100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #77 Mystery Jets – Two Doors Down

Released: 2008

Everyone loves a naming story, so briefly, the various members of Mystery Jets came from Eel Pie Island, a neck of land surrounded by the river Thames in Twickenham. Home to a legendary jazz and blues club which burned down in the early 70’s, as nearby Heathrow airport expanded the increased noise pollution caused the newspaper headline ‘Misery Jets’, a metaphor the band adopted not long after their formation in 2003. When drummer Blaine Harrison then mispelled this when painting it on his skins, they quickly became known by the handle they still are today. And now you’re all up to date.

In a world that typically values aesthetics well beyond the furthest limits of talent Harrison was an outlier in having a music career whilst dealing with spina biffida – and being the son of one of the band’s fellow members – but their 2005 debut Making Dens told a story just of promising songwriters. It’s follow up Twenty One was a different thing altogether though, shaped by big-hitting producers Erol Alkan and Stephen Street, it went straight for indie pop’s jugular in the mode of a starving rottie.

Two Doors Down had all the enthusiasm of that plus a knowing sense of it’s own irony, a song which straddled the basics of pop’s best 20th century decades – 60’s and 80’s – and left any cynicism about employing either’s levers at the door. There was the tiniest hint of cultural subversion via an oblique reference to Television’s Marquee Moon, but otherwise it was left to song’s cherubic gloss to carry it to the right side of cheese, a hurdle many of their contemporaries fell at. And other than the naming story, that’s really about it.