Now, with two hits and a highly anticipated, unfinished album to their name, one of the hottest bands of 2004 have gone out on their first headlining tour, performing to audiences of no more than a couple of hundred a night.
After sneaking on to what was possibly the world's lowest stage like parents leaving Christmas presents at the foot of the bed, the foursome did it again. From nowhere they clattered into their best-known song, Rip It Up, sending volts of excitement through the stunned crowd and leaving everyone wondering quite why they hadn't saved it for the encore.
The first rule of a successful rock gig is that you don't throw away your hits - especially when you've had only two, and particularly ones as incendiary as Rip It Up, with its instruction to "Get on the dancefloor! Rip it up! That's what it's there for!" - at the start of the show.
The look of sheer impudence on lead singer Johnny Borrell's face said it all. He knew exactly what his band had done and why they'd done it. At 22, the singer has already spent years on the London music scene, playing bass with the Libertines for a while and learning that impact is everything.
While not the most physically imposing of frontmen, Borrell more than compensated with a charisma that suggests he was born to do this. Resplendent in a T-shirt bearing a picture of himself and the kind of ripped-up denims last seen on Bros in 1989, he still managed to look exactly how a putative rock star should. "Defiance" must be his middle name.
Similarly defiantly, Razorlight's songs manage to be incredibly catchy while refusing to adhere to a traditional (some would say obvious) verse-chorus-verse structure. They're more like endless build-ups designed to extract the maximum amount of intensity from the band's performance.
They raced through 15 songs in just under three-quarters of an hour, proving that three minutes is the optimum length for a great pop song and guaranteeing a Pavlovian response to news of their next tour.
Razorlight may have done things in the wrong order, but what counts is that they got everything right.