New year. New deal. New record.

DEAR ALL. I wish to bring to light the announcement that we, Mystery Jets, have indeed left our previous contract with 679 recordings. We worked with some talented and inspiring people, enjoyed our time there and parted on an amicable note. But ultimately what occurred was a catch 22 situation with a major label. When we first signed, 679 was its own entity. They occupied a beautiful office in a leafy backstreet in Camden town, and we shared a pretty fierce roster with the likes of the Futureheads, Death from above and The Streets. Fast forward four years, and the label occupies nothing more than a six foot-high metal storage cabinet on the third floor of the Atlantic offices in High Street Kengington. And all we share is a shelf with some dusty old Kano promo cds.

John Lennon once famously said that he liked to imagine domestic objects that he could buy with the profits made from his songs, so as to give himself motivation to keep writing. It was once even (allegedly) said that he and Paul wrote 'Eight Days A Week' specifically so that John would be able to afford an extension to his house. "Sometimes we sat down and said 'right! Today we're going to write a swimming pool'."

Comparatively, record sales today aren't a scrape on what they were in the Beatles' day. Therefore, I think I can justify saying that in the eyes of a major label like Atlantic, Mystery Jets (and many of our contemporaries who have encountered similar obstacles, and who I have listed below) were effectively 'writing kebabs'.

Luckily I like Good Shoes.
And I like The Futureheads.
And I like The Horrors.
And I like Patrick Wolf.
And I also like kebabs.



On another note, it is with utter joy and excitement that I would like to announce our new home- Rough Trade Records.
We signed last week and took a photo to mark the occasion too.

Rough Trade records is a whole world unto itself. In the past thirty years it has been home to the likes of the Cure, the Smiths, the Strokes, the Libertines and the Arcade fire. And that's only scraping the surface. It also even more importantly carved the way for many of the independent labels we love and buy records from today. So I think its more than fair to say we are looking forward to what lies in front of us in the year ahead.


Photograph by Russ Tannen

Aside from the final dates in February in the UK and the States, our sights are firmly set on making the third record. Demos are being thrown around like beach balls, as are, less thrillingly, phrases like 'driving music!' and ' French new wave soundtracks!'. I can only speak for myself when I say there's a lot of Springsteen, Cars and late-police being played out round here. That said, I will however, never allow a Sting CD in this house.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

P.S
For those of you who are not familiar with the heritage of Rough Trade, let wonder-kid Jeff Lewis make the introduction:
To Paraphrase Jeff himself -
"Don't let the record label take you out to lunch, every sip of soup's gonna be recouped"



Read what founder Jeff Travis had to say himself on rough trade's website here:
http://www.roughtraderecords.com/mysteryjets/1199/mystery-jets-sign-to-rough-trade

X Blaine
05/02/09

THE DEMOLITION BALL.

Last night saw over 15 artists gather for one final farewell at the aptly titled Demolition Ball at the London Astoria.
As i sit here writing this, the lights are being pulled down from their rigging, the tiles are being lifted, and salvaged from the roof, and the floorboards are being pulled one by one, from where they have lied for the past 82 years.
All this (also combined with the loss of the adjacent Astoria 2 and classic dive, the metro club) for what exactly, we ask? For the Crossrail extention to Tottenham court tube station, some 30 feet beneath the ground.

My first ever experience of live music, that i can remember, was when i was eleven. I attended a show at the Astoria 2 (then known as the LA 2) which featured all but one of the ex-members of eighties new wave band Japan. There was ivy draped over the PA system and up the walls, dry ice up to everyones abdomens (and up to my head) and the fucking loudest sounding guitars i had ever heard, and have still probably ever heard. It was mesmerising.

Anyone seen the hairspray?

The mystery jets played the astoria 5 times in total. The first (and second) shows, and perhaps the most memorable, were in april of 2005 in support of the Futureheads and thier epic Hounds of love Uk tour. At the time, we had never played in a room which had a balcony in it. It was a huge deal for us. Rumour had it that johnny Marr had come to see us play, so we were all, obviously, on our very, very best behaviour.

