Mystery Jets

Mystery Jets’ Blaine Harrison talks to us about his band’s Texan adventure…

STUDIO: A wooden house in Austin, Texas
PRODUCER: Mystery Jets
CONFIRMED TRACKS: ‘Rad Lands’ ‘Sister Everett’
DUE: Early 2012
LABEL: Rough Trade

Hello Blaine. How far down the line is the new album?

We’re halfway through. We’ve got 14 songs but we still feel like we need to refine the sound. I went to California last week to try and get some more inspiration and imagery. It was really nice. We went driving round the valleys, saw the redwood trees and went to Reno, it’s like Vegas but for hardcore gamblers, lots of casinos and strip clubs. So there’s a bit of that in it.

You told us last year that ‘Serotonin’ was the end of a trilogy. Did you treat this new album like a fresh start?

It feels like we’ve had to rip up the books and redefine our sound. We’re a lot older than when we started and we want to write about different things. You move on from wanting to write about girls and love. There’s a more grand sound, there’s a lot of religious stuff, not that any of us are religious but a soul seeking vibe.

Has being in Austin changed your sound?

It’s the first one we’ve not done in a studio. It’s been liberating, we can work on it right through the night. I would love to say that it’s a cowboy record but it’s definitely got some country vibes. We got this amazing slide player and he came and played a couple of sessions. We set the microphones outdoors on the porch and we recorded at night; you can hear all the crickets! The house is like something from Little House On The Prairie. We’ve always been a London band: I think we felt that, if we were going to successfully change the sound, we needed to be somewhere foreign and strange.

Can you tell us a bit about what the new songs are about?

Well ‘Sister Everett’ is about a nun we met on the plane over here. She was trying to convert us. She spent the whole flight trying to sign us up, and she was giving us all these leaflets and we went along with it because we thought it was quite funny. She had all these weird people with her, young church kids and they were all on a trip to try and conscript people. It was quite regimented. Scares the shit out of me.

You’ve always worked very closely with your producers (Chris Thomas, Erol Alkan). How come you decided to self produce the album?

We’ve always relied on someone outside of the band to come in and orchestrate the thing but on this one we felt like we had enough experience to know how to treat the sound. It’s been a big adventure. We’ve found that there’s a reason why people have producers and it’s people management more than anything. We’ve been working a lot with loops and tried to add some lo-fi elements. We didn’t want to make a big studio-sounding record. We wanted it to sound like we were left to our own devices. In a house in the woods.

Bonus Factoids:

Blaine has been trying to find his “inner warble”

The band regularly enjoy Chewing Tobacco “It’s disgusting. Like an animal’s taken a shit in your mouth.”

At one point in the interview Blaine shouts “the blonde one!” at someone else in the room.

The band regularly take part in Bikram yoga, sometimes twice a day.

Blaine has never found a hat that fits his head.