Heard of the Mystery Jets? If so, congratulations on being in on something of a well-kept secret — outside the UK anyway.Early birds who caught the Mystery Jets in an afternoon slot at the 65,000-capacity Barclaycard presents British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park this month are left with plenty of reasons as to why the band is worth investigating. An indie rock band formerly based out of Twickenham, the group comprises original founders Henry Harrison, Blaine Harrison, and William Rees, as well as drummer Kapil Trivedi.After the gig, singer Blaine Harrison is sitting backstage in best rock star mode. He is soaking up the sun, sounds, and atmosphere, strumming his guitar, Ray-Bans in place. He is soon joined by band co-founder, guitarist William Rees.The group has a long history that can be traced back to when Harrison saw a headline about Heathrow Airport’s planes that read “Misery Jets.” Now 31, he recalls: “I was eight years old and I wrote it on my first bass drum.” He had a handheld Dymo machine that embossed letters onto sticky plastic, and misspelled “misery.”“My dad said, ‘why don’t you change it to mystery? It’s more appropriate.’” (Harrison's father Henry still plays a part in the group, surely making him one of the coolest dads in rock.) Ironically, during our interview, the misery jets overhead are still occasionally spoiling the music or conversational flow. As a British government decision looms on air traffic, the group agrees that the name is apt.Rees points out: “I found some stage drawings the other day from years ago which showed hawks — so maybe there was a time when we were considering ‘The Hawks.’”Could those schoolkids, full of dreams of hawks and jets, ever have imagined how things would have worked out?“For both Will and me,” says Harrison, “we were so young that the concept of what we were going to do when we grew up, or a career, was not something that even came into our heads. Even now, I don’t think of it as longevity or even success; this is just what we do, and this is what we have done since we were about this tall, and there isn't anything else we can or want to do.”Rees elaborates: “We both went to art school so we both paint. I was always slightly sickened by the art world; at least in music you can do your own thing.”The band's fifth album, “The Curve of the Earth,” came out in January and both musicians have been pleased by the reception. “It’s been really positive, like a new beginning for us [...] People are listening to us with fresh ears and looking at us with fresh eyes, and I think we needed that.” A key phrase that turns out to be the lyric at the start of the single “Bubblegum,” about being on the outside looking in.Harrison explains: “‘Bubblegum’ was one of the last to be written for the record...if not the last. Once we had the majority of the body of the album done, we realized that we needed a couple of songs to act as funnels to lead people into the denser, more emotive material on the record. What triggered it was something I had read in an interview about [Pink Floyd founder] Syd Barrett – I am a huge fan. One of his ex-girlfriends was describing the time that he had taken her to see Bob Dylan play. They sat down and he said to her, ‘Look, there is the you and me of every town in this room,’ and I just read that line and it really touched me.”“Artists have that feeling of being on the edge of something,” he continues. “I think that when you write, that is the place that you find yourself — on the outside looking in. There is comfort to be found in the idea that there are people like you all over the world, and every now and again you find yourself in the same room, say at rock concerts, and so the song was born from that.” Rees notes that it is about the passing of time too. There is another line in it — “deep down I know I should leave the past behind.”The Mystery Jets are hard to label. Recent reports have resorted to simply calling them “a Twickenham band,” “scruffy indie rockers,” and “schizophrenic.” How would they describe themselves?Rees says: “I think schizophrenic is quite appropriate in the bigger context because we have changed our sound on every album, and that is always something that we intended to do, but there is a continuity between the records which ‘schizophrenic’ doesn’t really suggest.”Harrison also hates labels, observing that they are only of use in record shops so that people can find music. “As musicians, we operate primarily as lovers of music and we are drawn in all directions all the time by hearing things — it might be traveling in America and spending some time out there exploring Americana. With this record, the seeds of inspiration were more from within.”Asked to name new acts to watch, they pick Declan McKenna, 17, who has supported them, and London act Pumarosa for “great songs.” Are there any other collaborations they would do, like in 2008 when they did the song “Young Love” with Laura Marling? Harrison says: “With Laura, it was a case of our two worlds colliding at just the right time. It is not something that we would necessarily go out and seek. We would wait until those collaborations present themselves.”Harrison is happy to campaign for causes close to his heart and his own experiences, such as the charity Attitude Is Everything, which aims to improve access to live music for deaf and disabled people. A few fans wrote in on Twitter asking for him to explain his biographical note there, which says simply “chasing the maybe,” and asking if this is a reference to these passions. This phrase also turns out to be significant.“‘Chasing the maybe’ is something that me and my girlfriend came up with and it relates slightly to some of the themes on our record,” says Harrison. “‘Midnight’s Mirror’ is a song about ‘chasing the maybe’ — it’s one of Will’s and it’s about that feeling of being on a night out and something is going to happen and you don’t want to miss out and be a part of that. A friend of ours had this expression, ‘don’t die wondering,’ and I have always loved that, and ‘chasing the maybe’ means the same thing. I'm going to go after that because who knows what is going to happen.”
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