"It was only a month or so after we had formed that we had our first gig And it was great, it felt really natural We were all from the same town. We all knew the same people, and it just came together immediately. It felt like a genuine gang mentality."The music industry woke up to Hard-Fi pretty quickly too. "We'd be at a gig, and there would be a couple of A&R guys there, scratching their beards. And then, at the next one, there would be a couple more, and it just grew from there."When asked what he thought those A&R men found interesting about Hard-Fi, Archer takes a rather circuitous route "We've always had a sound The thing about Staines is it's insular We're on the outskirts of London. You can get into town easily in the day, but you can't get back late at night So everything interesting gets sucked into London.

It's a cultural wasteland.""But because it's insular it's helped us out. We were never like, 'Oh, the NME and all our mates in Camden are telling us that we have to make this kind of sound.' So we just listened to the music that we loved, and that could be anything from soul, dub, hip hop, reggae, house. When it came to making the record - we thought the same thing. We didn't have to be just a rock band."And so the mini-LP emerged, a blazing collection of tracks drawn from the myriad influences of Archer and the band's own record collections. But it wasn't easy."There are no rehearsal rooms in Staines, so we were spending an hour and a half driving up to north-west London, where we'd have three hours at a time. By the time we had our gear set up and did a number, we'd have to take it down again and go home.

It was ridiculous.""So we thought, we could rent a lock-up for two weeks for the same price It was an old cab office, and a pretty small one too. We started rehearsing there, and then we tried recording something there, and it sounded pretty good."I bumped into a mate of mine [Wolsey White], who remixed it, and suddenly the whole thing had another angle He made us work really hard about getting the sound right. He started co-producing the album for nothing."After listening to the recorded tracks in a variety of odd locations around Staines - the cab office, the pub, White's BMW - Archer and White became more and more confident that they were heading in the right direction."Considering the resources we had," says Archer, "I was really proud of it. But when we put the mini-LP out I was sure we were going to get a kicking for it.