The beautiful JULIA STONE’s voice could easily melt the most glacial of dispositions, yet it’s her habit of finishing every other sentence in fit of giggles that makes CAMILLA JONES’s chat with her about life in London, recording with Fran Healy and family ties as much fun as a good old fashioned girl’s night in.

The sweet voice that flutters down the line doesn’t hail from the windy city this evening, but breezes in from England’s chilly, cobbled capital, from where Angus and Julia Stone had planned on pursuing an endless summer. “It’s so bad!” Julia laughs as we talk about the UK’s poor excuse for a sunny season. “It’s one of the worst ones ever. We were home in Australia for summer and got to spend time with family, which was cool, and then we came back here and we’ve had like two days with the sun out. It’s crazy! It’s all right though; the disappointment’s good for the soul. You kind of appreciate it so much more when you come home.”

Angus and Julia return to Australia this week to tour their debut album, A Book Like This, kicking off a swag of shows with an appearance at The Sound Lounge in Coolangatta. This sojourn may end up only as a brief hiatus from London rather than a permanent move, a prospect that Julia remains in two minds about. “For me certainly if I was to bring up a family I wouldn’t do it here [London], but at this point in my life I feel like it’s somewhere I very much relate to. I enjoy myself a lot over here,” she says. “We’re coming back to live in Australia for the next five months so it’ll be good to have a break from it. But when it gets to March next year we have to all decide together whether we’re going to move to again. I wouldn’t be upset if we decided to come back to London, I feel like I’ve made a lot of friends here.”

Friends like, oh you know, Fran Healy from Travis – just one of the better-known locals the antipodean duo have befriended, having taped half their album at his pad. Julia tells me how the album was captured across two continents, “The songs were about 10 months apart. The first half of them were when we hanging out at Fran’s house. Basically we went round there to record one song on piano and then he said ‘You know, play some of your other songs, stuff that you’ve written,’ and we ended up just doing a little concert for his family. He had this amazing set up,” she enthuses. “These beautiful microphones and an amazing room with an old grand piano and beautiful Ludwig drum kit. Angus borrowed one of his guitars and we just sat in this room for six hours playing. Then he went through those six hours of tape and picked out the takes he really liked and they were the ones that went on the record.”

The album was rounded off with a recording stint in Australia, this time the siblings choosing to hole up at the Newport family home. “The second half of it was back home at Mum’s house and we set up in the living space where the piano is. It was over four or five days – we’d wake up and go to the beach, come home, have a cup of tea and wait till everyone woke up. Then whenever we felt like it, go into the room and start playing. We’d just record till as late as everyone could be bothered to record till, then go to bed and do the same thing the next day. And that was really good, a really nice recording time actually.”

As you’d expect from any brother/sister collaboration, family played a big part in the process. “It was good actually, everyone stayed over – Ian [Pritchett – producer] stayed over, Catherine our older sister was there and Mum would come home from work at night. Everyone had to tip toe around though. Poor Mum! She was in the middle of working and we were all there. Dad brought home all the school instruments, so we had the glockenspiel, trombone and trumpet and Mum had two pianos at that time so we could switch between the two. One was this amazing old falling apart piano and the other was this beautiful new piano, so we kind of changed pianos for different songs.”

From their bluesy-folk arrangements to the pair’s beguiling lyrics and sweet harmonies, Angus and Julia’s music is underpinned by a child-like wholesome beauty. Although their songs and melodies embody an unassuming innocence, they also possess a melancholy edge, not dissimilar to the feeling that hits when you realise we all have to grow up someday.

When I ask Julia about the bittersweet characteristic that seems to colour their music, videos and even the styling of their latest press shots, she replies, “I suppose we don’t see ourselves as that, I guess we think we look kind of cool and edgy! I dunno know. I thought the press shots would be a bit darker than they are, but I suppose they’re not. I think whenever we create clips, our family is always involved so that kind of brings an element of family and niceness to it. All the same people are in the clips and all the same crew help out to make it. There’s a great love in what we do and in all the people who do it with us. Maybe that comes through, I don’t know. When I watch a clip I always get a combination of feeling happy and feeling sad. But I don’t know how innocent we are, I couldn’t tell you.”

One thing’s for sure, you won’t find any Christina Aguilera-style ass-bearing chaps in the pair’s videos, mainly because of the family connection. “When we make the clips it’s kind of like a school project. It’s something we all get into. It’s exciting to show the family at the end what it looks like.”

The video for the album’s first single, The Beast, was one ‘school project’ in which family featured heavily; from the use of their great grandmother’s children’s book as an inspiration for the artwork, to Julia piecing scenes of animation together in Final Cut Pro. “Angus came up with the idea, kind of based loosely on the characters we used for the album artwork which was from our great grandmother’s book,” Julia tells me. “I was into animation at the time and I thought ‘This is something I really want to do, I want to be able to animate,’ and I’d been doing some stuff in Final Cut Pro before and sort of thought I could do this. So I started hand drawing the pictures myself, scanning them into the computer and piecing them together. I got about 35 seconds into the song and it’d taken me so long and I was like ‘I cannot do this!’”

Luckily an illustrator friend in Cornwall came to the rescue and in conjunction with an Australian connection who ‘swung them a favour’ Julia relinquished computer control. “They followed the storyboard we’d created but they were like the masters behind it. Then I was just kind of out of it! It came out so beautifully. What Angus saw in his head was like exactly what they created, so it’s cool when people can see that,” she says.

She’s also excited that fans can now take home the songs they’ve been playing live for so long, in the form of their new album. Returning home for the first time since its release will be loads of fun for the pair, and not just to enjoy the public’s reception of the material. “It’s always nice to just hang out, sit in the sun and drink, like, smoothies,” Julia says. “We’re home for summer which is so exciting. London doesn’t really cater for the ocean people!”

Angus & Julia Stone play the Tivoli on October 5 supported by The Orange Bird. A Book Like This is out now through EMI.

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