We also played there for an NME awards show supporting CSS in spring of last year.
But Closest to our hearts by a long mile, was our performance there on October 23rd last year, for the homecoming of our year long tour in support of 21. Golden Silvers, one of my favorite bands in a long time, opened, and we were joined on stage by the Elysian quartet for a mid-set rendition of Umbrellahead and Bleeding love.
Performing at the Astoria is a dream for anyone who has played in bands or grown up in London.
And thats exactly what that day was.



On wednesday night the Astoria opened its doors one final time to upwards of 2000 lucky young kids.
We had been talking for several weeks amongst ourselves about how we wanted to go down and rip off some signs or steal some door knobs as a way of remembering the place as it once was. So it was a huge suprise, and indeed a magnificent moment when i recieved a text message from Drew Mconnel, of Babyshambles, at about 11pm on Tuesday night asking if we wanted to be a part of the last show.
Twenty four hours later, William, myself and Henry walked out onto the stage and performed a short accoustic set of Flakes and Young love. Ive got to say, it was the shortest and most beautiful 7 minutes of my life.



young love at the demolition ball 16/01/09

Its a sad day for music when the industry, and everyone in it, has to say goodbye to something so significant and totemic as the Astoria. But its an even sadder day for London, as its loosing something which has been so close to its heart and pride for the past 8 decades. And all for a few hundred yards of train track.
If you ask me, whoever it was that finally bent over and allowed this to happen deserves nothing less than a good slap in the face.





X O Blaine

P.S
To end on an up note, Henry took his chances and paid a visit to the place (with a builders' jacket and a step ladder) in the early hours of thursday morning and got the our letters from above the entrance (which had been sitting there since we played in October). Which is pretty damn cool wouldnt you say?

looks like 25 years of spelling out the G.A.Y night has taken it's toll..

BLAINES' KOOKS TOUR JOURNAL
EUROPE/UK NOVEMBER 2009



FRANCE.
Pulling into the car park of the small northern french town of Nantes, the sight of a small army of young french girls already grouped up around the front entrance to the venue takes me by suprise. I had an idea of the kooks popularity in europe, but the kind of mania that has surrounded them this whole tour was completely beyond what i had expected.
The crowd were prodominently young teenage girls, some with thier boyfriends, others came in groups accompanied by the odd sheepish looking guardian sipping a cold kronenbourg somewhere near the back of the room.
The reaction to our set was quite a suprise. The kids formed circle pits and crowdsurfed if we played anything with a pulse to it, and greeted us with a sea of glowing mobile phones (the 21 century's answer to the cigarette lighter) when we played flakes.
After the show we got off on a good foot with the kooks and hit a small bar in town where we ran up a massive bar bill.
Shorty before it was time to leave i realised i had no means of contributing my part to the tab, and concequently, any tab for the remainder of the tour as i had left my card behind the bar at the churchill arms in Notting Hill gate the afternoon before. Bummer.
So i went out side and decided i might as well break my first personal rule of the tour and take a puff on william's crudely-crafted roll up (i'd not touched one since september 11th ). Bad i dea. Got back to the bus, puked in my bunk, good times.

In toulouse, we hooked up with our friends the Dodoz, who have since recorded a very impressive cover version of veiled in grey. We originaly met these guys about a year ago at paris's top dancing spot, la fleche d'or. Jules, the taller of the band's two frontmen speaks the queens english and seems to have been blessed with her manners too. His bandmate however, Vincent, is undisputedly (though he will hate me for saying so) the spitting image of the popular actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Could be worse dude.

ALLEMAGNE
Generally speaking the german leg of the tour ran like clockwork. The german kids clap if you tell them to clap and keep thier mouths politely shut while you play. No kids being stretchered off site for raving too hard or having thier stomachs pumped by the local rescue workers as a concequence of dehydration , but i think we can all just about live with that.
The munich venue was insane. A vast airplane hanger, perhaps the size of the main hall at Alexandra palace. The roof was situated so high above the rafters it was invisible. As was the back wall of the room. I wanted to get some nostalgic looking shots on my lomo camera of us standing in the middle of the empty hall after the gig with everyones trash around us but the lighting wasnt sufficient.

