Mystery Jets are exiled from main street and happy to find their own way

Chris Martin and Marcus Mumford may be reference points, but Mystery Jets are producing their own anthemic sound, writes Ed Power

IN A world where Coldplay and Mumford and Sons are masters of all they survey, the ongoing obscurity of Mystery Jets is deeply mysterious. It would simplistic, but not entirely inaccurate, to describe the London five-piece as an uncanny splicing of Chris Martin and Marcus Mumford — cloud-scraping troubadours with hillbilly souls. But despite an impressive body of work and an agreeably anthemic sound they remain, commercially at least, on the lower rungs.

“As a fan of music myself, I’m aware that a lot of my favourite bands weren’t the Kings of Leon of their day,” shrugs frontman Blaine Harrison. “There’s that old story about the fact that the Velvet Underground’s first album only sold 200 copies but that everyone who bought one of those copies went on to to start a group themselves.