All jets off
It feels like people finally understand us,” muses guitarist Will Rees, with his feet up on the table and a battered acoustic guitar in his arms. Back in November the Mystery Jets played their first ever sold-out headlining show downstairs at the Zodiac. Six months later and they are playing upstairs, on a tour, which has seen them sell out venues as big as The Electric Ballroom. “This tour has been the best tour we’ve done,” Will continues.
“Everything changed when our album came out.” There is a sense that this gig is even more important, with lead singer Blaine having grown up in a village just outside of Abingdon. “When we first started we considered ourselves an Oxford band,” he adds. I ask what it feels like to be in this stage of their careers. “Its weird, for us it’s always been the Mystery Jets and now the Mystery Jets are coming out in public. What we did originally was just a private passion.
Clearly a lot has happened since November. A performance slot on Top of the Pops, an avenue that is usually firmly closed to bands like the Mystery Jets, was certainly an important albeit disillusioning achievement. “It was fucking strange. All of my perceptions of what that show is like were shattered. There’s an MC that makes people applaud, the audience are these kids that have been hired and the other artists mimed.
With their childlike lyrics, nautical imagery and devotion to instruments that look suspiciously like free toys from cereal boxes, the Mystery Jets trade in eccentricity, a trait which they claim is organic rather than self-conscious. “Because we’ve been together for fifteen years it’s just developed that way. Its kind of because we’re on Eel Pie island, you’re in a city but you’re also removed from it in a bubble, being on an island has a massive effect on how you live.
Perhaps this explains the band’s disillusionment with America, a market they are only just beginning to crack. “It’s hard to get a good feel out there. I’m not that eager to go again any time soon, England and Europe is what we care about, that’s our place and that’s where we’re from.” As Will was speaking, Henry Harrison, lead singer Blaine’s Dad and prominent band member. emerged from the top floor of the tour bus where he had been napping.
With his mop of bright white hair and soothing genteel accent there is an air of superiority and calm leadership to Henry. He immediately asked us if we were going to Truck Festival, where the Mystery Jets are headlining, recalling the days when “we used to walk across the fields to Truck from the village we lived in”.
Outside the window of the tour bus a queue is steadily forming at the doors of the Zodiac, a sign that after nearly a decade of playing together, the Mystery Jets are attracting greater attention. Two hours later and they are onstage, looking almost stunned by their own success. Musically they were tighter than ever. The percussion freakout midway through The Boy Who Ran Away, possibly the best moment in their entire career, sent ripples of exhilaration through the crowd.
Likewise, when the first few notes of You Can’t Fool Me Dennis drifted out from the stage it seemed as if a hydrogen bomb had been set off among the braying fans. Album tracks such as Horse Drawn Cart and Soluble in Air, which on record drift by unnoticed, were transformed into epics.
Indeed telling stories, something which Will had previously told me was “a device to draw people in”, is what the Mystery Jets do best, and the weird ambiguity of lyrics such as, “bathe me in water vapour / erase me to ashes with fire,” are injected by Blaine with a fierce passion. A few hours earlier, looking fondly at Will, Henry spoke of a time when “his guitar was taller than he was”.
Will, now fully grown, has just dived triumphantly into a sea of braying audience members, whose throats are still sore from singing every word of Alas Agnes. It seems as if people are at last beginning to understand the Mystery Jets.
18th May 2006