Mystery Jets

Wed 9th Jul, 2008 in Features

Jettisoning his father for the first time, Mystery Jets frontman Blaine Harrison now travels the world on his lonesome. If you’d ever heard the stories, they were true: Mystery Jets really were a father-son team, with Blaine being joined in the group by his dad, Henry. To a certain extent, the group still is a familiar affair – while Henry has stepped down from touring duties, he was a presence at the band’s recording of their second album, Twenty One.

The album has been generating some of the very best responses in the band’s career – while their debut, Making Dens, was laudable for its effort, Twenty One is a much more fully realised release. “I guess we’re pretty pleased,” Blaine avers. “For what we did – which is an indie record – we’re very pleased how people have received it.”

It’s a much more straightforward release, taking the pop elements found on their 2006 debut and amplifying the direct nature of some of the tunes. Gone are the prog references that, while interesting, ultimately took away from the more immediately approachable ones. “It was definitely something that we all wanted to do,” he confirms. “Straightforward is an appropriate word, really. We all felt, after our first album, that we wanted to change our sound and in a way put ourselves across in a more bold, digestible way. The background we had was listening to a lot of progressive rock, and 60s psych, and we never really saw ourselves as a – œpop’ band.”

But for the second time around, Blaine says the first record that actually started making him think differently about his own music was the Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr’s first solo record. “I liked the Strokes,” Blaine continues, “but listening to that album I realised I wanted to write love songs – I didn’t want to write songs in a language that was purposefully going to go over people’s heads. That idea seemed crazy. When we were younger we felt like we wanted to make an impression upon people, and however we made that impression it needed to be extreme.”

Mystery Jets were, in their early days, famed for doing things their way – instead of going the normal route and playing support slots to bigger bands, alongside the likes of Jamie T, Laura Marling, and others besides, they grouped together to create mini-festivals dubbed the White Cross Revival Parties, held on Eel Pie Island.

But, now, Mystery Jets are comparatively normal. “There’s nothing to feel bad about writing four-chord songs,” Blaine claims. “I listened to a lot of ABBA – not that this is a disco-inspired album! But hanging out with [producer] Erol [Alkan], I felt we had very similar ideas about what direction we wanted to move in – we agreed there were older songs that were buried beneath layers of arrangements and keyboards to the point where you almost couldn’t tell if it was a good song underneath it. We were adamant to the point that the songs would sound good on a piano or an acoustic guitar, which is how most of the songs were written.”

Erol Alkan is becoming something of a producer du jour for bands looking to hone in on their sound. He revolutionised the Long Blondes on their second album, will recently behind the boards as Franz Ferdinand made their third album, and ran London club Trash, as well created a myriad of remix work for acts such as Hot Chip, Bloc Party, Daft Punk, Klaxons, and more besides, including Mystery Jets.

“I think he saw a very different side of the band,” Blaine says of the way Alkan interpreted their track Zoo Time, which he remixed in 2005. “When it came around to working on songs after Making Dens he put himself forward to work with the band on our next record. It felt incredibly exciting to be the first band that he’d made a record with, and for me he made the record – from start to finish he was there, when we doing the writing, when we were doing the demos, and he was so integrated in the whole process. I’d credit him as a band member almost on Twenty One.”

Having someone else come in and contribute to the ideas, and redirect them, also gave the band fresh perspective – it changed their perception as to what they wanted their second album to be. “Our idea of what the album was going to be was constantly chopped about,” he confirms, but assuring that “I think that’s a great thing. I think if you’re the sort of band who think you’ve written 12 or 13 songs and you’re the Clash and you can just record them then that’s fine. But we’ve always been the kind of band that’s changed our songs, and changed our songs, and changed our songs. We’ve always been the sort of band that’s changed our songs even after we’ve recorded them!

“Having Erol there to add his knowledge to twentieth century pop music is nuts. He’d totally blow our minds, and I think that was great – he essentially grew up with an obsession of listening to music, which has made him really good at producing music.”

Mystery Jets’ Twenty One is available now.