Time marches inexorably on. Alternative music fans of a certain vintage can hardly have failed to notice the wave of anniversaries that has swept through the past few years, retrospectively branding the guitar bands of the 2000s as ‘indie sleaze’. Like their Britpop forebears before them, many are confronting the undeniable realisation that the years seem to pass ever more quickly. As such, some looking back is inevitable.
“We’re playing with The Maccabees, who’ve obviously got back together, and then we’re playing with The Libertines at the end of the summer, and they were our heroes when we got together,” concedes of Mystery Jets, speaking with CLASH. “A lot of the gigs now are 20 years of this, 10 years of that.”
“I had this realisation the other day; when we started in the early 2000s, there was a sense of a lineage behind us. I remember discovering The Smiths, Talking Heads, Television, Public Image, bands from the ‘70s. That gap to us felt like so long ago. The time to when we started bands to now is the same gap, which is terrifying. When we started out, you couldn’t see any bands from that era, but I look at us, The Maccabees, The Cribs. You see them at festivals, and we don’t feel like old men. We’re still going.”
Thankfully so because, although their debut album, , is now two decades old, the Eel Pie outfit are only looking forward, with their fine seventh album, ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ winging its way to your streaming service. It’s a big, bold album, expansive in the way the band have never been before, and a fitting follow-up to 2020’s ‘A Billion Heartbeats’, which was unfortunately doomed from the start, as Harrison explains: “A few things happened. I got quite unwell and we had to cancel a load of touring. Then we moved the album back and it was going to be coming out in April. Obviously, something else happened around that time and changed the whole schedule of everything.”
“I’m still super proud of that record, but it felt like it never really got that chance to lift off because we couldn’t do any in-stores for it, any radio sessions, any promo. It was a couple of weeks of Zooms and then it was like, I guess it’s out! Right there and then, we just said “Let’s start writing the next one.” We had a tour which we rescheduled four times, which was a nightmare. By the time it eventually happened (in) 2022, the record didn’t feel new to us anymore. It was great to play the shows, but I think where my head was at had moved on quite a lot.”
“ was inspired by this time where I was living just off Trafalgar Square,” he continues. “I was going to protests every week. In a way, that record was kind of my political awakening. I’ve described that album as almost musical reportage. Not in a prescriptive way, not telling people what to think; I’ve always felt that you can write about the feeling that’s behind the movement. I don’t think you need to be too preachy about anything like that.”
“But then it came to this record, and I thought there was this optimism in the pandemic, of maybe this world we’re going to go back to is going to be a more positive, mindful, healthy world. I felt in that pause of the pandemic, people started to open up about changes they wanted to make. Not only in the world and grand plans, but in themselves and leading a more meaningful life. Then that machinery of capitalism came back 10 times as hard, and the war machine came back, obviously, (in) Ukraine and the Middle East. It feels like the world’s gone into overdrive. It feels like we’re in a bleaker time than we were before.”
As turbulent as the outside world has been, things have also shifted in Mystery Jets Land. Founding member and guitarist William Rees has departed, along with bassist Jack Flanagan, who spent eight years in the band. Stepping into their roles are twin brothers Eddie and Ollie Taylor, formerly known as The Taylor Twins. Eddie, who is also present for the interview, reflects on how he came to join the band: “We met playing at Radio X; it was John Kennedy’s 20 years of ‘X-Posure’. I think we’d emailed or connected before on some of my music.”
“We were just fans and went along to the show with our brother and a few friends, then we met afterwards. We just got talking. Then obviously the pandemic hit and Blaine was unwell for a bit. Then we went on tour together a few years later where Mystery Jets took our band out.”
Harrison picks up the tale: “Part of that story is that the evening that Eddie and Ollie and I met at Omeara was also Will Rees’s last gig, who founded the band with my dad and I. We went to nursery school together; we played our first Mystery Jets gig on my tenth birthday. We had this incredibly long journey together; he’s my brother. Everyone who’s been in the band, we’re all brothers, but Will was the first person that I met on this planet and was like, you’re my guy.”
“We’ve described (the Omeara show) as a cosmic event in the life of Mystery Jets, because it was Will’s last show, it’s the first show that we played ‘Billion Heartbeat’ songs at, and then it’s the night that I met Eddie and Ollie. It’s also the night that I met my fiancé. Something was just in the air. I remember thinking, I feel like anything could happen today. It was this big crossroads in the story of Mystery Jets.”
“Fast forward to 2023, we had had this sort of like in-between lineup for a couple of years, which is what we toured ‘Billion Heartbeats’ with. Absolutely no shade on those musicians; Tom White, from the Electric Soft Parade, was playing guitar. He’s played with everyone from Sparks to Sea Power, and he helped us through a period, but it felt like he was there to help guide us through to the next era of the band. We held some auditions and tried out lots of people.”
“I’ve never worked harder in my life,” says Taylor of their audition. “It was quite weird for me and Ollie because it was one of our favourite bands. To be asked to join is a weird dream. I do feel like we somewhat had an unfair advantage on other people, but that’s because we were just playing constantly. Obviously, me and Ollie had spent our whole lives playing together, so it just felt natural.”
