THE Mystery Jets have always been present to accompany us through the walks of indie music. Eight years ago – and arguably during the height of indie music – they gave us their joyous hit album, Twenty One.
More recently came Radlands – recorded in Austin, Texas, where they departed with band member Kai Fish. Now, bearing new bassist Jack Flanagan, Mystery Jets have returned with bigger ideas, and an album that pushes their indie sound into the darker realms of music.
I headed down to a warehouse in Stoke Newington, London to chat to them about their latest album Curve of the Earth.
The Mystery Jets
Your album is called Curve of the Earth. What inspired the name?
William: Well, it was a working title for a long time and it was always in the background. When the time came to wrap the album up and Christen it with a name, we struggled and came up with lots of ideas but none of them were quite right so we ended up going back to this thing that we came up with.
Blaine: When talking about the album title, a good point of reference is this book (referring to the Whole Earth Epilog), which is a backdrop of the genesis of the record. It was published in the early 70s by a guy called Stewart Brand who was a Stamford graduate and a scientist, and his whole thing was him trying to get Nasa to publish a picture of the whole earth, which they hadn’t done at the time – and he started this campaign, and he’d go around uni campuses and give everyone badges saying “why haven’t we seen the whole Earth yet?” – and it started this movement which coincided with the interest of the space race and the idea of going to the moon – so this book was published as a compendium or a yellow pages for the counter culture of the movement in the late 60s and early 70s. There’s things ranging from how to braid leather, and crafts, how to big shelters in the desert as there was a big interest in eco conscious living at the time and all this and basically how to create your own version of existence, outside of the mainstream and…
William: How to live idealistically. How you have all these aspirations and all these ideas in your head. I’m talking of the 60s generation, and this book served to connect people and make their dreams more of a reality. In a way, I think what we found interesting about it was, it’s kind of the Google of the 60s – it’s like the Internet of the 60s.
Blaine: The analogue Internet is actually what Steve Jobs called the book, and the whole other catalogue is what he credited to being the main inspiration behind setting up Apple. I think the coolest thing about it is it’s what macs do. Macs put the power in your hands in the same way that this book didn’t directly sell you anything, but it gave you the tools to do everything yourself, and that kind of DIY aesthetic which really influenced us with the making of the record.
What is the significance of the artwork?
Blaine: It’s from NASA and it’s the sunrise over the northern hemisphere
William: It’s literally the curve of the Earth
Does the name link to the sound of the record?
William: Yes, that’s ultimately why we came back to it because it sounds like the music we’ve made.
You recorded the album in a studio you built yourself. Why?
William: There are lots of reasons for building your own studio. We’ve recorded in lots of places like London and Austin, Texas, which is where we did Radlands.
Blaine: We’re living in a time where you don’t have to spend vast amount of recording budgets to go into a commercial studios – you can build your own studio.
Jack: We all kind of realised than being a band in 2016, that without a studio you’re kind of screwed. You need to have that place where you can be a band and all get together – like, we’re recording a cover over there today and it’s so nice to just have everything we own set up in that room, and just walk in and go for it.
When did you decide to do this?
Jack: Maybe two and half years ago, maybe three?
Blaine: The first year was building the space and then…
Jack: Learning how to use it.
It’s been 4 years since your last release. What took so long to get the record out?
Blaine: We made two versions of the record. It wasn’t until we listened back to the first collection of songs we thought would make the record with a select group of friends and our team that we realised it was missing an entry point. Some of the integrity of what we wanted to do making this space rock record is, there are traces of it on Curve of the Earth, but at that point there were songs missing like Midnight’s Mirror and Bubblegum – songs which provided an entrance into this slightly darker esoteric world and looking back, the album needed those stepping stones to take people from where we’ve come into where we want to be.
Jack: I think without doing those batch of songs, we wouldn’t have a clear view of where we want to go either. You’ve got to learn from your mistakes in those situations.
William: You begin the process of making a record, and there’s all these grand schemes and grand designs and big hot headed discussions about ambitions things that you want to embark upon, and you get there to the end result and plans, well, they’re meant to be changed and it proves that you don’t know what your doing as artists or musicians. You’re in the dark, and that’s the best place to be actually because that’s where you’re going to find your magic. We’ve made this space rock thing, and in essence we looked and it thought “is there room for a space rock record in 2016?” with every song at at 70bpm, and we thought there wasn’t.
Jack: We retained elements of it though. I think the all the positive parts of the record stayed, and certain songs stayed. We just cut all the crap.
Have you dismissed the songs from your first attempt of the album?
Jack: No way. There’s some songs on there that are really cool. There’s actually a song on there called Curve of the Earth. Maybe we’ll use it one day.
Blaine: I think going back to the space rock thing; there is something about it that represented a time where there was a real interest in what was happening out there. Space was the final frontier at that time and I think what’s happened over the last two or three decades, is we’ve become a lot more concerned about what’s going on here, which in many ways is the greatest mystery of it all.
So in that sense to me, it is a space rock record, but it’s about that initial idea of looking out and wondering, “what’s happening out there?” and then after having gone out, looking back at the earth and thinking “well, actually that’s all we really have experience of”, and these songs are very much written from our personal experiences from the past 10 years or so, and that actually became what the record became about. It’s us looking back at our own lives from a vantage point that we hadn’t explored before.
You went to India as a band after your last release. Was this a big influence to the record?
