Mystery Jets Mean Fiddler, London WC2
It's not what you expect, in 2006, to attend a gig in one of London's sweaty indie-rock fleshpots and be greeted by the sight of five men - four barely in their twenties, one quite obviously in his fifties - wearing billowy Byron shirts and playing progressive rock. Yes, that's progressive rock, as in whooshy keyboard sounds and fiddly-widdly guitar solos designed to conjure up images of excited maths graduates travelling through space on a ship made solely from beams of light.
But that's what the Mystery Jets do for a living. The band, led by flame-haired, granny necklace-wearing singer Blaine Harrison and featuring his 55-year-old dad, Henry, stage left on rhythm guitar, have one of the strangest and most endearing histories in pop, which goes some way towards explaining their utter disregard for current fashions (musical or sartorial). The younger Harrison was born with spina bifida, a condition to which his dad admirably responded by encouraging Blaine to do what he loved most.
At the age of eight, that was playing drums and, bizarrely - or perhaps less so once you discover that you actually like your dad's record collection - listening to King Crimson, the noodle-tastic leaders of the Seventies prog-rock movement. Adding Blaine's school chum Will Rees on lead guitar, the Mystery Jets were born, and have lasted long enough to become one of the brightest, if most eccentric, hopes in British rock.
There are signs that the wider world has yet to fathom the appeal of a band who are known for their wildly exciting live shows, but who haven't yet had a hit single. Their debut album, Making Dens, released last Monday, is unlikely to make the Top 10 today and the Mean Fiddler was no more than three-quarters full. All the action - and there was a lot of it, from heroic stage-diving to chants of 'Henry! Henry! Henry!' between each song - was down the front, where the band's coterie of uber-fans squashed together.
The sound the band made on stage was a clattery, less polished version of how they sound on record, with all the posh eccentrities - oblique lyrics perfectly enunciated, synthesisers cribbed from bearded prog wizard Rick Wakeman, whimsy-filled choruses that don't grab you as hard as they should - present, but buried beneath layers and layers of percussion. Drummer Kapil Trivedi, slight but with Popeye-strength arms, struggled to control the beat over Blaine Harrison's spirited thrashing of his own homemade kit. 'Zootime', their best song by some distance, was chaotic and muddy-sounding when it should have been exhilarating to hear live.
Oh well. Just the sight of Henry Harrison giving the crowd the thumbs-up and clapping his son in the manner of the happiest dad in the world was enough to make you believe in the Mystery Jets' slightly messy endeavours. The chorus to 'You Can't Fool Me, Dennis' summed up everything that's worth cherishing about them: 'You can do anything you want as long as it makes sense.' There was a lot about this show that didn't make much sense at all, but what was heartening was the sense that a band so odd can get to make records at all.
