With a slew of spine-tingling winds and torrential downpours, our familiar Melbourne summer seems so far away
With a slew of spine-tingling winds and torrential downpours, our familiar Melbourne summer seems so far away. It is, however, December – less than a month until some of Australia’s finest music festivals – and William Rees of UK indie quintet Mystery Jets is as excited as ever on the eve of a return down under.
“We can’t wait. We were out there a couple of years ago and we had a great time, so we’re really looking forward to coming back,” Rees unreservedly declares.
“We’re actually kind of talking about living in Sydney for a little bit and doing some recording or writing over there. I think it’s fascinating, a really interesting place… especially if you come from somewhere like England, because Australia is wild in comparison,” he explains. “It’s the kind of place where you step into your back garden and you might get bitten by a deadly snake or something. To an English person, that’s just out of this world. It would just never happen!” he grins.
It’s been Mystery Jets’ celebrated catalogue – including its latest addition, Serotonin – that has enabled the Eel Pie Island band to take their music abroad, opening their eyes to new cultures and experiences, each colouring their artistic endeavours. “I think on the tail-end of the last album, we did a lot of travelling,” Rees recalls. “We really saw a lot of the planet and a lot of what we talked about before we started making our third record, was ‘Let’s try and get some of those experiences and some of the space we’ve crawled though, seeing the world. Let’s try and get that in the actual sound of the record.’ We wanted to achieve something more cinematic I think, and more polished and more wide-screen sounding.”
Previous excursions to our shores proved particularly instrumental in the band’s inspiration for Serotonin, indeed, the record’s opening track is titled Alice Springs. “It’s a really intriguing name… we all saw it on the map in Australia. We didn’t actually go there but we want to go there. We were like ‘Wow, this must be an amazing place!’” Rees muses, illuminating the core ideas behind their new album. “It was us just trying to branch out, you know, and make a sound that was bigger than London and England… make a sound that was kind of planetary. Alice Springs is kind of the epitome of that in a lot of ways.”
Typically, Rees is, by now, more than familiar with life on the road. Understandably, the life of a musician is more fluid than most. “It’s a very up and down lifestyle,” he admits. “You can be away for months, then suddenly you come home and sit on your arse… and there’s nothing to do for a few weeks and it’s totally weird. You go through periods of lots of movement and lots of new experiences kind of flooding your life so quickly to periods of stillness. It’s very different to someone who lives in a city, gets up and works everyday in a routine,” he muses.
“There’s a constant kind of adjusting process and that’s actually a real challenge, that’s really hard at times. But also great fun. You’ve just got to roll with it. It’s kind of like a fun fair ride. You just have to laugh at the funny bits, cry at the sad bits and scream at the scary bits and just do it, I suppose,” he smiles.
An extensive tour of exotic sights and sounds encouraged the direction of Serotonin. Reese recalls, however, that the recording process was smooth sailing. “It was pretty straightforward actually,” he figures. “We demoed all of our songs and we recorded one song every fortnight. Each song took about three or four days. So it wasn’t an intense period of work and getting lost in it – it was very much kind of ‘on’ and then ‘off’,” he remembers, “which was quite a good way to do it actually, because it gives you a lot of perspective on things. You can work out very quickly if you’re doing something wrong, or if you’re doing something right as well. It was a very smooth experience.”
“We recorded it with a guy called Chris Thomas,” Rees explains. “He’s done lots of stuff for Roxy Music and Never Mind The Bollocks to Elton John and The Pretenders… he’s a very experienced guy and I guess because we were moving away from a live raw sound into something that was more polished, we felt we needed an experienced hand to help us do that.”
Although further touring awaits, it seems that Mystery Jets have their sights set on who – and where – they will be in the distant future. “I think we’re going to get out of England… we’re going to become American or become Australian and live there and make music,” Rees explains.
“I think we need to press the reset button, you know? We need to find a new way of working, a new way of tearing up the rule book,” he asserts. “I think with the three albums we’ve made, they’re kind of like a trilogy. They’ve all got a relationship to each other. They’re like stepping stones. You couldn’t have one without the other and they all kind of make sense to me – in my head, at least – as a trilogy. But I think now it’s time to sort of set about and get as far away from it as possible.”
Much affection is felt for their work to date – 2006 debut Making Dens and 2008’s Twenty One, however. “We are proud of those records,” Rees nods. “We do love them and think they’re good, but I just think it’s time we head off in a completely new direction. It’s impossible to really say at this stage what that would be. But I think it’s going to be very live, very dynamic… there will be lots of blood in it.
“Not in a kind of Alice Cooper way,” he laughs, qualifying the idea, “more of in an emotional honesty way.”
MYSTERY JETS play The PYRAMID ROCK FESTIVAL on Phillip Island taking place across on New Years, December 30-January 1, alongside N*E*R*D*, The Temper Trap, Arrested Development, Built To Spill, Chromeo, Xavier Rudd, Midnight Juggernauts, Little Red and heaps more.
All info and tickets through thepyramidrockfestival.com. They also play a sideshow in Melbourne at The Hi-Fi on January 5 with The Holidays. Tickets from thehifi.com.au. Seratonin is out now through Remote Control.
