The first question that comes to mind when interviewing Jason Davis is: who exactly am I talking to?

There is Jabba – you know Jabba, that big, bouncy, wild, up-for-anything guy who used to pull the wacky stunts and muck around with rock stars on the old Channel V – and there is Jason. Jason Davis, the thoughtful, articulate, bespectacled pop culture aficionado and pundit in whom there may be just a little of that Jabba spark peeking out from time to time, but who ain’t the same guy. At least according to himself, who is of course the expert, being both of them. If you see what I mean. I’ll let him explain.

“(Jabba and Jason) are two very, very different people,” he says. “I went by Jabba since the age of 10, and I reclaimed Jason around 2004. So when I meet people it’s always, what context am I meeting them? If it’s me neighbour, I’m Jason. If it’s someone I’m professionally acquainted with, it’s normally Jabba, because then I can get away with being a dinosaur and saying inappropriate stuff.”

So Jabba wasn’t just a veejay name adopted for the sake of showbiz? “Jabba was a shield I created when I was ten, at primary school, when two girls went ‘you look like Jabba the Hutt’. My first nickname was ‘JD Hogg’ from the Dukes of Hazzard, because my initials were JD, so I thought Jabba the Hutt, the most vile notorious gangster in the universe, was an upgrade from old Boss Hog.”

It’s safe to say that by the time Jabba burst onto our screens in the ’90s, in the early days of pay-TV in Australia, he resembled neither Boss Hog nor the infamous Hutt, instead being a long, lanky streak of chaos that perfectly epitomised the anarchic vibe that Foxtel’s fledgling music channel was hoping to generate. It’s a job that he landed in the most perfectly Jabba-ish way.

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“I was working in a cafe called the Reasonably Good Cafe on Abercrombie Street in Darlington, and one of the guys I worked with, his flatmate worked in a casting agency, and they were casting for Australia’s first 24-hour music channel. I would have been 21, and he said ‘you should go and audition, because you love music and you never shut up’. I wore a flannelette shirt and a high-vis vest and had a shaved head. And when they asked me at the audition, ‘why do you want this job’, I said, ‘I’m about to be evicted and need some money to pay the rent’. They said that I immediately got the job because they had like 2000 previous candidates, people from Home and Away, everyone who’d ever auditioned for something. Everyone else answered, ‘I love music, music is my passion’. And I guess, in that instant, I gave a really real answer.”

From that first interview, Davis’ career has been marked by a certain disregard for the way things are supposed to be done. One of the first things he filmed – directed by future collaborator Paul Fenech – was a segment in which he spray-painted the “top ten ways to get evicted” on the wall of the house he was living in. “At Channel V, it was a risk-taking environment … until it wasn’t,” he recalls. “It’s more challenging to take a risk. I guess we need artists to make that stand and not care. And that, typically, was musicians, and that’s probably what informed my worldview.” It didn’t always pay off – an interview with Nick Cave in which the legend was nonplussed by Jabba’s question, “so … you’re into big things?” continues to “haunt” him – but it made for one certainty: that watching Jabba would, at the very least, be unpredictable.