One evening in 1997, a Southport police patrol was sent to a home off Liverpool Road, near Birkdale village, to deal with a domestic noise complaint.

They found a bunch of scruffy youngsters making music in the garage and told them to keep it down a bit.

They left, unaware they had just witnessed the birth of an album which would cause a sensation by winning next year's prestigious Mercury Music Prize, beating The Verve's Urban Hymns, Pulp's This Is Hardcore and Massive Attack's Mezzanine.

The noisemakers – Olly Peacock, Ian Ball, Ben Ottewell, Tom Gray and Paul Blackburn – were a band called Gomez and the album was to be called Bring It On.

Drummer Olly, in whose garage the sessions took place, recalls: "The soundproofing was a few bits of carpet hung from the ceiling.

"The police were like, 'All right, we've had a complaint from right over there,' and we were like, 'Really, they can hear it? That's pretty good!'"

Released largely unaltered, the album launched a career that sees them currently putting the finishing touches to their seventh studio album in Chicago.

They have cracked the American market, thanks in part to TV series Greys Anatomy using the title track of their last album, How We Operate.

Today Olly is at home in Brooklyn, New York, while Ian lives in LA, and Paul in Detroit. Ben and Tom remain in England, in Brighton. But all five are due to head back North as the climax of a mini-tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of Bring It On.

For the first time, they will play the record live in its entirety. The tour ends next Thursday at Manchester Academy – the nearest they come to playing a hometown gig.

Such nostalgia inevitably provokes memories of their ramshackle beginnings. Olly grins: "It was quite amusing, I guess, for the most part because it was so basic.

"We didn't really have microphone stands then – we had oil canisters for microphone stands. It was generally freezing cold so we would be drinking red wine and recordings didn't last long, like three takes. If there were no massive blundering errors, that was the take because we didn't know anything otherwise and also we wanted to get out and probably go to the pub."

Olly and Ian have been friends all their lives. Olly says: "We were born three days apart in the same hospital and our parents knew each other so we've known each other 30-odd years."

At college, they met Tom and Paul. Olly says: "I remember me and Tom being in the canteen area and he was doing some coin tricks or something like that to impress everybody.

"And you'd always see Blackie around. He always looked a lot more mature than everybody else on account of the size of his beard. He had essentially a Jim Morrison haircut so he just looked like this really distinct cool guy."

When Ian met Ben at Leeds University, it proved the catalyst. Olly says: "I just think we put more effort into it because we had somebody else who we didn't know that well. Us four were good friends and we did music but I don't think we were concentrating on it too heavily."

Their first gig was in Leeds in 1996. Then unnamed, they left a sign reading, Gomez, the gig's here, to direct a friend and the name stuck. Record companies soon got interested.

Olly recalls: "We would hear rumours and say, 'I think there's actually this record company possibly wants to sign us,' and you're like, 'What, really?'. And then next week, we'd hear maybe about another record label. It was all this big build-up."

The Mercury left them bemused. Olly says: "We thought we'd sell, you know, like maybe 500 records.

"And then you win an award and it's like, great, not knowing what the significance of it is. I think everyone else put more emphasis on it than we did."

They caused a local uproar when Ian referred to Southport as the land of "layabouts in caravans" in an interview. Olly laughs: "Our manager at the time told us and we were all howling. He had to call up the Southport Visiter, and apologise! It's not like he's going to go back into town and people are going to stone him.

"Somebody recently asked me, do I come back and do you miss anything from Southport?

"It's all about family for us but it's not like I'm going to say I miss the pitch and putt or anything like that."

Although they still have family there – including Olly's mum, dad, brothers and nephews – Gomez have never played in Southport.

He says: "There was talk about that early on. I don't know where we were thinking of playing, I guess, there's the wonderful Floral Hall. And I remember a certain sense, I don't know if it's a kind of giving back, but I wasn't too enthusiastic. We've never done it still."

The new album is as yet unnamed. Ian grins: "We toy with ridiculous titles for months. It is really hard so we probably won't think about that until a few weeks before we release it.

"With Bring It On, I think we went a week over the deadline. And it was just like, yeah, I guess that'll do."

Gomez play Manchester Academy on Thursday, September 4. Call the box office on 0161 832 1111.