I sat down with Will and Kai from the Mystery Jets at Manchester Cathedral just before the first date of their late 2010 tour in support of their new album "Serotonin". We discussed their latest album, the production and artwork, the 80s pop vibe, how things have changed since their first album, and their upcoming tour.
Interviewer: You're playing the Manchester Cathedral tonight.. Excited?
Will: Can't wait.
Kai: Yeah absolutely. It's the first night of the tour, a sold out show, very excited.
Interviewer: Ever played a cathedral before?
Kai: We've played the Union Chapel in London a couple of times, which is pretty magical. But that's not quite as epic as a Cathedral. It's our first cathedral show.
Will: First of many hopefully…
Kai: (jokingly) We're thinking about doing like a religious tour, doing cathedrals, mosques, igloos, and temples.
Will: We'll break bread in the middle of the set, and pass the wine.
Kai: Sacrifice some virgins… (laughs)
Interviewer: How does it feel to have your opening act tonight as an Evensong?
Will: Good.. It's nice and peaceful. It's different..
Kai: Gives a real build to the night.
Will: Peaceful and holy.. then to loud and satanic. (laughs)
Interviewer: Should be interesting… Where do you play, on the alter?
Will: Blaine's singing from the alter, Kai is playing from the cradle in the crypt
Kai: I'm little baby jesus in the cradle.
Will: Kapil is one of the wise men.
Kai: Will IS the choir. (laughs)
Will: Nah, I'm a leper.
Kai: He's like the village thief just stealing from the collection box..
Interviewer: Any faith healing tonight?
Kai: Hopefully we'll heal all the faith in our fans, and reward their faith in us...
Interviewer: Ok well, your new album is called Serotonin. How did the concept come about?
Will: The concept came last actually.. the idea for Serotonin was actually the last thing to happen. We were writing for about a year, getting demos togetherthen we got in the studio with Chris Thomas, and laid it all down.. and then I think Serotonin popped out of nowhere really. It sort of maked sense. Serotonin, as is a chemical that's responsible for your ups and downs, and with our music, we hope that it our music has an effect on how people feel, which is very similar to Serotonin.
Kai: Music is a serotonin in it's own way.. well at least good music is.
Interviewer: What was it like working with Chris Thomas? Any crazy practices in this the studio?
Will: He's just a class act really..
Kai: You're dealing with a pedigree producer. It was good to take that approach with the third album.. Not like the more ramshackle, free approaches with the others. This (album) was really concise, together, as streamlined as possible really. If you want to do that in a classy, exciting, rich way, he's your man. There's very few people who do it the way he does. Fortunate enough, he was a fan of our band. We've had many an amazing meal with him, a few bottles of wine… The way he hears things, he'll hear a bit of arrangement, parts to songs..
Will: (jokingly) He can hear frequencies that only animals can hear..
Kai: He puts dogs to shame.
Will: You know dogs have, you can get dog whistles, we had a Chris whistle, no one else hears it. (laughs)
Kai: Apparently he can talk to snakes..
Interviewer: Did you hit these frequencies in the studio?
Will: I don't know.. I think we did.
Kai: (jokingly) He said we did, but we couldn't hear them.. and he said he the talked to the old one-eyed snake. They're in there as a kind of subliminal message.
Interviewer: Your new album is very produced, many arrangements in there.
Will: It's very polished. Compared to Twenty One especially. I think that's something we were going for, wanted to do something that was a bit more cinematic, had a bit more finesse.
Kai: (Half jokingly) Like a beautiful, hollywood epic.
Interviewer: How do you recreate it live?
Kai: We use a sampler.
Will: Some of the songs have backing tracks, but not too many. Live, it's a different thing. It's much more raw, you can't really aim to reproduce a record in a live environment. And also it's not something we want to do, I think it's important to take the songs you've recorded and show a different side to them live. Bring out their progressive element, or work on their atmospheric element. It's good to exaggerate things live. We definitely try to do that, leave the record behind.
Interview: You have a new single coming out soon?
Will: We've got a song called "Show Me The Light" coming out soon. We did a great video for it with these two young directors who are called "Tell No One". It was the first video they've ever made, and we're actually very happy with how it turned out. It took a bit of time for us to get to the right edit that we wanted. I actually think it's a really fucking great video. It's just very classy, and moody. I don't think many people make videos like that - it's not a band in a room, or trying to be funny.. it's just got a strong feeling about it.
Interviewer: When I first heard of you guys it was a really cool theatrical video…
Will: "Alas Agnes"..
Interviewer: Have you always put a lot of thought and effort into your music videos?
Will: I think the whole visual side of the band is really very important. It's what you make of it. I think you can tell straight away when there's a band that lack vision, and have just been snapped up by a major label and haven't really thought about the artwork. You can see it when the artwork comes from the band.
Interviewer: Do you guys do your own artwork?
Will: We don't actually do the artwork, physically, but we discuss it with designers, and the people we work with our usually friends of ours and people we're very close with. There's the spanish guy called Nacho Allegre, he's an amazing photographer, and calligrapher.. would you call it calligrapher?
Kai: Typography? He does a magazine called Apartmento. Which is a really, really classy, bi-annual, interiors magazine. It's very closely linked with music, and he'll go to all sorts of peoples houses and talk to them about their music and the space they're in affects their music. It's between him and these couple of guys in Milan. We've worked with Nacho before on the second album, he did a lot of the photography on Twenty One.
Interviewer: I love the cover of your new album actually, is that him?
