New Album ‘Serotonin’ – release date July 5th
The Mystery Jets sit around a vast table, upstairs in a plush West London studio.
Downstairs in the control room, putting the finishing touches to the third Mystery Jets
album, lurks Chris Thomas, legendary producer of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure,
the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK, John Cale’s Paris 1919 and Pulp’s Different
Class, of whom the Mystery Jets understandably seem a little in awe. “He can hear
things that none of us can hear,” whispers guitarist William Rees. “He’s got dog’s
ears.” “And he has the best stories,” nods lead singer Blaine Harrison. “The anecdotes
are just unbelievable.”
It is, the band concede, all rather a long way from their ramshackle beginnings in the
Eel Pie Island boatyard where the Mystery Jets staged impromptu Saturday night gigs
that brought them to the attention of the wider world in 2005. When they emerged,
they seemed like a band entirely unlike any other: the lead singer was on crutches, his
father was on guitar – Henry Harrison had formed the band with his son and Rees
when the latter were both 8 - some of the lyrics were in Latin and the prog rock of
King Crimson and Yes was loudly touted as an influence on their debut album
Making Dens. “We wanted to be Crimson, Yes, the Floyds and Genesis all at the
same time,” says Blaine, “then The Libertines were massively influential. And some
weirder stuff too,” he adds, as if forming a band influenced by King Crimson Yes and
Genesis with your dad when you were 8 wasn’t sufficiently peculiar enough. “There
was Afrobeat and Can as well. Every song on that album had five synthesizers on it
and a harp and a wizard’s hat, field recordings of tramps, people sawing wood and
hammering. By the time you got onstage you were playing bells with your feet. It was
all over the place, but it represented what we wanted to be. We were,” he nods, “ a
very confused bunch of kids, very enthusiastic.”
The sound emerging from the studio today sounds infinitely less chaotic, but no less
inventive. After stripping away much of the excess on their lovelorn, warmly-received
2008 album Twenty One, Serotonin sees the Mystery Jets mapping out entirely new
musical territories: the synthesizer-fuelled perfect pop of Dreaming Of Another
World; It’s Too Late, which begins as an aching soft-rock ballad before unexpectedly
heading somewhere infinitely weirder; the dark, hallucinatory grind of Lorna Doone
(“it’s got this really eerie sound, like you’re out on the moors,” notes Rees, entirely
correctly). You can hear echoes of ELO, 10CC, Fleetwood Mac and Supertramp
rubbing up against the band’s own idiosyncratic, very British, occasionally rather
creepy psychedelic sensibility. “I think it’s really important with a Mystery Jets song
that you want to get involved, that there’s a bit of blood and gore” offers Henry
Harrison - no longer an onstage fixture with band, but still clearly involved in making
their records. “We’ve got our hands in the mud. That’s what I feel about this album.
You take your hands out and if they’re covered in mud, you say, that’s alright. That’s
the kind of feeling we want.”
It’s an album, Blaine suggests, about “dreaming and escapism – we wanted to get a
sense of distance on the album, the idea of looking at the world”. Accordingly, it was
arrived at via a circuituous route that variously involved a scrapped plan to stage a
glam rock revival (“we were wearing all these sparkly clothes at the end of the last
album,” explains Blaine), a stay in a gypsy caravan in Cornwall (“we rehearsed there
for three weeks, feeding the chickens, that was the real beginning of the album”), a
week in “a little pad in Nice” and a temporary name-change to The Crystal Wolf
Hunters during a sojourn in Berlin. “It was meant like a piss-take of all those
Brooklyn Bands like Crystal Castles,” explains bassist Kai Fish. “we went to Berlin
and just did six or seven gigs in hotel lobbies and art spaces under this different name.
We didn’t play any Mystery Jets songs other than tracks off the new album. It was
liberating, the most healthy thing we’ve ever done.”
“The gigs were completely unpromoted, just the local indie kids turned up, we set up
all our own gear,” says Rees. “I’ve never felt more happy to lug my amp around. I
thought I’d found my true destiny – to be a roadie.”
Quite aside from the fact that the Berlin trip enabled the Mystery Jets to live out a
childhood fantasy – “it’s honestly what we’ve always wanted to do, since we were
like seven years old, to go out to Berlin like Brian Eno and Bowie”, offers Blaine,
which, as childhood fantasies go, certainly makes a change from wanting to be an
astronaut or meet Wayne Rooney – it enabled the band to explore their new songs
fully. “A lot of the time, you write a record, you go off on tour, and by the time you
come back, a year later, the songs have got way better than they were when you
recorded them, they become different animals. The idea with Berlin was to play the
album before we recorded it, wherever they’d have us.”
It’s an odd way of going about things, but then again, “an odd way of going about
things” could have been the Mystery Jets’ motto, right from their earliest days, when
covers of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb and Richie Havens’ La Bamba nestled
alongside an 11-minute prog instrumental. And odd way of going about things or not,
they seem understandably delighted with the results. “It feels like we know what
we’re doing,” nods Blaine. No regrets about failing to stage a glam rock revival, then?
“No. We talked ourselves out of that one.” He smiles. “We decided to just be
ourselves,” he says, safe in the knowledge that means they’re being weird and
inventive and original enough for anyone.
For further information for UK/Europe please contact:
Jamie Woolgar – jamiewoolgar@roughtraderecords.com
Ben Ayres – ben.ayres@roughtraderecords.com
0208 875 5189/5190
For UK online press enquiries:
Ned Hodge – ned.hodge@roughtraderecords.com