In Dusseldorf, i decided to pay a visit to the zoo to try and dust away some tour fatigue and hopefully find some inspiration for the third record from some fellow marsupials. And i have to say, for future reference,if you could find anything more psychedelic than sitting before a pack of thirty blue-bottomed Baboons ravaging and shitting on each other for a whole hour and a half, i'd love to hear it. These guys were vicious little fuckers too. At one point a pair of chunky looking females (i didnt know bulldykes were prevalent social sterotypes in the monkey kingdom) sat down right in front of me and proceeded to pick all the scabs of thier bite marks, which they'd casually flick at the glass. But anytime i appeared to be showing too much interest, they would both lunge out in the direction of my face and let off an awful piercing shriek. Which, given the moral wrongness of zoos in general, i have no difficulty in understanding.
Most of these little guys have spent their entire monkey lives become experts at amusing horrid little child tourists.
I mean most clowns take american Express these days for fucks sake. These guys are still paid in bananas.





I was pleased with how our stage clothes took to the light this tour. I am proud to say that Sequin jackets have replaced the pastel suits. Not in the sense that we have created a box around ourselves as a way of giving people something easy and palatable to digest. But in the way that i now look at the clothes we wear as a sort of reflection on whats' going on in our heads. Which is really the only kind of statement (fashion or artistic) worth making.
With the pastel suits we were litrerally wearing our musical influences on our sleeves, but by the end we had pushed it to a point where i think it must have been obvious that some degree of irony was at work, as it was within the way we initially presented the record. With the sparkles, there is more than a nod to the disco era and its kitch glamour, for which credit must be given to william and his growing collection of italo records. There is also the iconic images of a young, glamed-up and androgenous Brian eno in the early Roxy press shots...



PARIS
For a town we have played infinitely more times than any other city outside the Uk, paris has been somewhat discouragingly slow to find a place in its' heart for the mystery jets. When we first arrived, we thought it might be a key bonus that we spoke the language, and have concequently conducted all our press there in french, as we were told les rock dieux Placebo and Muse had done before us. And who could argue?
But three years on, France still has some catching up to do with Australia, where we'd not even played until last week!
However, the show at the Zenith was a convincing sign that things are picking up, and that there are perhaps indeed french school children out there, creating a small space in thier compact disc collections (and in thier hearts) between thier muses and thier nicklebacks for les mystery jets.
We played with White lies, and CSS as well as the kooks so there was a sort of festival feeling in the air, which no doubt contributed to the success of the show too. Of paticular note was how well a change of name and in style has worked for the White lies boys (we've known one another since the West london all-ages days). They look sharp as any of the other tools in the shed and 'unfinished buisiness' is a probably the best opener ive heard in donkeys' years too. Big thumbs up.


AMSTERDAM
As any musician who has even had the most modest taste of the touring life will tell you, an amsterdam show is more often than not the high point of most european tours(excuse the pun). Its easy for friends to fly out for the weekend, narcotics (for those so inclined) are a phone call /5 minute walk away and more than anything, you couldnt find a more beautiful place to have a day off.
The gig kicked ass (if my memory serves me well) and the subsequent celebrations were pretty fun too. We have a friend called 'Handsome dan' who lives adjacent to one of the many canals, and who has never failed to show us a good time when weve been there for a gig.
Last time we were there it involved pedalos and pineapple express. Admittedly this time, it was more centered around watching videos of hungarian traditional guitar music on youtube and drawring all over our tour managers sleeping face, but first class fun no less.

ENGLAND
There are few things in life queerer than the sight of a pale-fleshed twenty-something young woman squeezed into a dress made for someone half her size, walking home at three in the morning along the seafront in a coastal town (in four inch heels) on a sunday night in the middle of december.You got to love the brits.

The Regional shows over the next few days were a lot of fun, and the crowds were great, but in all honesty, it was no secret that everyone was really dying to get back to london and rest up before the last couple of big nights at Brixton.
Considering the acclaim it recieved from critics, we found the roundhouse a bit of a dissapointment. The accoustics are distractingly offset by the shape of the room, and due to the size of the stage (tiny) its hard to get into what poor musicians call 'the zone' in quite the same way. But really, Come on guys.
After the first night went a little by the wayside, we decided to invent a band-only term which, when uttered on stage, would act kind of like a pull-up-your-socks-boys button. Only to be used in extreme circumstances, so as to not weaken it's long term effect, the word is actually a calling sign taken from one of the band's favorite childhood disney cartoons. The name of which, i would be a fool to repeat. Guesses on the back of a postcard.

