next year, Jaded Hearts Club performed at Rachael Ray’s outdoor Feedback party at South by Southwest. (“We had a bet of who could keep their leather jacket on for the longest. And I won. Of course I won. I always win,” Chris quips). And  even more intimidatingly, they played a Stella McCartney event where her father, an actual Beatle, showed up and surprise-jammed with them. By this point, Chris was feeling more confident behind the mic, but as he recalls, “It was intense, because there’s fame, and then there’s the Beatles! It was amazing, because I know a few famous people, but it’s a different kind of level when it’s someone like him. … We were just halfway through and I was singing, ‘She was just 17…’ It was a foot-high stage and then [Sir Paul McCartney] just stepped on there. I looked over to my right and I was like [jaw drops]. … I got offstage and there was like 48 missed text messages. Everyone knew about it within 20 minutes. My mom had called me three times!”

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All of this set up Chris for sure success as a cocksure frontman, but only a few weeks after Mystic Knights’ above-mentioned first Los Angeles shows, the COVID-19 lockdown put their live plans on hold. So, the band shifted their focus to writing and recording, and it was a prolific time: While Mystic Knights have only released two singles so far (the other one being “This High Up”), they estimate that they have at least 250 songs in their arsenal.

“Chris has an old G3 tower computer full of unreleased songs,” Eisenberg laughs.

“And there’s like a hundred songs labeled ‘Tuesday,’ and then a hundred more labeled ‘Wednesday,’ and a hundred more labeled ‘Thursday,’ or something like that. So, it’s hard to find them,” adds Castro.

Jet have enjoyed a resurgence as of late — they were inducted into the Hall of Fame at the 2023 ARIA Music Awards (Australia’s equivalent to the Grammys), where Chris and his Jet bandmates performed a medley of hits, and then officially “reunited” in 2024, although Chris has not been part of that reunion, with Peter Marin playing drums instead. When asked about the possibility of him returning to Jet to appear on their long-rumored comeback album (which would be Jet’s first since 2009), he bristles a bit and answers with his usual sauciness, “Well, if you were Jet, and the drummer in Jet had 250 songs on the boil, what would you do?”

Fair enough. Chris is instead excitedly prepping Mystic Knights’ debut full-length album, whittling down those 250 songs. “Oh yeah, we’re making a record. It’s going to be out this year,” reveals Castro. “We went to EastWest [Studios] the other day. We finished recording the whole thing, and now we’re just in the final mixing and getting all the final vocals and overdubs done.”

Watch Mystic Knights’ full LPTV interview in the video at the top of this article, where they discuss tricking Chris’s friend, Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon, into saying the C-word on live radio; their surprising desert-island-disc picks; their unexpected (and awesome) live Kasabian cover; the story behind Jet’s bloody and murderous seldom-aired “K.I.A.” music video; and Chris’s love for under-appreciated (on this side of the equator) Australian power-trio You Am I.