Mystery Jets
One of the less orthodox bands spawned by the post-Libertines London music scene, Mystery Jets started at the end of the last century when Blaine Harrison and his dad, Henry, formed a band together. Soon joined by Blaine's school friends Kai and Will, the band recruited drummer Kapil and started staging gigs in a crumbling hotel ballroom on Eel Pie Island. A new scene rapidly grew up around the Eel Pie shows, giving artists like Jamie T an opportunity to play their first gigs.
The final Eel Pie party was attended by over 600 people, but by then the band had signed to 679 Recordings, appearing on Top Of The Pops, releasing a handful of singles and one album, Making Dens and spending almost two years on a tour that took in Europe, the US and Japan, including a stint on the road with Arctic Monkeys on the NME Awards Tour in 2006. The last we heard of them was when they hosted a tribute night to their hero Syd Barrett at Islington's Union Chapel, but for the last two they've been busy preparing their second album for us.
Produced predominately by DJ legend Erol Alkan and with one track, Half In Love With Elizabeth helmed by veteran British producer Stephen Street, Twenty One is a huge stylistic and emotional leap forward for the band. Now no longer residents of the West London scene that they helped to found with their Eel Pie Island parties, Mystery Jets have spread their wings in style on their second record.
Largely abandoning the prog-influenced weirdness of their debut album, Twenty One is a sleek collection of oddball pop born of Erol's willingness to road-test new tracks at his now-defunct Trash night.
The first fruits of the band's collaboration with Alkan appeared in December 2006, when they gave away copies of a limited-edition vinyl-only seven inch with Umbrellahead and Half In Love With The Radio on to MySpace competition winners. The two tracks were originally supposed to be part of an acoustic EP, but the band decided that they marked an important transition between the young proggers of Making Dens and what the group were rapidly becoming.
One of the reasons for keeping things simple was that the band wanted to concentrate on the art of writing pop songs, rather than throwing songs together as studio jams as they had done previously. The inspiration for this came from a source that many people might be surprised by, especially considering Mystery Jets' former reputation as saucer-eyed Pink Floyd fans.
Witness the revolution at Southbound.