A rehearsal space on the increasingly blurred dividing line between east London's achingly hip districts of Dalston and Shoreditch. Roots in a club night that briefly bedazzled London trendies in the early Noughties, with its mix of live music, spoken word and performance art, and guest artists including Jane Birkin, Jarvis Cocker and Vincent Gallo. A debut album, Institute of Joy, whose own musical stew of dreamy psychedelia and lysergic experimentalism has been likened to early Pink Floyd, late Talk Talk and pre-California Fleetwood Mac. Before meeting or even hearing a note by the duo A Mountain of One, it is easy to start picturing the pair as skinny-jeaned young blades with the right contacts and a well-chosen classic-vinyl collection.
Disarmingly, Zeben Jameson and Mo Morris turn out to be two musicians in early middle age. Okay, Morris could be seen as clinging to youth through his choice of an ear-splittingly loud polka-dot shirt and mid-1970s Elton John shades. But mere minutes in A Mountain of One's delightful company makes sense of what is one of the best and most individualistic British debut albums in ages. For Institute of Joy bears witness to the strange and eventful journey the duo have been on to get to this point.
"I had a really far-out upbringing," admits Jameson, "brought up by a hippie painter in the woods. So I always knew what it meant to have the life of an artist. We'd be broke, and I'd say, 'Mum, why don't you just go and paint some pretty pictures of the mere or something', and she'd go, 'I don't want to paint the f***ing mere.' So it would be a crust of bread and lentil soup - again."
Jameson's education at the liberal Summerhill school ended with expulsion. And much of his adult life, between attempts at establishing his own career, has been spent as a jobbing touring keyboardist with bands such as Oasis and the Pretenders. "I think," he continues, "that if I'd stayed on the road playing with all those bands, I would have become embittered. I had to make a conscious decision to get on with my own stuff." "Well," adds Morris, who has a habit of punch-lining his partner's remarks, "you'd have ended up on cruise liners in a few years."
For Morris, the family tradition of military service saw him enlist briefly in the Fleet Air Arm, before he bailed out, got a job in the music industry, set up an independent label and found work as a producer. "I can remember," he says, "walking onto Ark Royal with two bags of records, and DJ-ing psychedelic tunes on the ship's radio station in the middle of the Bosnian conflict. Everyone thought I was crazy - they kept wanting to give me random drug tests. And all the boys from Liverpool would sprinkle grass into their cups of tea an hour before my DJ set, to get in the mood."
Advertisement
Both say that bad experiences in the music business helped them identify what they didn't want from music. And that rings true: the most accurate description of Institute of Joy might be that it sounds like an album its creators genuinely wanted to make, rather than one produced with the hot breath of bean-counters on their necks. "We've had the luxury," Morris agrees, "of not having that awful pressure, which puts you through the spin cycle time and time again. It can kick an artist in the nuts so badly that they never get up."
AMO1 came together, after several years of intermittent contact, in the summer of 2005 in a friend's country garden, where they listened to a lot of their favourite records and began feeling their way towards making their own. In keeping with such beginnings, tracks such as Sky Is Folding, Lie Awake, River Music and Bones could certainly be labelled escapist - but in the sense of rejecting coldly calculating artistry, not retreating into a smug comfort zone. Recording the album was, says Jameson, the sort of experience that "can make you feel incredibly wealthy as a human being, no matter what your circumstances. And you have to be free of all that shit to be able to go, 'This is it, this is the album I'm doing, it's balls-on-the-line time.' " "In the face," says Morris, "of all advice and evidence to the contrary."
The buzz the band have steadily built up around their work, since the release of their acclaimed debut EP in 2006, looks set to give Institute of Joy the exposure it so richly deserves. Track times regularly clock in at near the seven-minute mark. You never detect anxiety, politesse or corners being cut to make the right impression. "We never set out to chase record deals," says Morris, signalling by his expression that he knows the pursuit would probably have been futile in any case. "It was just a need we had, and we were wrapped up in that and the euphoria of doing it, rather than, 'How many could we sell?'" For once, Jameson has the last word. "Anyway," he laughs, "imagine a band like us trying to write singles."
Institute of Joy is released tomorrow on Ten Worlds