Mystery Jets: Sons of Eel Pie Island

By Karmun Ng  •  17 Jan 2013 in Interview

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You mentioned just now that you guys went to America with a pretty much clean slate and you sorta developed, or like wrote the songs as you went along. Did any particular incident or an American character inspire some of the songs, perhaps?
H Yea, ‘Sister Everett’, that was a song based on the nun we met on the flight over to Austin. She was a nun for the Church of the Latter Day Saint, which is a Mormon church. And uh… she was trying to indoctrinate us into her church.

Did it work? [laughs]
H No, we wouldn’t be here otherwise. We wouldn’t have made the record.
K She was very sweet. She was kinda… this sweet little old lady. She wasn’t that persuasive but she was really… kinda sweet. She gave us a bible on the plane, and she said “This is a book called the Bible.” And we were like, “We know.” She was like “I think you should read it” and we kinda flipped through a few pages and gave it back to her. In her heart I think she believed she was doing the right thing, but to us, it was interesting to see religion almost kinda treated like a business. She was trying to sell it to us. And when we came off the plane, she gave us a business card, and it said ‘Sister Everett’ and we wrote the song a couple days later.
H That was a culture shock for us. It’s strange that when in England, and I think in most other places, religion is a much more private thing. It’s much more personal, when you go and pray, you have a one on one confession, it’s your own thing. But in America there have big billboards about it, it’s marketed to you. It’s pushed to you. And that was kinda the first thing that really sort of grabbed our attention. And it’s great cause it gave us something new to write about, which is exactly why we went there in the first place. To find new territory.
K And you always read about this kinda things online, and you read about them in books, but I think when you actually go somewhere and experience it with your own eyes, as a stranger, you experience something much more direct, something much more three-dimensional. So I think we needed to go there to do it.

You guys seem to give a lot of thought into simply naming an album. How did you all come up with the name Mystery Jets for the band?
H That was uh… [laughs] originally we were called the Misery Jets, when we were about seven years old.
K It came from a newspaper article that Henry read about planes flying over Henry’s house. It annoyed the residents in the area so they were called Misery Jets cause people were complaining about the sound they made every day. And then we formed a band and they started complaining about us [laughs]. There were always complaints, so we’ve kinda replaced those jets, with these jets. And then somehow they became Mystery Jets… I think I remember! I remember writing it on my bass drum, you know like when you start a band in high school, you’re like “Oh, I have to write the name on the bass drum” and I wasn’t very good at spelling, I’m a bit dyslexic, I put a “Y” instead of an “I” and I thought to myself, “That’s interesting…” So that’s how we became the Mystery Jets.

What goes through your mind when you’re on stage?
K I think the trick is to make sure nothing is going through your mind. Cause once you have thoughts, then it can be really bad. You should really just have blank ends in your head; “feel the music”.
H Sometimes there’ll be someone in the crowd who kinda looks all blank and you’re thinking “Why are they here?”
K Yea, that’s probably because they’re thinking about something. I’ve often seen at gigs at the front, sometimes you get the girls who are batting their eyelids at you, and sometimes you get the boys and they’re not looking at you, they’re looking at all your guitar pedals. I’ve seen quite a few times in gigs, there’ll always be a couple of guys who will just be looking at Will’s pedals and when he clicks a pedal they go like [nudges each other to check the pedal out] (laughs). They’re sorta like making notes, like “Look he has that pedal, I’ve got that pedal!” Yea, I love it when in front of you, you have all this faces just staring back at you. It’s quite surreal.

There’ve been more than just a few occasions when you guys have been referred to as “London’s most underrated band”. What are your thoughts on that?
H Wow. I don’t know… We’re not a massive band and perhaps there was a time when we might have had as aspiration to be a huge band. We still do actually…
K Do you think it’s because we’ve always very much been in our own bubble? We’ve never really been a part of a lot of this scene that’s happened in London. Not because we haven’t wanted to but we’ve just been very much living in our own world. That kinda puts you in the peripheries, you know? So you’re kinda like on the outside looking in. It’s kinda a more interesting place to be.
H I think we have a constant sorta presence over here which means that we don’t and never had an intense six months or year of fame and success and then nothing. We’ve always just kinda been kinda cooking away on the sidelines. Which is great because it’s enabled us to do a lot of the things we wanna do without too much pressure.
Will We’ve been doing it for a very long time now, I think it’s just because we haven’t had a huge burst. We’ve kinda kept it quite steady.

We’re sure you guys gig a lot in London, what’s the scene like anyway given the economic slowdown? Are people still coming out to gigs and having fun?
H No!
K You can’t tour as much. When we started off, you could do maybe three tours in a year, three big London shows. Now you could do probably like one, or two.
H It’s terrible, you know. There are no streetlights anymore, there are people in their houses with woodfires…
K He’s joking.
W Yea, the economic meltdown, this year I think it really hit the musicians. I feel like hand in hand with the internet as well, that has shortened the lifespan of a touring band as well. Like you’ve got an album and you’ve got about… the internet generates a lot of hype, so therefore the lifespan of your album cycle is a lot shorter because they’ve always created a new platform for the next big thing.

K I think it’s like a big hole that you sorta gotta keep feeding. Every day you gotta like upload a new photo, like “Here I am, drinking a beer” and “Now I am sitting down.”
H It’s like a big fire, you gotta keep feeding it.

That’s more social media than the internet right?
K Yea, it’s terrible, really.
H Twitter is a big part of that. Before you have the newspaper come out with something in the morning, now you can know everything that’s happening by the minute. So we’re so much more aware of the passing of time because you know, a tweet that you sent ten minutes ago is already old news. Everything’s just accelerating and it’s hard to keep up with it. Cause you’ve only got 24 hours in the day, and that’s something that’s definitely not gonna change.

Mystery Jets’ 4th studio album, Radlands, is out in stores now.  Checkout www.mysteryjets.com.