Mystery Jets singer Blaine Harrison loves playing their new music to his mum – because she’ll tell him if the song is "rubbish".
The ‘Young Love’ frontman writes the group’s songs with his father, the group’s guitarist Henry Harrison, and they always give the rest of their family a preview of their material before the public get to hear it because they know they’ll get honest feedback.
Henry said: "The family go through the agonising process of having to listen to it before anyone else."
Blaine added: "I love playing stuff to my mum, she has absolutely no problem telling me if she thinks it’s absolute rubbish."
Blaine’s mum is much more a fan of the Macabees than Mystery Jets, and always urges her family to be more like their chart rivals.
Blaine said: "She’s like, ‘Can’t you make it more about those Maccabees songs…’
Henry added: "[She says] ‘They write about big swimming pools, you are always writing about big subjects, can’t you get down to earth?’ "
And the ‘Telomere’ hitmakers – which also include William Rees, Jack Flanagan, and Kapil Trivedi – have even sampled the family matriarch in the background of their songs.
Henry said: "She’s featured on a couple of records doing the washing up in the background, on ‘Little Bag of Hair’ she’s dropping plates, and you can hear her going, ‘Do you know dinner’s ready Blaine?’, ‘Just a minute mum I’m singing’."
When they are writing together, Blaine loves the way his father will dive into a "stack of books" to come up with some references he wouldn’t otherwise have known.
He told BANG Showbiz: "Henry is the key of cross-referencing so I’ll say I’ve got this bit of music I’m working on and it might be about this or stem from this feeling and he’ll say give me a minute and he disappears into the library and comes back with a stack of books.
"I love that, that is so not a part of how my generation work, we’ve got Google, whereas Henry will have this stack of literature and we actually come up with results and long syllabic words that probably I’d never dream of being in my vocabulary so that’s fantastic."
Henry added: "We simplify and simplify, but a lot of the complex ideas underlie the tracks like ‘Telomere’."
Mystery Jets have honest family critics
