Tales of bands holed up in the studio indulging their sordid vices in a blurred mess of nymphomania and narcotics are the stuff of rock and roll cliché, but witnessing Battle lay down their debut in the remote Surrey retreat of Jacob's Studios, could not prove a greater contrast to such debauched excess. The latest ascendant stars signed to the Transgressive label, Battle have a demeanour that is down-to-earth, unassuming and refreshingly pretension-free, and an ethic of hard work, honesty and democracy.

Having so far produced two well-received, limited edition indie releases in 'Isabelle' and 'Demons’, they are now preparing for their first full single, 'Tendency', to hit home while putting the finishing touches to their forthcoming album. The London-based four-piece create a sound that is perkily energetic, rough-edged yet warm then lace it with strong melodies and clever lyrical imagery that hints and suggests rather than attempting to dictate, leaving the words pleasingly open to interpretation. As frontman Jason Bavanandan explains in typically self-effacing fashion: "I've never said I'm trying to be a poet, I'm not like Mike Skinner, I just like things that sound nice in my ear and make me feel a certain way. The only way I can really feel comfortable and play it to other people is when I've done something and I have a feeling about what it might be about but it's not, resolute and it's not an absolute defined thing."

Having met each other at school, Bavanandan and guitarist James Ellis headed off to Kent University to further both their academic and musical education, discovering the missing pieces of what went on to become Battle in the form of bassist, Tim Scudder and drummer, Oliver Davies. Having played, lived and learned together over the past few years, sleeping on each other's floors and rehearsing whenever and wherever they could, (including in a disused bank vault beneath a hairdresser's on Luton High Street), they honed not only their sound but a mutual understanding. "You know like that hippy attitude to making music where whatever anyone does, that's got to be right? 'He's the drummer, that's got to be the right beat' and I don't believe that's always true," explains Bavanandan. "I think if you've got skills, without hard work you're always just potentially good at something. Like you've got the capacity to be really good and it's in there somewhere but it takes you and your mentors and people around you to work on it."

Taking this egalitarian approach has had a great impact while recording the album. "Gareth our producer just said, 'Look, I want you to play live'. To begin with it put the fear of God into us because when we play live we speed up and slow down and it's really ramshackle and you know, can our debut be like that? You know it might be the only chance we get to make an album! But he was really forceful with us and made us just do it and it made us a much better band and when we listened to the tapes back it was really special. We don't sound like the Libertines, and I think that's what I realised, there are different degrees in which you can play live."

With nobody afraid to speak their mind if any element of the music needs altering or improving, surely even constructive criticism can sometimes lead to disagreements? "You can't be friends with someone unless you argue, it's an unrealistic friendship because people have arguments and that's life. You have to have the peaks and troughs," insists Bavanandan. "We all get on really well," adds Ellis, "We have our disagreements but we all love music, we all understand each other, we're all really comfortable with each other. There is that family element because we do bicker and stuff and we're not really polite to each other." The result of such openness is a band who are always seeking to refine their sound, fulfill their potential and produce the best results in the studio but Bavanandan's quest for musical perfection may spring from having had a very privileged musical education: "I never really went to gigs when I was younger, I just listened to a lot of records and all of the records I got were filtered down for me through like my cousins so I'd get all of these great albums. Then I started going to gigs and I'd see really shit bands," he adds. "I grew up with stuff like Motown and soul music and Bob Marley and stuff and I had this really romantic view of how wonderful music was and when I started going to gigs when I was sixteen or seventeen it ruined it a bit for me because I wasn't seeing Talking Heads, I wasn't seeing Bowie."

Aspirations to live up to musical heroes including The Smiths, The Beatles, Radiohead and The Stone Roses run throughout the band, but they also share the common belief that they owe it to music as a whole to do their very best. "I just think that music's so important that it wouldn't be doing it justice if you tried to do something a bit half-arsed," explains Scudder. "I don't think we're particularly serious people but we're really serious about music, so we just want to do it credit and do something that warrants the position we've been put in."

Grateful for the creative freedom that Transgressive afford them, nothing it seems will be allowed to take precedence over the music and they will do all they can to avoid becoming merely another music industry product. "None of us have rock star haircuts or rock star girlfriends", offers Bavanandan. "I don't have any tattoos, I haven't got any piercings. I don't know if there's anything about us aesthetically that anyone can latch on to and maybe that's something we lack." But perhaps it is that lack of regulation, rock star styling that paradoxically makes them more recognisable. With the focus placed upon the music, they hope to transcend cynicism-fuelled marketing strategies where everything becomes a brand to be bought, vacuum-packed and flogged to the masses and this includes being made part of any scene. "Our sound roughly correlated with what was happening in London," Ellis explains. "That's the lucky thing because if we'd lived in London, because we really hate scenes, we probably would have reacted to that and maybe tried to push our music in different directions and that might have not paid off. We're just very lucky we're now here in the studio recording our debut album."

So what exactly about scenes inspires such a reaction? "You get a club like Trash, which as an actual club is OK, you go in there and it really is all about people's haircuts. I don't stand there just looking at people with absurd haircuts and drainpipe jeans and all that but you hear them talking, because one thing I really like to do is observe people, social astronomy. I wander around listening to people's conversations but it's all like 'I like your hair, yeah, where did you get that badge from?'. Fashion's fine, I don't want to sound self-righteous, but I just think there's more to life than that."

Their refusal to adhere to and mould themselves around the dictates of fashion is a factor they feel has perhaps made success harder to attain, again demonstrating their tendency to swim against the current. It is this trait that inspired the name Battle, as Scudder explains. "We're not Oasis and we didn't sit on building sites writing our songs in the foreman's workshed, dreaming of a better life but at the same time I don't think we've had it easy in the sense that we're not fashionista scenester type people. When we met I was in my final year so for a year I was working in the cinema in Watford three or four days a week and then I had to come down for the other three days of the week and sleep on Jason's floor, and this is in a crap student house. It's not the most comfortable way to live but fundamentally we really, really believed in this. We didn't have to crawl through shit for five miles or something like that but we've had to work hard."

Having put in the effort to reach this stage and with such high standards and ambitions, it would seem that the album, due for release in the summer, bears a hefty weight of expectation from each member of the band. "I suppose we're very ambitious," admits Bavanandan. "We don't want to let ourselves down and we've got a really specific idea of what good music does to people and how important that is. When you do just hint at it ever so slightly it's like an amazing feeling, like a cool drug, like 'Can I have some more of that?'."

"I hope we won't make an album that just boxes us in and just gives out a defined sound. I think you need to have enough inherent variety, not like a greatest hits kind of thing but enough inherent variety to leave yourself back doors and hope people won't go away thinking 'I know what the second album's going to sound like'. For our debut I want to make a document, like a snapshot of where we are now,” he continues. “None of us are computer wizards or anything, we're just a band, four of us play instruments and we're quite intense. Maybe on our third record we'll mess around with clicks and beeps and have fun with computers but when we're dead and gone I want people to know what we were like when we made our first record, just before we got signed this is probably what we sounded like you know - it's become really important to us. I don't think we can do that again. I think once you're in the machine and in the industry it kind of alters your mindset a little bit and you end up playing the game."

If the album maintains the same quality of their output so far, the chances are Battle will have to continue trying to avoid playing the game for some time yet. Characteristically, how many units it shifts is not the most important factor to them however, as Bavanandan explains. "I'd rather be the most important band in the world to twenty people than just be a band that 20,000 people quite like."

- Ian Roullier, 03/2006