“I used to work on a fruit and veg stall” cheeky Tommi girl Lil Chill tells me in a chirpy east end accent. “One day I was singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to my mate on the stall, when a friend of our producer BJ spotted me and thought I’d be perfect for the project.” Producer BJ (better known as BJ Mic Soul / ‘Overlord X’) combed the streets up and down the UK looking for the right girls for Tommi. His vision was to find a group that represented the new breed of chic, sports-casual urban tom boys that are seen on every street in the UK. Cutting edge, cosmopolitan and credible, Tommi are just what the charts need. Forget girl power, Tommi is about a no holds barred attitude.

Itch FM DJ Stylus was found at a talent showcase a week after being thrown out of her flat, Peek-A-Boo moved down to London from Glasgow to be part of the group and moved in with Mi$ Thang, an ex-dancer turned secretary turned Tommi girl and Bambi was spotted by BJ outside a laundrette! This is not your average straight-outta stage school manufactured pop act, Tommi is the genuine article. “When we formed the group, there were no big urban girl acts’ Peek-a-boo tells me, ‘most of the girl groups hitting the charts were bred to be in the industry, we are all from the street’.

Tommi may be a new act to you and me, but in actual fact they are three years in the making. After six months they got their first major record deal, but that was just the beginning of what was to be a long hard slog. ‘The record company kept telling us we were going to be huge’ Bambi tells me, ‘Six months later...nothing had happened. We found out the person who’d signed us had left the company after a merger so no one was pushing us...we got out of the deal as fast as we could.’

Undeterred, the girls went it alone for a while and put out a promotional CD-ROM game called Tommi ADM featuring cartoon characters of themselves that connected people to their website. This generated 37,000 hits and secured them a second major deal...’Things were going well with that label too’ Stylus remembers, ‘until that label’s MD resigned, and threw everything into turmoil! But this time we knew exactly what we had to do to get out of the contract, and now we are going to stand alone on our own two feet for a while. We used our advances from the labels to do our own tune and our own video...’ ‘I think it’s made us stronger as a group’ Mi$ Thang adds, ‘we are so developed now as performers...there are other urban girl groups doing well now but we’re still totally different. Ms Dynamite is very mature in what she rhymes about, we can be but I think we also appeal to a younger market. Mis-teeq are garage based and very girly, we are strictly R&B and hip hop rugged tom boys!’

For the time being the girls are still promoting their material on the newly set up independent Mo-am records, their new single ‘What Part of No’ is getting a good response and their debut album is all but finished. ‘We are so confident, says Chill, ‘urban acts are killing pop acts now, that’s why people like N-Sync and Britney Spears are getting outfits like the Neptunes to produce singles for them. Urban music is selling across the board and it’s just getting bigger.’