Why aren’t you listening to Flo Morrissey yet?

Take a walk down the Cowley Road on a Friday night. It definitely trumps that little stretch of George Street outside Roppongi in terms of late-night ribaldry. Where is the gentle humdrum of high-street suburbia now when the weekend descends with its casual kebab-shop-violence?

While the Bully pounds to a soundtrack of uncontrollable gnashing and sweating, you can be sure that a band of merry lads will be out in full force, chanting their jolly tunes through microphones of stolen traffic cones.  And by 7am when the sun starts to rise over St Clements and gleams off the pissed-streaked shop windows, you can see the stragglers from the night before, still criss-crossing their way home.

But last Friday, tucked away right in the middle of all this, saw a small corner of calm amongst the storm. In the ground floor room of the O2 Academy at 7pm, a congregation of the most unlikely gig-goers were gathering around the bar and tentatively edging towards the stage.

The age-range spanned from those who were too young to even be up that late, to those who could probably remember the days when a gig was something that a horse dragged along. It’s an unusually early gig, but that’s probably the attraction for the young and the old alike. Everything is pretty sedate in the pre-gig glare of the stage lighting and everyone is shifting uncomfortably, trying to stake out a little space on the sticky floor that’ll be theirs for the evening.

But everyone is happy and chatting away with polite smiles to the strangers that they’ve just met. And at 7.30 sharp, Flo Morrissey takes to the stage.

Unless you are one of those who spends your weekends compulsively tooth-combing the culture sections of the Sunday broadsheets, you’re unlikely to have heard of Flo Morrissey. (Only just) twenty-year-old Flo put out her first single ‘Pages of Gold’ at the end of last year, after having left school at seventeen and signing with Glassnote Records the following year. Since then, she’s recorded an album in LA, played at Green Man festival and attracted attention from The Times and the Mail, who deemed her voice to be “tinglingly pure” – whatever that means. Now, in preparation for the album, which will be released in May, she’s touring with The Staves, the three-piece sister outfit that’s England’s answer to First Aid Kit.

We spoke beforehand in a room which rather ambitiously calls itself a ‘dressing room’; in fact it’s  converted broom-cupboard with a couple of awkwardly placed sofas wedged into the corner.  But Morrissey – actually, perhaps we should stick with Flo – is unperturbed. Wearing her own brand of flower-power chic (flares and all), she looks remarkably elegant for someone who has been touring the country from coast to coast, often playing several nights worth of consecutive dates. And to make matters worse, she has been travelling these distances under her own steam.

“Yeah, there was no space on the tour bus with The Staves so I have to get the train everywhere. Usually I’m by myself too, so that’s a challenge sometimes.”

I can’t help thinking that it wouldn’t have been too much to ask for a bus with an extra bed – it also crosses my mind that The Staves have probably got a bigger dressing room. But it’s not all bad as “they take my guitar and piano”, and Flo speaks with a genuine sisterly warmth about the trio, saying, “they’re lovely – they check up on me.”

But when it comes to sisterly warmth, she has had more than her fair share of experience – she is one of nine children. Ranging from twenty three years-old to six years-old, the Morrissey household isn’t always the best place for writing contemplative acoustic ballads. “It can be tricky. But I find quiet amongst the chaos and I try to use it to my advantage. Because they inspire the songs too.”

She got her big break three years ago after she posted a demo, titled ‘If You Can’t Love This All Goes Away’, set to a home-video of her swimming, which was spotted by Devendra Banhart’s manager. Some of these early tracks have made it to the album, including one that she wrote when she was fifteen called ‘Show Me’. “It’s nice for me to have a snapshot of my last five years”, she says.

But this particular song has the lyric, “show me the places where we died” and I make the suggestion that the young Flo Morrissey was rather more dark than you average angsty teenager. She laughs it off: “No, it’s just sometimes you don’t really know where the song is going to come from.  Without sounding all deep and stuff, the best things often come when I’m least trying. It’s about trying to find beauty in the ordinary.”

Ever since Laura Marling hit the scene a few years back, along with that bunch of banjo-toting yokels from west London, it has been the unhappy fate of every acoustic guitar playing singer to be instantly deemed a folk artist. Apart from Ed Sheeran, of course – but he rapped his way out of that one.

I pose the problem to Flo and ask how she would define herself, to which she asks the question back at me.  I mumble something about freak-folk meeting opera. She smiles politely in response, but I’m fairly sure she’s not particularly flattered by my cack-handed proposition. “I like ‘alternative’ – it’s so open ended.”

There’s a definite folky influence to her music, Devndra Banhart (“my dad and brother used to play his songs in the car”) and Vashti Bunyan being prime suspects. But there’s more to it than that. The sound is bigger, or “cinematic” as she calls it, so much so that you can quite easily imagine the chorus to “Pages Of Gold” soaring over the end credits of  a Bond film, with its dramatic vocals and swooping string augmentation.

But on Friday night at 7.30 it was just her on stage with a guitar in hand, and a keyboard on stand-by. The friendly audience greets her warmly and she rattles off the first few numbers, garnering bigger and louder applause with every song. ‘Show Me’ takes it down a notch, as “show me the places where we died” resounds darkly around the room.

But it’s all smiles down in the crowd and there’s a palpable sense of happiness among us, and I start to wonder whether her flower-power vibes might well be rubbing off on us. And it shows. “Thank you, you’re all so lovely!” Flo breathes into the microphone as she takes her leave. Certainly makes a change from your average night out in Cowley.

Flo Morrissey’s debut album is out in the UK on 25th May on Glassnote Records