It's a scenario every aspiring singer dreams about. Harry Collier was a struggling musician, waiting on tables in an organic cafe in North London, when celebrity intervention changed his life.

Rollo, former Faithless producer and Dido's brother, strolled in with a group of mates to celebrate his birthday and was treated to a spontaneous, if opportunistic, rendition of Happy Birthday by Harry, the staff's star performer.

Rollo was so impressed with Harry's voice, he invited him over to record some tracks in his Highbury studio. Nothing came of the collaboration, but the pair struck up a friendship and Harry was introduced to two of Rollo's friends, Ben Langmaid and Jeff Patterson. After some fruitful co-writing, Ben offered to be Harry's manager, to find him a band and get him a record deal.

He succeeded. Just two years later, the newly-formed Kubb are signed to Mercury Records; they have released their debut album, Mother, and are hotly-tipped as the next Keane or Coldplay. So you could say it was meant to be.

Harry, 30, has a voice so magnetic and lush, that with the right contacts, a record deal was inevitable.

The hard part was finding a vehicle for his talent. Kubb had to be recruited. Following a series of phone calls and auditions, the line-up was eventually decided upon: ex-Reef member Dominic Greensmith on drums, former Brightonian Adj Buffoni on guitar and John Tilley, fresh out of Greenwich Conservatoire and contacted via an NME ad, on keyboards.

Manufactured they may be, but Kubb work.

"It's a bit weird, if you put it like that," Harry admits. "But the truth is the longer we spend together the more of a band it is.

"Different bands come together in different ways. We're not one of those bands that started off at school who have been together for ten years or whatever. I have been in that kind of band before and it doesn't always happen.

"With us, something just clicked. We get on. I feel like I belong and I get a lot of energy from it."

Dom agrees. His old rock band, Reef (whose biggest hit, Place Your Hands, was famously changed to It's Your Letters by Chris Evans for use on his television show TFI Friday) was formed more conventionally out of friendships, but he is much happier in Kubb.

"By the time I left Reef I just wasn't enjoying being in the same company," he says. "I didn't want to be just slogging it.

"I felt like we had passed our peak but we kept playing, hoping we would have another hit.

It was going downhill and everyone knew it. We were friends and I look back really fondly on that time but we were just getting on each others' nerves. Kubb is a different vibe, the dynamic is great, it's very easygoing."

The chemistry between the band members was startlingly obvious when they made their television debut last year on LaterWith Jools Holland. They played an electrifying set which hugely boosted their confidence and record sales, catapulting them into the public eye. They have been rapidly gaining momentum ever since.

Now there is a sense that Kubb's story is only just beginning.

Most of their debut record had already been written by the time Adj, Dom and Tilley arrived on the scene, but their second album will allow each band member to put more of their personality into the songs and ferment Kubb's sound. "I certainly believe we have got a better album in us," says Adj, describing Kubb as "a soulful rock band".

"Kubb is in touch with matters of the heart," he adds. "I think Harry is led by his heart and this comes through in his singing. All of us are." Born in Liverpool to a Tobagan mother, Harry grew up in the Caribbean. He returned to England when he was 17, settling in London after several years living in Cornwall. "My love of music started in Tobago," he says. "I played recorder, clarinet and classical guitar in a wind band."

As Adj says, when you meet Harry, "you know he's not from round here." So does he think growing up in Tobago has influenced the way he listens to or writes music?

"Maybe," Harry says. "I think you can't get away from your musical influences. They come out in the music you write. But you don't need to grow up in the West Indies to have syncopation and rhythm or anything like that.

"If I'm writing for the band or playing live I tend not to write out-and-out calypso tunes. But when I'm singing to myself I'm always singing those kind of songs.

"I think I took the vibe of Tobago with me in my personality. I'm quite chilled out really.

When I think about Tobago, when I get really nostalgic about it, I think of the evenings there.

The sun has already gone down but it's still light - that kind of evening when there is a hot wind off the sea the plants and the coast, which can be quite rugged as well as beautiful.

"But wait until our next album," he interrupts himself. "It might be different. It might be harsh and angry. You never know."

Whatever the second album brings, Mother is a glorious debut. Produced by Youth (bass payer for Killing Joke and producer of The Verve, and Embrace), songs like Somebody Else, Wicked Soul and Chemical are soaring, piano-led ballads with dark lyrical twists about drug addiction, death, and, as Harry says, "f****** the brains out of your missus."

Harry's voice, without doubt the driving force, is reminiscent of Radiohead's Thom Yorke in its intensity and tone and, Jeff Buckley in its emotional depth and range.

Harry remembers the weather was appropriately miserable during the shoot.

"There was a bad storm and it was freezing and raining with threatening clouds. I was really ill with flu and we had to get down there at seven in the morning and spend all day there.

"The song is a relationship healer. It's about various experiences I've had over the years, when you end up begging someone to forgive you, and sometimes it works and sometimes not.

"Shooting the video by the pier was the director's idea because he liked the scenery."

Director Paul Minor, from Los Angeles, said the dilapidated pier was an obvious choice for a song about broken hearts. "I saw some pictures of Brighton in the winter and they had a really melancholy quality to them, like a beach town that's closed for the winter," he says.

"The West Pier has that broken feeling and it seemed to be a fitting sort of place to start the song. It really is unique, and you don't see anything like it anywhere else."

The video for Grow is believed to contain some of the last footage of the pier's kiosk before storms forced it into the sea a few days later.

As the song develops, the lyrics become more uplifting. The video moves along the seafront to the Palace Pier, where hundreds of colourful lights flare up as a symbol of renewal. Paul, who has just finished filming a video for James Blunt's single Wiseman, says: "Kubb's song starts in a bad place, and it's about transition and being able to grow past it."

The album's title is also loaded with meaning. "It's mother, the divine feminine, the earth," says Harry. "I've read stuff about this that interests me. I was brought up a staunch Christian and learning about paganism is a good route out of the Christian side of things.

"When Constantine made Christianity official, our society was turned into a patriarchal one. There were women throughout the Roman Empire who saw through it. Most of them would have been pagan priestesses but they were demonised, called witches and killed so I just thought yeah, mother."

Confused? Let Adj clarify matters. "When your singer is as good as Harry," he says, "what's the point in over-complicating things?"

Doors 7.30pm, tickets cost £10. Call 01273 673311