KAI FISH, bass player for London guitar whipper-snappers MYSTERY JETS, talks to ALASDAIR DUNCAN about his band’s run-ins with the local noise authorities, and the writing of their new album, the marvellously poppy Twenty One.

“We got shut down by the noise police,” Kai Fish is telling me, concerning the last of his band’s legendary series of free shows in their home area of Eel Pie Island. “In London, as soon as you have even a little bit of noise coming from a house, you have the local council come around with a decibel metre measuring how loud it is. It’s understandable, because the gig had six or seven hundred people, and you could really only fit two hundred in the room. So you had people packed on top of each other in the room, and hundreds more just wondering around the island, falling asleep in people’s boats...”

This experience was undoubtedly a watershed for the band, but as Fish recognises now, it is perhaps a good thing that the parties were shut down at their peak. “We became too big for the island – it was great while it lasted, but it’s also nice when these things stop and they’re remembered. If you stop something before it gets boring, stop it in its prime, right where it’s great, that’s a good way to do things. Erol Alkan, who produced the album, did a similar thing with Trash – he ran it for ten years, but he decided that things would inevitably move on, and he wanted to move on and do other things, so he stopped it when it was still great.”

The album Fish refers two is Twenty One, the second outing for the young band – a poppy collection of eighties, white-boy soul inspired guitar rock, it is one of the catchiest and most intelligent releases of the year so far. “If you listen to a song and it feels like you’ve heard it before when you haven’t, that a really good sign,” says Fish of the familiar feeling inspired by Twenty One. “With our first album, we wanted to make it as big as possible – we had a lot of progressive influences, and we’d try to fill songs with as many ideas as we could cram in. We wanted to bring this one in line with the great pop tracks of the eighties – tracks that were pop and accessible, but were doing something. Pop in the eighties was about pushing boundaries, but it was also really accessible.”

The warm and fuzzy single Young Love, a current favourite on Triple J, sounds to me like the kind of song you’d put on a mix tape for someone you fancy; when I put this idea to fish, he laughs and agrees. Young Love was written in a hurry, during a break in recording, and almost didn’t make it onto the album. “We had a piece of music that had been floating around for ages and was previously part of a song that didn’t work out ... it was a really strong piece of music though, so we just said, let’s write the poppiest tune that we can possibly write and still call it a Mystery Jets song. We’d never taken that approach before, but in a day, the song was done. As a musician, you over work things sometimes,” Fish continues. ‘You do something, then you think, that’s not good enough, so you revise it and rework it and end up coming around in a really big circle and realising that you’re right back where you started, realising that yes, that was actually the strongest thing.”

TWENTY ONE is out now on 679 / Warner.

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