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 UK Music |
Dec
06
2005
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Monday, 05 December 2005 |
 Bands get given some really strange gifts and for Will Rees things are no different. “We were playing in Aberdeen and during the set, I was playing and this handed me a black vibrator, like a girl’s vibrator and I was just like ‘what the f**k’” he recalls. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Mystery Jets, Eel Pie Island’s finest prog rockers.
The five-piece actually formed nearly ten years ago. That’s quite a remarkable feat considering that most of the band members are only in their early twenties. With the exception of 55 year old Henry Harrison of course, who together with his son Blaine Harrison, guitarist Will, bassist Kai Fish and drummer Kapil Trivedi complete the line up. Much has been made of the fact that the Mystery Jets are an outsider’s band. Labels such as ‘odd’ and ‘different’ have been attached to them. Which is hardly surprising, after all, there aren’t many other groups out there with a lead singer who was born with spina bifida, moves around on crutches, and has their father in their band as a guitarist. That’s before getting to the part where they use kitchen utensils for instruments and sing songs about transsexuals. However it was not being able to fit in at school that drove them to music and eventually to form their very own band. “If anything it was rebellion against maybe people our age, but that’s not generally something you rebel against. It’s kind of this ‘secret society’. It was only when we were older did that evolve into something, where we thought ‘OK, let’s write songs for this sort of society to sing’” says Blaine. “Forming a band is actually in itself is a very adolescent idea, creating this sort of ‘club’. It’s kind of an evolution from running away into the woods and making a tree house is going into the attic and smoking weed and trying to play some guitars”.
Henry, who was an amateur musician in the ‘60s, was also a big influence as Blaine puts it, “I think because of Henry we had very old heads on our shoulders because his taste, I think, is very sophisticated and he’s the main influence.” Having tried but never succeeding Blaine reckons that being in the band has been a big boost for his father. “He went through being a dad, he went through being a husband, failing as a businessman, having huge success and failing again. The only thing that was left was to go back on himself and try and discover what he was really excited about again. He didn’t really think about it. It just happened. I think he feels tremendously lucky and privileged because how many people at that point their lives get to do something this exciting? Most people think that life ends at forty”. Being bandmates already puts an automatic strain on a relationship but add being father/son to the mix and some might suggest that this is asking for trouble. “Thing is when you’re on tour, you’re so close, you’re so physically close that sometimes you can feel very, very far from each other. Sometimes it takes me like a week when I get back off tour to rediscover maybe what kind of relationship I have with my father and with the other guys in the band. Because when you’re on tour you’re in front of each other the whole time, you can’t actually gain perspective. If you’ve got a bottle, that close to your eye, you can’t actually see it,” Blaine explains, holding a bottle to his face to demonstrate. “You know it’s there, but you can’t focus on it. That’s what I kind of compare it to”.
The Mystery Jets are just one of a huge number of bands that have come on to the scene this year, so do they think it’s been a good year for music? “Maybe ‘s**t’ is a bad word, but there’s lots of people copying each other, there’s lots of copycat bands,” reckons Blaine. Will points out that this may not actually be a bad thing. “You look at the punk scene of the seventies, the Clash, sex Pistols, Siouxsie and The Banshees, you had like a whole host of bands, then out of that slowly came like Adam and The Ants and the new romantics. I think lots of bands doing similar things can still be interesting”. Blaine agrees. “I listened to the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album today. There’s bits on there where you could say ‘He sounds like David Burns, the drummer sounds like whatever, etc, etc, it’s still a new combination of things that have never ever been done before. It still sounds fresh so what I just said doesn’t take into account the actual sound of the record, the recording sound. That’s a whole new world”. Besides music, Blaine and Will, who have known each other since nursery school, are also artists and had previously attended to art school. “We still make art a big part of Mystery Jets, we still publish our newspaper with drawings in it and we have a lot to do with our record sleeves. Doing music was always the real passion. I love doing both of them but music comes from so much. It comes from playing in front of people, it comes from meeting those people after your gigs that’s part of music and art just misses out on that”.
They finished recording their album, which is due out in the spring of 2006, earlier this year and Will describes it as an idyllic time. “We all stayed on Eel Pie Island where we’d work late until 9 and then we had big meals at the end of the day. It was just a really, really happy time and it was summer as well We all swapped instruments for some of the songs, we bought loads of stuff that made weird sounds and we tried it out, experimented and just played.” And if the guitarist has things his way, the future is an exciting one. “I just want us to come up with some really exciting ideas and make something of them. That’s really what the band is about, new ideas, just doing the most unordinary things you can do and doing the most unexpected things”.
The single Alas Agnes is out on the 5th December.
For more info: www.mysteryjets.com
Words: Helen Duong
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