3rd Edge: BIOGRAPHY
It's the back-end of 1999. Down at the best ­ let's be honest, the only garage night on the streets of Gillingham, Kent, the DJ's rinsing the latest twelves to hit his record box, mixing them down with his own dirty scratches and hip hop beats. UK garage won't go stellar for another year, but the dancefloor's packed with the kids who are in the know. Two of them decide it's their turn on their mic, get on the stage and start spitting rhymes.

A little history lesson on 3rd Edge...
First up is Thomas Jules Stock, the main vocalist of the group. If he seems a bit distracted don't worry - he was born on the cusp of Gemini and Cancer and reckons he's got three personalities.

The 21-year-old Harlow boy grew up with his mum's family - including six aunts and an uncle who played everything from country & western LPs to reggae dub plates, explaining Thomas' own varied tastes.

He speaks his mind ("probably too much, but at least I'm honest"), is a regular down the gym, sports a messy mop of curly black hair, and likes girls with nice toes. Note: Thomas always gets the girl.

3rd Edge - giving a fresh edge to R&B and making a sound all their own!

Onto the other MCs. Meet the DJ and MC. Born in South London, Jamie Thompson is known as JTee to his friends. (They don't spend too much time inventing nicknames where JTee's from.)

JTee's a chilled-out geezer with a wicked sense of humour and a scorching human beatbox routine; pop round the 22-year-old's house and you'll find a front room piled high with 12,000 slabs of vinyl, covering not just
the carpet but the entire history of dance music. (His dad was a DJ - and gave him a copy of Rapper's Delight on the day he was born.)

Everyone thinks Jamie is Chinese, he huffs. In fact he's South African, English, Indian and Jamaican, "with a bit of Martinique thrown in". So now you know.

Dan Grant, 3rd Edge's third edge, is a soft-hearted badboy with waxed-up hair and punked-up attitude, and he'll be 21 in time for 3rd Edge to be on Top Of The Pops.

Schooldays were spent attempting to have as much fun as possible, winding up the teachers and escaping expulsion every time. With a brand of logic that's all his own he puts his love of jungle music down to the fact that he's a Leo, he whistles like a grandad when he's drunk, and he fell in love with music during the height of the old-skool rave scene.

He brings "some vibing, some rapping and some madness" to the 3rd Edge party. As individuals they're a tempting prospect; put them together and they're a pop powerhouse.

Three edges of a triangle, you see, and you don't need a degree in roof construction to know that yer humble triangle is the strongest shape. Pythagoras would love this lot.

That night at the Gillingham garage club, something clicked that would change each boy's future. First impressions? Thomas on Dan: "I thought here we go, rude boy, I've heard a lot about you, show us your stuff. And he was good." Dan on Thomas: "He just freaked me out, this wicked MC - I was going to all my mates, I've met this bad boy who could MC for England". Tom on JTee: "I instantly knew he was talented, the guy can scratch, the guy can mix, I thought top man. I never imagined it'd turn out like it did - he was quite quiet, quite reserved."

The words quiet and reserved were swiftly erased from the boys' vocabulary. Over a period of weeks the guys started hanging out together, working on beats and rhymes, putting songs together.

Weeks turned to months, half-sketched songs became something a bit more special. "We were just vibing," Thomas recalls. "You need a vibe before anything else. You catch the vibe, pluck it out of the air, and chuck it on the Dictaphone." Back in his house, JTee would stitch the whole thing together on his rickety bedroom studio. Before long 3rd Edge were ready to take their tape to producers, and within months they'd signed their deal.

Most of the stuff we'll be hearing from 3rd Edge over the next year ­ and we'll be hearing a lot of it ­ has blossomed from the seeds of those early sessions. Anytime Anywhere is a furious, electro-fuelled club banger with the soul of a golden-age Jacko and pulsating Knight Rider effects aplenty (it is, Thomas modestly suggests, "genius"), while No Pick-Up Line explores the lads' slightly softer side, a mid-tempo slinker with an old-skool hip hop flavour that conjures images of Usher u-turning his way across Twice As Nice. Could You Get Down, meanwhile, is a four-to-the-floor club anthem with Tom on a ragga tip, Dan and JTe chanting in the background and a bassline that moves buildings. First up, though, is debut single In & Out, whose title is one of the greatest single entendres to hit pop since East 17's Deep. It's already been doing the business on the club circuit thanks to mixes from the likes of Jameson and United Groove Collective, with everyone from the pirates to mainstream radio keen to get on board.

Thomas reckons the track, a heady blur of bumpy beats, quick rhymes and furious urban drama, is "not dirty, not perverted", but when Dan suggests it's tongue in cheek you've got to wonder what sort of cheek he's talking about.

So do they live up to the promise of In & Out? "We've got age on our side," Dan smiles, with a wink. "We've got stamina." He doesn't just mean in the sack. As the music attests, the matter of whether 3rd Edge have stamina simply isn't up for debate.

3rd Edge are a long-overdue blast of fresh for air in an increasingly stale pop scene.