Mystery Jets

A father-son partnership is at the heart of one of England’s more curious bands

Blaine Harrison (center), his dad Henry (far right), and fellow Mystery Jets William Rees, Kai Fish and Kapil Trivedi Courtesy of Smash

So much for the Oedipus complex. Instead of wanting to off his dad, lead vocalist for the UK’s Mystery Jets, Blaine Harrison has him in his band. “My dad is different from normal dads,” explains Harrison down the line from Eel Pie Island studio in suburban London. “He’s a bit special, really. It’s not like having a parent, more like having a big brother.”

Blaine and father Henry have been jamming together since Blaine was a tyke, it turns out. The pair’s musical partnership progressed from playing acoustic guitars together, to electric, to forming a band, gigging, getting signed, and now touring worldwide, including a spot on the bill at last summer’s Fuji Rock Festival. Harrison insists the partnership with his father developed in an organic way. “He’s also in the band because he writes great lyrics. It’s not a gimmick—that’s been an issue for us, because we don’t want people to get that impression.”

This spring’s debut album, Making Dens, shows the Harrisons (filled out with William Rees on guitar, Kai Fish on bass and Kapil Trivedi on drums) informed as much by the rich traditions of British rock as by contemporary currents. Part of their sense of history is related to the illustrious past of Eel Pie Island, which is located in the Thames River and accessible only by footbridge.

“It’s a bit far out of town, but it really is worth it,” explains Harrison. “It’s a unique space, and we rehearse here and recorded our album and do our artwork all in the same room. In the ’60s Eel Pie was the hip hangout. It all disappeared in the ’70s, but at the time it was a vital place in music. It’s got a lot of legends around, and that’s what attracted us: we wanted to bring some of that back.”

Harrison the senior, an architect, bought a small plot of land to build on, and the band ended up constructing a shed on it to call their own. Harrison the younger says he likes the distance from the hustle and bustle of central London’s music scene. “There’s a tendency for bands to copy each other and form cliques. People feel that if they join the crowd, they will be accepted into the scene, and I don’t think that’s a recipe for good music. At the same time, trying to be different for the sake of being different can sound contrived as well.”

Eel Pie Island played host to seminal gigs by the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and many other classic rock bands. The Who’s Pete Townshend also ran a studio there for a time and still owns the rights to the name. With this kind of history, it’s no surprise that even though most of the Mystery Jets are in their twenties, their music can veer from the jagged, stripped-down indie guitar rock of the moment to flights of retro prog-rock musical complexity, all in the space it takes to change time signatures.

The band’s songs also often have a fanciful, storytelling quality that harks back to an era when Led Zeppelin was referencing the Lord of the Rings. For the follow-up to Making Dens, now half complete, Harrison’s got a certain story in mind.

“We’ve got this image of an elephant. An elephant has a fantastic memory and never forgets. There’s an old story of a kid who teased an elephant, offering him peanuts and then taking them away. Thirty years later, when he’s an old man he goes to the zoo, and the elephant recognizes him and thwacks him across the face. That image of an animal that never forgets sticks in my head and, I think, it will be in the album in one form or another.”

One thing the follow-up won’t be is a repeat of the process used for Making Dens. “A lot of that material was written over a number of years, and the idea of the album was for it to read as a scrapbook of the early days of the band,” explains Harrison. “Making dens is something that children do: they go and hide away and create a space to escape from things, which is how we saw the album.

“On the first album we had so many ideas that we wanted to get out on record, some of the songs had 140, 150 tracks. I think we can now sort of say to ourselves we would have had a third of that going on had we known how the mix would turn out. There’s something to be said for stripping away what isn’t completely essential.”

Having been with the group for most of his still-brief existence, Harrison takes a long view. “Some of my favorite bands have really evolved and proved themselves. The Talking Heads started as an art-school project, but by the end it was something so far removed—they were recording with Brian Eno, doing polyrhythms, and became this weird electronic force. I love it when bands completely evolve over time.”

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