BRIXTON
Inspired by the appoaching seasonal festivities and precious family time, everyone on board all three tourbuses was agreed that it was of utter importance that the Brixton shows were to be the best ones of the year, by a long shot. And looking back, i think they might very well have been.
'Secret santa' , for those of you not lucky enough to have ever played, is a tradition enjoyed by all walks of people. Office folk, primary school children and all kinds of other non-christian groups. However on this occasion, the rules came under ferocious scrutiny due to a certain member of mystery jets' (whos name i will refrain from mentioning) background spent in summer camps, where secret santa was a highlight of the recreational winter gathering.
Apparently, by some peoples' rules, the only secret part of the game is not not knowing what your going to recieve. But once you have openend your gift, it is that persons' right to announce them as your 'giftee'. However, unless im mistaken, the whole point of christmas is not knowing what your going to recieve (unless, like william, you buy yourself presents). The point of secret santa surely is that you never find out who picked your name from out of the hat.
Thus, when you discover you have effectively been 'skanked' (aka been bought something under the set price recomendation, like a singing AA battery operated black father christmas -mentioning no names kapil) you wont know who's door to go knocking on.



HOME
is where the heart is. There is nothing quite like the feeling of waking up on the morning of a big london show in your own bed. You actually feel inspired in a way quite unlike the experience of waking fully clothed in your bunk five minutes before soundcheck in a Morrison's carpark somewhere near Stockton. Simple things like brushing your teeth, and emptying your pockets of unfamiliar-looking currencies and phone numbers and facebook adresses become a joy. Getting on the tube and sharing those short fifteen minutes with the inhabitants of the real world with thier shiny shoes and winking blackrerries, theres just something about it.
Which reminds me of something i was thinking about earlier..
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be able to speak in italics?


X O Blaine

LUNG YOVE

THE OTHER DAY BLAINE DID AN INTERVIEW WITH THE 'JUST PLRESS PLAY' BLOG. YOU CAN READ IT HERE


XXX M J S

Throwing Shapes

...a couple of weeks ago, i had the good fortune of being taken along to a gig by a close friend and leaving the sweaty little basement feeling speechless. Its a rare thing to arrive unsuspecting at a little venue on the toilet circuit and come home with your ears still ringing from the melodies of the person you've just seen perform, rarer still when those tunes still swim about in your head the morning after that. "Micachu and the shapes" is what they call themselves, and its the first time this side of 2008 that i've felt completely excited by a new band. They're music is wild in the Captain Beefheart sense, melancholy in The Raincoats circa Odyshape (shouting out loud) way, percussive and tribal in a Creatures/Siouxsie manner and....this is only on the live side of things. On record its a different kettle of fish. Mica, the singer, is a grime producer as well, she's remixed Toddla T, and worked with some of the guys from Man like Me and Naked and the Boys. To add to that she is also an innventor of her own instruments, so far she's made a bizarre guitar/harp/drone instrument with a foot pedal attached to it that allows you to vary the pitch of some of the strings as you play it. Their recorded songs to date are edgy pieces, lots of anxious sounding drum beats, made from a mixture of electronic bleeps and found-sounds. These elements all blend into their music to create something very bizarre but also effortless sounding too, imagine Jamie T but as a girl, Moon Dog being born in 1985 and given a laptop for his 20th birthday or Siouxsie Sioux with an androgynous voice and an obsession with heart-break rather than gothic stuff. Enough talk, have a listen to this and then click here for more.
William.
X

VIDEODROME

Hey. So We've not posted in a while. And for that i'm sorry. The past 4 months has pretty much consisted of non stop running around trying to get everything finished for the new record. Actually I am happy to say i think were pretty much there.
And I'm pretty fucking exited.

Very soon I will be able to shed more light on what you can expect to hear from us over the next two or three months, and indeed exactly where we will be. And When.
In the meantime heres some cool shit Ive come across over the past couple of weeks.


