Hockey are individually from all over the United States, via band stints in Los Angeles, Spokane and Portland – To quote a line from I Wanna Be Black – all the band’s witty, biting lyrics are written by Ben – “everyone’s making dance music now true, but we started in 2002”. ‘When we started making music’ says Ben, ‘we wanted to make music that people could have fun to at the parties we played.’ ‘We wanted to make dance music that was infectious,’ says Jerm. ‘Almost like: this is a band but it might as well be a DJ.’ ‘We didn’t want to just get up and do our thing,’ says Ben. ‘We want people to react. That was our deal.’ This is typical Hockey. It’s about being progressive, even when Hockey were an unknown band stuck in a basement in Portland, making their original US underground release “Mind Chaos”. It’s about spending what little they had recording those nine songs, to create an album stuffed with melodic and rhythmic gold. A lo-fi project with hi-fi aspirations. Anthony: ‘We want to marry dance music with real songs that people can remember.’ Jerm: ‘They should be able to resonate beyond a small sweaty dance club.’ Anthony: ‘And the lyrics should have a real message.’ Brian: ‘All that is what makes great pop music.’ And all that is what makes Hockey the first properly vital new band of 2009. Ben and Jerm met while studying at The Johnston Center For Integrative Studies, part of the University of Redlands in southern California. A fancy name for what was effectively ‘a hippy commune within this boring business-major kinda place’ says Jerm. More phraseology: ‘you could create your own course of studies within a cross-disciplinary free-thinking space’. Which means Ben and Jerm could make music, any music, and it counted as homework. Ben: ‘It was a school where anything goes. Whatever you can justify, do it. Whatever you feel passionate about, as long as you’re having a good time…’ The pair began rockin’ local parties and playing clubs around LA as two men and a drum machine. After being a duo for some time, they decided they wanted to expand and become a full band ‘that came into a room and made a big noise and expressed songs and had a dynamic, we couldn’t do that with a drum machine’ They deemed only one song from that intense period of writing and recording as a duo good enough to make the grade for Mind Chaos: Song Away, a golden, glorious tribute to the power of song that, in its choppy riffs, recalls The Cars giving it some Saturday Night Fever. With artsy college studies at an end, Ben and Jerm relocated to Spokane, Washington to hook up with drummer Anthony. They began writing songs. Curse This City is brilliantly superfly, a soulful song born (improbably) of the frustration of Jerm and Ben being robbed of their bikes in Spokane. They were brimming with ideas. On one level they were an indie band who dug Michael Jackson. On the other, they wanted to mix the rawness of old school hip hop with the rawness of garage-rock. Eventually the new trio moved on, to Portland, Oregon – a place with a buzzing music scene. If Hockey could make it there… Jerm: ‘Being in the big city was an eye opener after Spokane, which is pretty remote. Those people in Portland aren’t easily impressed. You have to elevate your game. It’s Darwinian in a sense – evolve or perish.’ Hear the hypnotic grunge-funk of Too Fake and you might call this survival of the phattest. The latter song was an early gem, emerging from a stoned extended jam during a gig. Ben, alternating falsetto with a throaty holler, began channelling James Brown: “I’m just too fake for the world… I’ve got too much soul for you…” By day they were holding down dead-end jobs, washing dishes, rolling burritos, pushing pencils; by night they recorded in the basement, scraping together enough money to buy one microphone and one outboard compressor. They had nothing to lose so they had everything to aim for. ‘Moving to Portland was kind of crazy, It being our third move as a band’ says Jerm with a chuckle. ‘We called it Custard’s Next Stand.’ In spring 2008 Brian, an old bandmate of Anthony’s, joined. The newly-minted four-piece began gigging down the west coast of the US. The featherlight but souldeep rock groove of Work and The Strokes-meets-LCD Soundsystem jitter of Learn To Loose, attracted the attention of Zane Lowe at Radio 1. The label buzz got loud, and the band eventually signed to Capitol Records in the US and Virgin Records in the UK. Finally, in late 2008, Hockey came to the UK, to play Water Rats and an NME showcase night, and to mix what they’re calling (for now) Mind Chaos Version 2.0. Their first full release will comprise around six of the tracks from the original album, plus a handful of newer songs. Like the abortive stint in Los Angeles, the ill-fated stay in Spokane and the testing times in Portland, it’s all part of the journey that makes Hockey such a thrilling, edgy, real group. If it hadn’t been hard it wouldn’t have been worth it. They’re a brandnewbuzzband with proper graft, heritage, soul and songs within them. Crucially of-the-moment but, brilliantly, for-tomorrow too. ‘We were just mercenaries to the music,’ says Jerm. ‘Didn’t matter if we moved to LA or the middle of nowhere – it was just a battle pursuing this band, pursuing the idea, being 100 per cent all the time. That was the only way we would have success, if we worked like maniacs.’ ‘We don’t take it for granted,’ adds Anthony. ‘We have a bigger picture. And the bigger tunes. Listening to the radio/hitting a club/hitting a festival in 2009? Get ready to lose it to Hockey.