William: Not really. There are two songs from the album that came from that trip – Bombay Blue and Taken by the Tide. But I think India was a stopgap for us – a place we all wanted to visit. It was also symbolically and sadly where we officially parted with our old bass player Kai. He left the band officially in Varanasi.
Blaine: Perhaps what differentiates this record from the previous record Radlands is that these songs are very much written from the first person perspective. It’s all things that have happened to us as individuals and writers. On the last album we were more interested in the idea of inventing characters, almost like Avatars to project our own experiences on to, for example with characters like Emmerson Lonestar or Sister Everett.
With this, it’s back down to earth. A song like Midnight’s Mirror is probably the most confessional a Mystery Jets song can get, as it’s sort of looking at your own reflection and scrutinising it. That song to me is a song that could only have been on this record as it’s looking back on everything that’s come before you, like living in a crazy city like London and all the misadventures that come with living here in your 20’s. All those experiences needed to be lived through in order for them to be put in a song.
How do you approach the writing process? Who does the majority of the writing?
William: On Curve of the Earth, the beginnings of songs are from myself and Blaine. They begin life outside of the band, but then they enter another phase and that’s when other band members get involved. We take them into the studio and look at the arrangements and pull apart the melodies. Blaine’s dad Henry is also very involved with the lyric writing. So in pretty much every case apart from a couple, Henry’s lyrics and mind have been put to important use of expanding the lyrics.
Blaine: He’s like the human rhyming dictionary. You can just chuck anything at him and he can come back with a 5-syllable rhyme.
What hurdles did you face during the process of making the record?
William: I remember spending about 12 hours trying to tune an acoustic guitar.
Jack: I feel like there weren’t many technical difficulties, although stuff breaks all the time when you’re trying to make an album unfortunately – but I feel like for most of it, it was just people management. For certain parts of the record, different people led the way, and naturally being human beings we all feel very different from day to day.
It’s amazing having four or five people in a room then having one person who’s there willing to steer it that day – and it changes every day. I think because we were stuck in a room for more than a year we had to learn how to deal with each other in that space. At the end we were there for 12 hours at a time. We were all very pale when we got out!
William: I think it was killing us. Those last couple of months were hell. I know that’s an extreme word, but it was just so exhausting.
Jack: It was like the thing just wouldn’t finish – there was always something. I can’t remember it finishing. There was no clear stop. It’s still going! We’re still talking about it!
Blaine: For the last couple of tracks it was like getting them to the finish line.
William: I remember getting to the finish was like a factory line
Jack: We were all on laptops working on different songs
Blaine: It was Saturnine, I think which was the last one, and it was literally like a sweatshop
William: We were all living off Nescafe and Pro Plus
Jack: I developed a twitch!
Your record is very psychedelic and progressive at times. It reminded me of Pink Floyd. Where you listening to music like that when writing?
Jack: That’s the sort of music everyone in the band was brought up on. A lot of the influences from the album came from other places like books and films. It’s funny you should say that though, because those kind of influences are the ones that are in our blood. Often we get together and things come out, and we’re like “oh that sounds like that”. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing.
Are there any artists you are collectively influenced by?
William: I image for you Blaine, that Neil Young is a big one
Blaine: Yeah, or Peter Gabriel. I’m at a really big Peter Gabriel stage at the moment, especially the first 4 records when he left Genesis. I think he was right at the forefront of discovering what we now call world music. He was one of the first to go to Africa with a tape recorder, and record tribal drums, which is now a big influence in pop music.
William: I’d say Paul Simon and Damon Albarn are people I always come back to. Again, they both go to Africa a lot.
Blaine: Maybe we need to go to Africa!
Jack: Yeh, I’d be really up for that!
You’ve played a good handful of shows since your album release. How have fans been responding to the new material live?
Jack: It’s been really cool. People have been singing along already. It’s weird because I never thought the old songs and new songs would blend so well together in the set, so t’s nice to see it working.
Blaine: I think the first time you hear the lyrics of a new song being sung back at you there’s such a relief that comes with it. I have flashbacks to the writing process sitting and just hitting my head against the table thinking, “How do I finish this song?”
Then finally you play it to a live audience and all of the self-doubt completely evaporates and I think that feeling is why we do this. There’s an elation that comes with seeing this thing come out of your skull and seeing the light of day. That’s been amazing on this record. We’ve felt that more than ever when we played the show in Brixton a few weeks ago, and….
Jack: You kept messing the lyrics up! As soon as the fans starting singing along, Blaine kept forgetting the lyrics.
Blaine; Then I realised that they were getting lines right that I was getting wrong. It’s a wonderful feeling, and the singing along at that gig was so encouraging and inspiring for us.
Do you think you’ve gained new fans since the new record?
Jack: It feels that way. It feels there are different kinds of people. They’re slightly younger I think.
William: I think it’s more of a cross section that ever actually. It’s more mixed than it’s ever been. You get people who are 60 down to 16, consistently all the way through the ages. It’s mixed as well, where as one point it was quite female heavy around 21.
Blaine: I think part of that is because we’ve had really great support and radio behind this record, and I think that’s brought a more diverse audience to our music. They’ve started playing our music at the football. We’ve got the FA cup to thank.
You’re playing a lot of festivals this summer. Do you prefer them to indoor venues?
William: They’re such vastly different experiences. Personally, I like both equally, but definitely at a festival you don’t know what you’re going to get because it’s not your crowd and also you don’t sound check – you just get thrown on stage and that’s it.
Watch their video for Telomere below:
by Katrina Mirpuri