KING CRIMSONwere the first band I truly fell in love with. In fact the first LP I ever owned was a chrome cassette tape of their 80s stuff. It had things like 'Frame by frame' and 'discipline' on it as well as a couple of songs from their first record, 'In the court of the Crimson King' weirdly tagged on at the end.
"Elephant talk" is a completely revolutionary piece of music. It features an instrument called the Chapman stick, played by a big scary bald guy called Tony Levin, who also played with Peter Gabriel throughout the 80s. This song is out there. And this performance is unbelievable. Robert Fripp, who was the brains of the band right from the start is the guy on the right hand side, playing fingerpicked guitar at an unreasonable speed. Just look at the guy.
Thats' somebody's dad. And probably someone else's only child.

King Crimson - Elephant talk (live on American Television circa 1981)



MGMT are a band I know little about, but their single 'Time to pretend' is being caned pretty heavily on the radio right now in the UK. And I like it. Just check the lyrics.

"I'm Feelin rough I'm Feelin raw I'm in the prime of my life.
Let's make some music make some money find some models for wives.
I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars.
You man the island and the cocaine and the elegant cars."

So they've got a knack for the written word. But have you seen their video?
Apparently Someones blocked youtube from allowing people to share it, but I found a link to a high resolution version somewhere else. And I urge you..NO, ACTUALLY I PLEAD WITH YOU TO WATCH IT.
Anyone who saw Klaxons' original 'Gravity's Rainbow' video will notice similarities, but I mean this is other level shit.

SEE IT HERE


If you agree with me and you also believe that this is indeed the greatest thing ever made, then you might also like the next video. If you disagree, then you suck.

ENCYCLOPEDIA PICTURA
are a video collective from San Fransisco. Well in fact I think it's just a couple of young dudes, but since they started making short films a couple of years ago, they've been getting their fair share of attention. I heard they are working with Bjork, though i don't know when or what exactly on. Actually little while ago I posted the video they did for Grizzly bear . Most things they do involve sickening amounts of animation and make up but Its really hard to tell how much is real and how much is mouse magic.

I don't even think this technically counts as a music video as theres only a bit of harp being strummed here and there, but I think its amazing.

'Tactical Advantage' by Mangello Tipperary/Encyclopedia Pictura



Far out!

NACHO ALEGRE



I first came across Nacho Alegre a couple of months ago when we started looking for artwork to use on our new record. I wrote to him initially just to say how much i loved his work and to see how he would feel about other people (like us) possibly using his photographs on record sleeves in the future. It turned out he was delighted and in no time at all, flights were booked for him to come over and shoot the band. He spent a week with us, sleeping at our houses and flats and basically capturing each of us in our own environments.
We were so pleased with what came out of the whole thing that we decided one of his shots should be on the album cover and the others should also be used on every single released off it.
He told me he started taking photos because he felt like his youth was slowly slipping from under his feet and he wanted to have a record of all his friends and of everyone he shared experiences with. Which kind of felt to us a lot like the reason we started making music in the first place. And that's exactly how i think his photographs look, like memories. Some have an eeriness to them , some are blurred and others are just photographs taken of his hot girlfriends while they were sleeping.
Nacho is the man, basically. To see more of his work, here is his PHOTOJOURNAL.
The Mystery jets journal should be up there any day soon.




JAN KOUNEN
is a film maker from France. He doesn't sound french with a name like that, but he is. He made an ultraviolent movie called Doberman with Vincent Cassel in it in the late nineties and also made the 'lay all your love on me' video for Erasure in the Eighties. I read somewhere he is really into a cult called 'Shipibo-Conibo' and is also obsessed with shamanism. Well, watching this short film, all of that would make sense. Its basically a bunch of wizards chasing each other on petrol fuelled broomsticks around a deserted business park.
I believe all the flying sequences were constructed from stills which is pretty cool when you consider these wizard dudes would have had to have been jumping up and down about a hundred times a minute for it to look real. That's like one and a quarter jumps every second. Shikes.



AND SO TO END...A CLASSIC.
Everybody saw Donnie Darko and everybody knows the 'Mad world' song. Don't get me wrong, I like the tune a lot, and the guy who did the cover does Micheal Stipe better than Micheal Stipe.
But It's far from Tears for Fears' best song. This is.



Love Blaine X

back to the drawing board

XXX