There’s no other J

“It was an amazing view,” enthuses Unger-Hamilton. “The stage is in the middle of the hotel, by a pool. You look down from the stage and there’s a massive swimming-pool there, and there are people in it watching you play. Just behind that, you see Las Vegas, and there’s an Eiffel Tower, this massive globe thing – it’s kind of bonkers really.”
It turns out there’s been something of an aquatic theme to Alt-J’s gigs this year.
“We played the Into The Great Wide Open festival in Holland this summer,” recalls Gus, “and right in front of the stage was a big lake. You had people around the edge of the water and people on boats watching the band. It was quite cool. It seems the marine-themed gigs are slowly making their way over to Europe.”
Alt-J’s big break was undoubtedly receiving the Mercury nomination for their debut, an example of the prize doing what it’s supposed to do – bringing daring music to a wider audience. Considering the band would have kept tabs on the event whilst in school and university, it must be a bit odd to find themselves as favourites to land the gong.
“It really is,” admits Gus. “I remember being in bed listening to Radio One at night and there was a live announcement of who’d won. It was the year it went to Anthony and the Johnsons. It was really exciting, and I’ve always had this immense respect for the Mercury award. I’ve always thought it was kind of the be-all and end-all of the music scene for the year. If one particular year you haven’t been paying attention to the albums that have been released, when the Mercury shortlist is announced, you could catch up, or cram, through listening to those records, and have a fairly good ideas of what was going on.”
Is being a big band important to Alt-J?
“Undeniably it’s become something we’re aware of,” considers Gus. “It was never something we set out to do, and I would never say it’s something that we want to do. But it’s really exciting to be selling out bigger and bigger gigs, it’s exciting to be on the A-list at [BBC] Radio One... critical acclaim is something we’re probably much more keen on than mass appeal, simply because we’re an indie band. And all indie bands have this dream of people loving the record. We don’t care how much it sells, we just want to get some good reviews!”
Alt-J formed at Leeds University in 2007 when – according to the group’s Wikipedia page – frontman Joe Newman showed guitarist/bassist Gwil Sainsbury some songs he’d written inspired by his guitar-playing dad and hallucinogens. Like Wild Beasts and labelmates These New Puritans, Alt-J have a very distinctive, idiosyncratic sound that makes them hard to pin down. There is also a psychedelic feel to some of their tunes. You wonder if there’s a drug aspect to their music?
“Not massively, no,” replies Gus. “The whole hallucinogens thing was basically that in first year, Joe took mushrooms with his flatmate and had a really bad time. He had to go home to his parents for a few weeks and really wasn’t the same when he came back for a good year or so. I think it improved his songwriting if anything; something seemed to click in his brain, and his songs got much more mature and dark and interesting. That was probably quite important actually in how the band went, because his songs after that did change and he seemed to grow up a lot.”
Bands who attain the sort of buzz that surrounds Alt-J usually find themselves the subject of much celebrity interest. Have any interesting people been turning up to the gigs lately?
“Moby was at our gig in show recently, which was really cool,” says Gus. “Yoko Ono follows us on Twitter! There have been a few people who’ve given us some really good support on Twitter – Harry Styles from One Direction mentioned us and we got about a thousand followers from that. Similarly Rizzle Kicks right now are quite keen on us. Ellie Goulding as well seems to be a fan, so we’ve got a nice little following in that respect.”
The aforementioned Styles has had a punishing schedule recently, between dating the stunning model Cara Delevingne and tweeting Emma Watson. Gus says Alt-J themselves are possibly “closing in on the model stage. I don’t know if we’re quite there yet. When you’re in America, they all look like models, it’s great!”
I mention that Sophie Sleigh-Johnson from fellow Infectious act These New Puritans is quite nice.
“I really like them, but we haven’t actually met,” notes Gus. “But hopefully at the old Christmas bash we can get chatting.”
So as Alt-J continue on their US tour, are they leaving a trail of destruction behind them a la Led Zep and Guns N’ Roses?
“We’re leaving a trail of goodwill and British politeness,” Gus laughs. “We’re not very rock ‘n’ roll.”
I suppose it didn’t do Radiohead any harm.
“Exactly!”

An Awesome Wave is out now. Alt-J play the Olympia, Dublin on May 3, 2013