Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Mystery band part of Project
Thirteen venues across Canterbury will be rocking to the sounds of the City Sound Project over the May Day Bank Holiday weekend. Indie band Mystery Jets will be among the headliners, fresh off the back of the success of their latest album.
City Sound Project uses a lot of heritage venues around Canterbury – what’s the oldest/ most interesting venue you’ve ever played at? I would say our favourite venue of heritage would have to be Somerset House.
It was a big moment for us as we had just released our album, Serotonin, and the first time we unveiled the new songs was in that beautiful building.
Plus Noel Gallagher was in the crowed! What’s not to like?
What does a Mystery Jets live show usually contain these days? We would like to think a Mystery Jets live show is now better than ever.
Expect to find it full of songs, both old and new, showing off our favourite parts of the last 10 years. It’s been so much fun placing Curve of the Earth songs into the set. We are thoroughly enjoying people hearing them in the room with us.
How excited are you to be playing in Canterbury? Has anyone in the band visited before? If so, what did you think? We are totally excited to be playing in Canterbury!
Blaine did a lot of writing for the album in a beach shack in Whitstable so he would quite often venture into Canterbury to enjoy the treats, sweets and cinema seats that it had to offer.
I also lived there for around a year. It really is a beautiful place and full of culture for all the vultures.
How has your recording process changed throughout your career? Did you change it up much for the new album, Curve of the Earth? The recording process was very different to any other Mystery Jets album, as we decided to produce it ourselves alongside our friend and producer/ engineer, Matthew Twaites.
I guess the difference between this and any other record was time frames. When we started we had no deadline and there was a unified feeling in the band that we weren’t going to stop until we all thought it was the best that it could be.
Using three words how would you describe Curve of the Earth as a record? Scale, ghosts, reflection.
Who would you say are your biggest influences in your work? A lot of the influences for this record didn’t necessarily come from other musicians. Actually tell a lie, when in the studio we drew a lot of influence from other people’s recording techniques (drum sounds, microphones, etc), but mainly a lot of our references for this album came from books and film, an interesting place to turn your lyric-writing head to.
If you could add another band member to your band, dead or alive, who would it be? I would like to add Jeff Lynne of ELO, purely because the man might just be the best all-round musician that has ever lived. Blaine and I are complete Lynne-heads, constantly trying to figure out how the man can make three choruses work in a song.
For tickets and more visit www.citysoundproject.com.