When reformed boybanders Take That have you evicted from your flat, you know your lifestyle must be too rock 'n' roll.

Hot new prospects Iglu and Hartly claim this happened to them following their recent relocation to London from LA – although frontman Jarvis Anderson seems a little economical with the truth at times, leaving me wondering how much I should believe.

He drawls down the phone: "There were just some little petty things. Bucher the bassist kicked in the door and put, like, a huge hole in it and some other stuff like we lost a couple of keys.

"And then I think the icing on the cake was that band that was living upstairs who apparently have some clout within the housing industry, hahaha! They tried to get us kicked out. Who was that? These guys called Take That."

Britain's favourite man-band may or may not have hated them but the English music press loves Iglu and Hartly and their newly released debut, And Then Boom.

Jarvis acknowledges the hype but refuses to be swayed by it. He says: "It's good to have people getting amped up about us, it's fun. It can't be a bad thing, right?

"But we try to just hang out in our own little world, we don't get too involved in any of that stuff. It has its ups and downs. Sometimes somebody gives you a two out of 10 and if you really give a damn about that, then that's too bad."

Jarvis, who is the production powerhouse behind Iglu and Hartly, grew up in Chicago and began experimenting with music as soon as his parents began sending him to piano lessons as a child.

He recalls: "I would play the piano and make up little things. So it was pretty much as soon as like I was putting my hands on the piano, I was fooling around a little bit."

His mother particularly influenced his music taste. He recalls: "Ma used to play all sorts of records when I was a kid, like George Benson and Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner. Those are my earliest musical memories, just dancing around the living room to that kind of stuff."

Iglu and Hartly came together after Jarvis met keyboardist Sam Martin and guitarist Simon Katz at university in Boulder, Colorado.

Unimpressed by the idea of getting proper jobs, they quit and moved to LA to make music.

Jarvis says: "We'd see all our friends going down the same road, getting a serious job and getting stressed out about the last year of college, like, 'Oh, I've got to get out in the real world,' and all this stuff.

"And we were like, well, we're having a good time making some good tunes so why don't we just keep doing that? And then when everyone finished up college, we just moved to LA.

"We had visited the city before and we'd loved it, it has a real feeling of, like, optimism. You can do whatever you wanted if you try really hard and it's kinda a magical place. It was just a natural place for us to go."

Jarvis called old friend Luis Rosiles and persuaded him to fly out from Chicago to be their drummer. Then they recruited LA local Michael Bucher as bassist and Iglu and Hartly was complete.

They began playing LA venues but soon found faster ways to fame. Jarvis says: "The venues would make us pay to play and you've got to sell tickets and stuff.

"So we were just like, 'You know what, that's garbage, that's the stupidest thing in the world.' So we just started meeting a bunch of promoters at parties and what-not. We were just infamous for sneaking into all these private parties, Hollywood, you know?

"And we would just basically toss out demos and meet people and just network and try and find promoters that would let us play at their club so then there would already be about four or five hundred people in the club and we'd play.

"We love the Viper Room, we love those places but at first we couldn't afford to play there and nobody would show up because no-one knew who we were so we just wanted to go to the clubs."

They also began playing surfer beach parties. Jarvis says: "That was really fun because we got to hang out in those areas and we got a lot of buddies down there.

"Then we did little tours. We did the South by South West festival and we did like a Southern tour of the southern United States, we were just hanging out in like, Tennessee and that, man."

They spent months holed up in their house in Echo Park, LA, recording And Then Boom. Now signed to Mercury and with the album released last week, they're ready to take on the world – starting with London.

Jarvis grins: "We don't actually have a home in London right now, we're just kind of nomadic."

* Iglu and Hartly play 53 Degrees on Thursday, October 9. Tickets are available from Student Union reception on 01772 893000, Action Records in Church Street, Preston, on 01772 258809 or at www.53degrees.net