When you are at secondary school there is always a “pocket of kids that like dusty old records”, says Dominic McGuinness, lead singer of Essex band The Bohicas.

In the early Noughties at Trinity Catholic High School in Woodford Green it was Ilford boy Dominic and his friends Brendan Heaney, from Chingford, and Dom John, from Wanstead, who would huddle round listening to The Beatles and Ray Charles as well as the new breed of emerging bands such as Kings of Leon and The White Stripes.

It wasn’t long before the 13-year-old boys decided to pick up some instruments and give it a go themselves, but they soon discovered it was harder than it looked.

“We did an after school thing with (community music trainer) Phil Mullen where you could play pop and rock‘n’roll and we came together for a gig at the Kenneth More Theatre in Ilford, and Phil came on stage in front of all the parents and said ‘OK, we have got the greatest underage band in Essex for you now’, we were called the 88s at the time, and we walked on to the stage to massive applause, but there was no sound coming from the keyboard.

“All you could hear was the sound of a finger hitting the plastic. It went so wrong.”

So how did it go from there to The Bohicas being named ‘Ones to Watch in 2015’ by global music streaming service Spotify?

Dominic, now 25, says it all started to come together about three years ago when the band, then named Swanton Bomb, finally found that elusive bass player they had been missing all through school.

“I met him in the studio when my brother Eugene was recording his album. He had this guy come in on double bass and it was Adrian (Acolatse) and we just stole him immediately and then Dom came back from university and it all gelled and made sense.

“I remember the first practise we had as a four-piece. We use to travel to the Roundhouse in Camden, it has this membership for 16 to 25s and you can hire a tiny room for a few pounds, which was perfect for us.”

They started gigging around London as The Bohicas (military slang for Bend over! Here it comes again – used colloquially to indicate that an adverse situation is about to repeat itself) and got their first taste of success when double A-side XXX and Swarm was a hit Down Under and they were asked to go on tour in Australia and Tokyo.

They have also played alongside Franz Ferdinand a few times, as they are also signed to record label Domino, and lead singer Alex Kapranos invited them to do a gig at Ibiza Rocks with them.

“It was loads of drunk Brits and these guys in leather jackets in 25 degree heat, “ laughs Dominic. “It was a bit in at the deep end for us but it was really good.

“We were also given the opportunity to film the video for XXX and Swarm and it was all quite glamorous and rock‘n’roll.”

Now The Bohicas are on the verge of releasing their debut album in the spring, but will be giving home turf fans the chance to hear their new material first this week with their Swarm Over Essex tour, which will see them play gigs in Harlow, Southend, Colchester and Canvey Island before following up with a BBC Introducing gig at Koko in Camden.

When we speak, Dominic is in the Fish Factory Studio in Dollis Hill making the final tweaks to the album and says these songs are “proper band stuff”.

“Until now we have been reeling out the older, crappier tunes so it’s dead exciting that we will finally be playing them and people will be hearing them.”

The first single will be To Die For and Dominic confesses that: “It isn’t about anything. It’s just stuff that sounds cool when you sing it. I’m not that clever really.

The self-confessed “huge Beatles nerd” says the dream is to be as popular as the Fab Four and he hopes making the Spotify list will bring them to more people’s attention.

All the venues on the Swarm Over Essex tour will be new to them and Dominic says: “I have only ever done one gig in Essex so I’m really looking forward to seeing people’s reactions to it. That’s much better than looking at some graph or statistics.

“I know it could go either way and there may be a reason people don’t go there for gigs. But 2015 is going to be our year, hopefully. We are all bracing ourselves for something big.”

South Record Shop, Southend-on-Sea, January 8, 1.30pm; Chinnerys, Southend-on-Sea, January 8, 8pm; The Square, Harlow, January 9, 8pm; Colchester Arts Centre, January 10, 7.30pm; The Oysterfleet Hotel, Canvey Island, January 11, 7pm; KOKO, Camden, January 16, 10pm. Details: dominorecordco.com/thebohicas