(4/08/10)
Walking through the Phonica Records shop on Poland Street, Soho, achingly cool industry types are a mass and eagerly awaiting to get inside. Tonight’s venue is the Vinyl Factory which is situated underneath the store, and it plays host to one of Britain’s most exciting bands, The Mystery Jets. The promise of new material and the exciting prospect of seeing these guys in such a secluded venue, was too good an opportunity to turn down.
Mystery Jets
In what I believe use to be an old vinyl factory, hence the name, the stage is set up and staring right in front of me is a car turned up on it’s side with only the bloody DJ booth built into it! Chevrolet are the manufacturers putting on this event tonight, so obviously there are touches of their new car darted around the place. Not only the make shift music booth but you had the ‘first ever digital light graffiti’ from a company called Lumacoustics. Also tucked away was a WAH nails make shift area, with again the ‘Spark’ car placed strategically amongst the various exhibitions.
Lumacoustics
But enough about the car side of the event, as predominant as it was, it was the prospect of seeing The Mystery Jets perform new material tonight that got me very excited indeed. If your not familiar with the band, well their music influences certainly are from a mix bag of classic 60s psych pop and wonderful 80s soundtrack synth quirkiness. Going from debut album ‘Making Dens’, which is a huge nod to people like Syd Barrett, to ‘Twenty One’, which is an ode to John Hughes and the brat pack form the 80s. The setlist tonight is very ‘Twenty One’ heavy, so the crowd are singing along to songs like ‘Young Love’ and the truly sublime ‘Two Doors Down‘, the latter making me do a certain indie ‘two -step’ dance move. With the exclusion of tracks like ‘You Can’t Fool Me Dennis‘, it was no surprise that the new Mystery Jet songs, 4 in total I believe, were more in the poppy, fun-loving, synth happy kind of mood. The new material was big sounding, with sing-along chorus’s that had that Radio 1 daytime feel to them. One could imagine the band planning UK music domination, one track at a time, and if what I heard that night is anything to go by, then they will achieve all sorts of greatness.
The crowd unfortunately were a tough nut to crack, and with the room only half filled with Mystery Jet lookalikes, it was a shame the audience was not buzzing off the band more. Singing and crowd surfing to the band’s more popular singles from ‘Twenty One’ but no where near enough admiration for their future hits. As the band come to a close I was left wanting more from the West London quartet. The performance was a triumph and I’m with the masses when I say, ‘I can’t wait for album number 3’.
Peter Cornish-Barlow
