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Perth MusicMystery Jets Interview
One of the less orthodox bands spawned by the post-Libertines London music scene, the Mystery Jets started at the end of the last century when Blaine Harrison and his dad, Henry, formed a band together. Soon joined by Blaine’s school friends Kai and Will, the band recruited drummer Kapil and started staging gigs in a crumbling hotel ballroom on Eel Pie Island. Their second album Twenty One has just been released in Australia and frontman Blaine Harrison caught up with Justin Middleton for this exclusive interview.
Click here to download the podcast of the entire interview. (13:12 - 3.0Mb)
I asked Blaine if he is looking forward to see how the Australian public will accept the bands second album given many have not heard of the band too much before now. “Yeah I am excited. We’ve been going for a long, long time. I started the band with William, my dad, when I was eight years old so it was a long, long, long time ago. I can’t work out exactly how many years, I’m not very good at math. I’d say things got more serious and focused when we left school and did a couple of tours off our own back. We eventually got the line up that we have today and we started putting on our own parties really as a response to not wanting to go down the traditional pub circuit. That seems to be the route that most bands don’t really have a choice but to go down and that essentially involved charging your friends money to see you at shitty pubs with shitty sound and overpriced alcohol. That seemed like the exact opposite of what we wanted to do at the time. Instead we put on our own parties and eventually they picked up and lots of friends bands that played eventually established themselves and a lot of them got signed. We kind of decided that our work was done and we signed ourselves to 679 Records and got our first album, Making Dens, out in 2006.”
“Twenty One is our second album and we wrote it across the course of about 18 months, maybe a year and put it out early this year in England. With the first album the songs you end up releasing are generally the songs that you have got people’s attention with and it’s really just a case of rounding the album off. But definitely with the second album we had to think a little bit harder and think about what we wanted to say. We toured the hell out of the first album and really went for it on the road so by the end of touring we all felt creatively starved. Henry, my dad, wrote a lot of the lyrics for the first album and William wrote a lot of the music but after touring we all felt like there were things we wanted to say and things we were learning and that kind of resulted in Twenty One.”
With everyone in the band contributing to Twenty One I asked Blaine if it felt different and foreign in creating the album. “It is kind of a thematic album really. A lot of the songs I think really fit together and they all kind of sit under that umbrella of first love and having your heart broken for the first time. We all bring different things to the table, a lot of the lyrics come from Henry and myself and musically William is still, in a way, the driving force but a lot of the other stuff is equally important: the arrangements, and the kind of clothes you put the songs in. A lot of the songs are pop songs at the bottom of them but they are in some kind of disguise and I think that is something we have learnt to manipulate on the second album.”
The band are still young so I asked Blaine if it was hard creating pop songs or if it felt quite natural and easy. “I don’t think initially it was really. We didn’t really grow up with pop music, we are 90’s kids and although what was going on in England at the time was Brit-pop and all that kind of stuff, I think we kind of grew up in our own bubble. My dad plays a lot of prog, a lot of Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Genesis and that sort of stuff and we were teased a lot about it at school. But that was what we really wanted to do and growing up pop music was an unnatural ground for us to cover. With the second album we felt like we wanted to do that and we wanted to go out on a limb and try and do something we had never done before. Likewise with the next album, I think we will try and explore something that does feel completely new. That is the only way you can not trap yourself and not bury yourself in a hole.”
Young Love
Twenty One is out now. For more info on Mystery Jets visit www.mysteryjets.com
