Interview In the studio with Mystery Jets

Spending a solid 14 months, from the tail end of 2017 through the whole of 2018, bunkered down in their new studio – a “rabbit warren of tunnels” in the basement of an old tram shed in Clerkenwell (“In the '80s and '90s, it was a bit of a legendary hang out,” informs the singer. “I bumped into Bobby Gillespie the other day, and he said he went to some pretty sordid parties there back in the day...”), the recording of Album Six sounds a wholly fulfilling one. For the first time, the band solely took production duties on themselves, bolstered by the new confidence of having learnt the ropes together, co-producing their last.

The sessions themselves, meanwhile, were just as creative and semi-ridiculous as you might expect from the bunch of Eel Pie Island natives who've always operated one slightly eccentric step left of the mainstream. “We always seem to end up in these bizarre spaces; our first studio was a boat shed, and then we were in a button factory and now we're in a tram shed,” chuckles Blaine. “We set up different spaces in different parts of the basement and a lot of the rooms have tie lines between them, so if you want, people can be in different rooms and still communicate. We'd be working on different parts of a song and running between spaces, swapping ideas.”

However, if the recording itself was an excitable, collaborative thing, then the route to that point was born from purposefully starker circumstances.

Having learnt over the years that periods of solitariness were the key to “coaxing the songs out”, Blaine decided to test the theory further. “I thought, well how can I take that to the extreme? Where can I go that I'm not gonna have any signal, and no one will get hold of me? Iceland. I thought, I'm gonna go up a glacier and find a cabin. So I went and had a really social experience hanging out in Reykjavik, and then for the majority of the trip I circumnavigated the island. I rented a car at one point, I did some hitch-hiking, caught some buses, basically working my way around.

“The conduit for where the music came from was being cut off from outside influences,” he continues, “however, whereas on the last record it had been about escaping as a means to having an inward journey, this time, escaping to this very remote environment actually reminded me that maybe where I should be is in the middle of it all, in the thick of it. It was a long way to go to realise that actually I should be at home.”

By the time this issue hits shelves, the band will have dropped the first single from the new batch in the slowburning epic of 'Hospital Radio'. Blaine is remaining cagey for now about how it and the rest of the album relates to his epiphany although, he notes, “thematically, in terms of the bigger picture, it's something quite different [to their last work]”. Sonically, however, the addition of “rock god” engineer Alan Moulder into the mix (who's previously upped the ante on records by the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Foals, Smashing Pumpkins and more) probably gives as much of a statement of intent as any. “I think the last album had quite a grand palette to it; we wanted to make something that felt like it had a lot of air in it – quite a widescreen, expansive sense of dimension,” says Blaine. “But I think with this record, even though it was made in quite a similar way, it's much more direct, much more hard-hitting. The guitars sound like they're right there in front of you. We wanted to make something that sounded like it was slamming against your ear drums.”

Heading into the second half of their second decade together as a band, Mystery Jets could easily be resting on their laurels, but instead they're gearing up for a sixth album bursting with ideas. You sense they might really only just be hitting their stride. “I think, with us, we just feel like we've still got so much of our story left to tell,” says Blaine. We're all ears.

Tags: Mystery Jets, Features, Interviews