With the line-up now settled, the only founding members remaining are Harrison and his father, Henry, who has come back to the fore after a spell in the shadows. “(Henry) played with us in the very early days, he was always on stage,” Harrison explains. “Then there was this point around our second record, where we all got sick of the fact that all the press that we got was like, ‘Singer’s disabled, old man in the band.’ Especially for the rest of the guys in the group, they were like, we rehearse and we slave away days on end, working out elaborate arrangements to our songs. I felt everyone’s frustration, and I think Henry recognised that it was taking the focus away from the music, so he stepped back.”
“In a way that rung in the next era of the band, which was basically us making a record with Erol Alkan, going out five nights a week, getting into lots of trouble and running into our twenties headfirst. I think the next two records (‘Twenty One’ and ‘Serotonin’) were very much an expression of that. It was us living this very fast paced life, having our hearts broken, doing things we shouldn’t be doing.”
“I think indie music was possibly a different thing,” Harrison continues. “The culture around it was very different back then. It was probably much unhealthier in a lot of ways, but it was a more immersive environment. We very much were fully signed up members of that sleazy club. By ‘Billion Heartbeats’, and especially now, that is well and truly out of our systems. We’re quite a clean-living band these days.”
“It’s 20 years since ‘Making Dens’. I’ve recently moved back to Eel Pie Island, which is where the band started. It just felt like it was a cool time to bring Henry back into the picture. And actually, his creative involvement in the band has never stopped. All the lyrics of every Mystery Jets record have been written with Henry in the room. He’s a huge contributor to the songwriting. But I think with this record, we’re like, let’s give the man a mic and, when the opportunity allows, he’ll still jump up on stage with us.”
So prolific after ‘A Billion Suns’ were the Harrisons that the band had too many songs to pick from. “The three piles were: pop songs, quite throwback indie/alternative guitar driven tracks and then there was the in-between pile. Our manager was interested in the in-between pile because there are choruses and riffs in there, but it’s not a record you can easily put in a box. That’s always been the criteria for a Jets record; how can we do something different to what we’ve done before? It’s probably been our curse over the years, but it’s just what excites us.”
Once the songs had been whittled down, a guiding hand was required. For the first time in over a decade, Mystery Jets enlisted a heavyweight producer, with Leo Abrahams sitting behind the desk for ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’. “I don’t think Mystery Jets are necessarily an easy band to produce,” Harrison admits. “Because we’ve self-produced quite a lot over the years. We started self-producing on ‘Radlands’ and failed miserably. Dan Carey saved that record. Then we did self-produce ‘Curve Of The Earth’ and ‘Billion Heartbeats’ along with an engineer, my brother-in-law (but) it was such a long recording/writing process, and then it was just such a disappointment for those songs not to be able to get the release they needed. We felt strongly that we just wanted to be in a safe pair of hands and Leo is so the epitome of that.”
“I think the reason we gravitated towards Leo is because we just had this idea of making a dreamy sounding record. Not necessarily (that) we wanted it to be grandiose, but a certain kind of ethereal dreaminess felt important. This expansive feeling being in the music isn’t something we’ve explored before. Leo has worked with Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins, and is versed in that more soundtrack, ambient world. He’d also made an amazing Frightened Rabbit record (‘Pedestrian Verse’). I felt if you can do ‘The Woodpile’ with Frightened Rabbit, and you can also make the soundtrack to ‘Lovely Bones’ with Brian Eno, then let’s put those two things together. I think the record reflects that.”
Not only does their seventh album come with the experience of both the band and Abrahams, but patronage has come from an actual living legend, as Harrison explains: “I stumbled across a picture which I had on my camera roll, which I’d taken a picture of. It’s a replica of the postcard that I saw in the British Museum by Yoko Ono, and I just thought, let’s have that as a starting place, and that’s where the journey of this record began.”
“The first song we wrote for the album was the title track. Fast forward after three years of writing and we started thinking about artwork. We’ve got an amazing art director who we’ve worked with on our last few albums. He went down this rabbit hole of trying to work out ways to explore the title. After about six months, we were like, why don’t we just write to Yoko Ono? I wrote her a letter, it was picked up by her estate and they said, “You can, but also you can’t patent a hole, so even if you did it, we couldn’t have stopped you.” We said we got that, but we wanted Yoko’s blessing because the album is taking her original idea; the hole is an oculus you can see the world through. It’s this idea of changing perspective can change the way you feel about life. It felt very important to have her collaboration on it and they’ve been so on board with it.”
With the stars aligned, Mystery Jets are as prepared as possible for their next chapter. Yet while positivity has been a running thread throughout their career, this time Harrison seems more determined than ever to provide some happiness in an increasingly scary world. “Let’s try and summon some joy. Let’s try and reach for hope. People reach for music, for comfort and for solace, but I think people also reach music for escapism.”
“I’m the biggest Radiohead fan there is, and I love a lot of really depressing music, but I think there’s space for both. It’s a lot harder to write a joyful song, after doing this for a long time. Writing something happy that isn’t shit, and doesn’t sound like children’s music, is quite difficult. I don’t know if we’ve made a happy record, but I think we’ve aspired to make something that feels like that.”
‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’ is out now.