Back in 2001 Turin Brakes unleashed their debut album The Optimist on to an unsuspecting world.

The album earned the duo of Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian a Mercury Music Prize nomination, two top-40 hits and kick-started a ten-year career which is still very much flourishing.

Now the band is recreating that initial calling card in Brighton, a city which has played a major part in their professional lives. Not only was it the base for their first record label, Anvil, it is also the home for several of the band’s members.

“It’s the spiritual home of the band,” says Knights, while on the road from Sheffield to Whitehaven.

“Our whole history pretty much started out in Brighton.”

The Optimist was penned around 2000, and recorded almost a year before its official release on Source Records by the two old schoolfriends.

“We were saying recently that the album had the new millennium feeling in it,” says Knights.

“It was that turn-of-the-century pre-9/11 period – there are a lot of things on that album which almost make it a bit of a time capsule. The music had a hope in it, and a freshness to it that people couldn’t help pick up on. I think it’s a real music fan’s album.

“The label were very clever. We wanted to put it out straight away, but they forced us into releasing little bits and pieces which helped build up a fan base. By the time it came out in full all the work had been done.”

The Optimist was characterised by its very pure and stripped-down sound, leading to the band being named by the NME as one of the leaders in what they dubbed the “New Acoustic Movement”, which also contained the likes of Kings Of Convenience, Tom McRae, Elbow and Starsailor.

But the duo didn’t want to be tied into a certain sound, and explored much fuller band arrangements on second album Ether Song.

“We didn’t want to get stuck being an acoustic duo,” says Knights. “We felt the sound of The Optimist would get very old very quickly, and we had much more to give. We moved on very fast. Ether Song managed to carve out its own identity. Both albums are very strong.”

Ether Song was home to the band’s biggest hit Pain Killer, which broke the top five, as well as three more top-40 hits. It meant the band had free rein to do what they liked over the next fewyears.

The return to The Optimist has seen them try to reconnect with the original sound of the album.

“We always used to let the live band do itsown thing,” says Knights. “For this tour we have tried to be as faithful as possible.

It’s really forced us to look at what we did and what it was musically about that first record that made it so special.

“It will probably influence whatever we do in the future. We are ten years older now, so we can never entirely be who we were then, but we don’t know what we’re going to do next. It will be interesting to see if the experience will informthe next record.”

At present the band is promoting a new covers EP, Xerox, featuring the unusual lead track Chim Chim Cher-ee from Disney family favourite Mary Poppins.

“It’s like taking a holiday from your own material,” says Knights. “It’s the first time in a long time we have needed to take a break from writing and thinking about the future.”

The idea for the cover of the song Dick Van Dyke made famous came from Knights’s bandmate Paridjanian.

“He suggested we do something quickly,” says Knights.

“We tried the Mary Poppins song and it just worked straight away. It’s a beautiful song about alternative lives going on in the shadows of London.”

Proceeds from the track’s sale on iTunes are going to the charity Shelter.

Turin Brakes played a sold-out show at St Mary's Church, Brighton, on December 10.