London's Jungle: We Wanted To Be The Libertines

"I'd like you to know me as T 'cause I think we're friends now, we've had a good chat, so that would be good, man.”

A casual 20-minute conversation – that's all you need to be welcomed into the Jungle family. And The Music fast finds out that this is very much a family. Still fresh to the stage, having only taken the project live last October, the London collective arrive for Splendour '14 and will be fronting up as a five-piece unit, made up of good friends with incredible talents.

“It's so cool to share the experiences with people that you love and trust,” smiles T. “I'm very much of the opinion that they're as much a part of Jungle as I am and as J is, because I can step off stage and I can let those musicians stand there and represent the emotion and ethos of the project, and that's a really cool place to be. Everyone that we work with really represents [the group] in their own individual way, and at the end of the day, Jungle is bigger than all of us, so it's just about our little individual contributions towards that greater picture.”

The modern soul act have created a stir in the past 12 months, no doubt aided by the fact that the duo at the heart of the group simply go by 'T' and 'J', and that, oh, no one knows what the fuck they look like. Listen to their self-titled debut, however, and you quickly discover that those superficial elements are probably the most boring things going on with Jungle, the new record sounding lived-in in the smoothest of ways.

T laughs when talking album flow, admitting almost sheepishly that the band's sound guy played a crucial part in organising the tracklist. But he gets serious when discussing the record's accomplished edge, saying the songs “are such an intrinsic part of who we are”.

“We use a lot of found sounds,” he says. “I go and make field recordings – I love sitting, like watching a boxing match in east London and you're just sitting there with your recorder, and then you take it home, put your headphones on and close your eyes, and you're immediately back in that space with the crowd and the sound of the bell and the shuffling of the feet on the canvas. And trying to get things like that into our music takes it to another dimension. It's almost like bringing the energy of 1000 people into a track, and that makes it feel warm and much more stable and emotionally secure.”

After a childhood spent scraping in fights and running away from their parents, music became the centre of J and T's universe around the age of 15 when they started their first band – “We thought we were going to be the next Libertines or something,” he chuckles. However, things really came to a head last year when the pair, dissatisfied with the music they were creating, focused on writing songs that spoke honestly to them, removing the fear and paranoia from their egos. “You've got to trust yourself,” T stresses. “If you're too busy asking for other people's opinions then you're not busy enough making music that you think you're going to enjoy yourself.”

Jungle call Shepherd's Bush home, but T admits he doesn't think they consciously made a west London sounding record. “Obviously people draw comparisons between Gorillaz and stuff like because Damon [Albarn]'s based in west London, and our label [XL Recordings] is based there too. But it's more of a subconscious thing – you pick up the energy. You spend so long living in an area that's busy, you have to digest information so quickly in order to keep up with the pace of life here, and that translates into your subconscious, definitely.

“Also, Shepherd's Bush is a massive culture clash,” he continues. “You have a huge Australian population, South African, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Saudi Arabian community. So there's loads of different food, music, smells, sights, sounds.” And although it closed last year, there was always the shining beacon to Aussie expat hedonism in London, the Shepherd's Bush Walkabout. “The amount of times I nearly ran over people dressed as like Super Mario on a Sunday night,” T cackles.

So what is Jungle? According to T, it's the result of 25 years of being alive. “Naturally you digest so much culture and information and life in your existence as you grow up,” he finishes, “and sharing those experiences [with J] makes them more vivid when you come back to explaining them a little bit more.”