Kai: That's actually something we did ourselves. It just captured the time and space, and the vibe, which we felt was so relevant. Everything we did subsequently didn't have the same impact.
Interviewer: I heard you guys demoed stuff in another European country under a different name?
Will: Berlin. Yeah we went over there in the middle of, was it last year?
Kai: Yeah, April 2009.
Will: The idea was to go there, and change the name of the band and play all the new songs to crowds that knew nothing of who we were. And it kinda worked, yeah.We weren't playing to people who knew us and would just applaud. It made it a challenge. Our way of thinking was if the song's not any good and the audience don't really care about who you are, then you're gonna find out, they'll just turn their back. It worked out. We went there for about a week, did 7 gigs. It was an amazing, amazing time.
Interviewer: You guys aren't newcomers to the whole album, tour cycle..
Will: We've been doing it for 5 or 6 years.
Interviewer: What makes it different this time around?
Will: It's different because the music industry is constantly changing, your fan base generally changes quite a lot, i think ours has changed quite a lot. I think a lot of them are still there with us, but also, it gets older, younger, and our fanbase has gotten very female, which is a good thing. It's always different. It's always different, there's always something surprising. There's always gonna be a song that people react to which you'd never think people would react to like that, as opposed to another one. Your idea of how things are gonna turn out, never come true. And that's whats kinda exciting about it.
Interviewer: What's the response to your album been like?
Will: It's been good. I think it's been slightly slow, but that's probably because we're only starting to tour now, and the album came out 4 or 5 months ago.
Interviewer: Oh, have you not been touring?
Will: Well, we did a few festivals. I say a few, we've done some pretty serious festivals. Well, we're a live band really, and I think people are really going to understand it live, singing along to the record.
Interviewer: How do you think the music scene has changed? I mean, you guys came out a few years back around the same time as Bloc Party etc. How do you view your contemporaries now? Do you see yourself as part of a different scene?
Will: I don't think we were part of any scene. We came out of a bunch of musicians who were working and performing in West London. And a lot of those people were a friends, a lot of them actually aren't doing music anymore. I think we feel a part of our own little universe, making our own songs. Lots has changed, I mean, records don't sell particularly now. Although there are a few bands that seem to have proved that wrong. I think people get into music much quicker, people are into many more types of music. As opposed to five years ago, where indie kids were probably just into bands, where now, dance and indie is kinda one and the same thing. I kind of like certain bits of dubstep, and I'm sure lots of people who like bands are into dubstep.. it's this kind of cross-pollination.
Interviewer: It seems that all of your albums have done well, to the same degree and acclaim, without dropping popularity, or gaining bigger amounts of success. What's next for you guys? Do you want chart success?
Will: I think.. I think we do. We're in a very fortunate position where we can tour England and sell out venues roughly around the thousand mark. And that's amazing and a great position to be in. It's a good question what you asked. You always want more of something, don't you? You always want to be playing bigger venues or higher up in the charts.
Kai: The more you do it, you realise "there is no god", there is no end thing that you to achieve. Like when you're a kid. "Play that venue and then you've made it"… it doesn't exist, that. You just learn to kinda relax into it and enjoy the whole ride. Who knows where we'll get to? I'd love to play Wembley Stadium one day and I all the faith in the world that we're good enough as a band to get there, but whatever, it's a lovely dream. If we get there, fantastic, if we don't, it doesn't matter. As long as we're still making music, and people are still enjoying that.
Will: The nature of success is a bizarre, bizarre thing. I don't think anybody on the planet knows why things are successful or how people get successful. It's a weird thing, and it's something not worth thinking about.
Interviewer: I was speaking to a friend earlier who was a huge fan of Making Dens.. He said you guys have got 'less weird'.. What do you think of that?
Will: I think we've got less weird in the sense of zany, whacky or quirky. Yeah I think we've become less weird in that sense. But we've grown up a lot. And we're learning more about who we are as a band, and what we want to achieve. We started out making really odd music, left of centre.. We're kinda slowly discovering ourselves, learning to write pop tunes.
Kai: The thing with that whole zany thing, there's almost something slightly novelty-ish about it. Maybe the initial shock of the newness, of doing something eccentric. The effect of it is because it's different, rather than it's own worth. It's like, a great melody is a great melody, it's something you'll remember, it's something you'll wanna sing. I mean, playing pots and pans, and in weird time signatures, it's hard but what does that do apart from just be different in itself? Know what I mean? I mean, it has a place, who knows, something that the next album might refer back to more. As a musician you want to try different things and explore different types of music. For me, the finest art is writing incredible melody, or even an incredible rhythm, it's just a bit more universal.
Will: I think when we were doing that, a lot of those ideas like playing with percussion, and doing stuff that looked eccentric.. It actually came from a real place, cause we were listening to bands like King Crimson and Yes. King Crimson in particular had two drummers, and they had a percussionist as well, a guy called Jamie Muir. They embraced that all that kind of, world music-y stuff, and put it into a rock format. That's where a lot of ideas to do that came from.
Interviewer: I'm hearing a lot of 80s synths on your new album. I first heard it on "Two Doors Down" off your last record. Where did that come from?
Kai: Listening to a lot of Phil Collins…
Will: They say that the music you love the most is music that came out when you were a child, like five to twelve.. We were born in like 85, 84, so a lot of that music was made in that time so maybe it kinda filtered into our psyches. Yeah, people have actually said to me there are a lot of 80s sounding synths on the new record, and that kind of annoys me.. I think they're right, and they are.. but that wasn't our intention. We wanted to go more 70s actually, we were listening to Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, also Electric Light Orchestra.
