Richard Archer of the band Hard Fi told David Hennessy about reforming the band after a ten year hiatus, turning down his invitation to Downing Street and that there are nowhere for new plans to play these days.
Hard Fi are currently touring the UK with a run of dates that includes a sold out night at The Roundhouse in London.
It was in 2005 that the band, led by Richard Archer, first came to prominence with tracks like Hard to Beat, Cash Machine and Living for the Weekend.
Their debut album, Stars of CCTV, would sell over a million copies and see them nominated for the Mercury Music Prize.
The band from Staines also equalled the record held by Bob Dylan, The Prodigy, The Clash and Massive Attack by playing five sold-out nights at Brixton Academy in 2006.
The follow up album, Once Upon a Time in the West- boasting another anthem in Suburban Knights, was their second album to go number one.
Album number three would also make the top ten but it would be the final collection before the band took a hiatus that would end up being ten years long.
It was not until the COVID lockdown that lead singer Richard was encouraged to revisit the Hard Fi material by the warm response he got to an acoustic stream and also seeing how relevant some of the messages still were.
Since 2022 they have been playing live shows.
They are now releasing music again.
Today they release the track Don’t Need You. This followed their first track in over a decade, Don’t Go Making Plans and Always and Forever.
All come form the Don’t Go Making Plans EP which is out now.
Lead singer Richard Archer chatted to The Irish World recently.
Richard believes he has some Irish blood in his background somewhere but bass player Kai Stephens is ‘through and through’ Irish.
I was listening to the new music and thought it sounded like the Hard Fi I knew which is not to say there hasn’t been a progression but I really found the band to sound familiar even though it’s been nearly 20 years since you first came along. What does it feel like for you? Does it feel like you’ve never been away?
“I think we do feel like we’ve been away because so many things have changed completely like the way you put out music, it’s all very different and we’re still trying to get our heads around that.
“I think it was definitely a decision to not try and complicate things.
“Since Hard Fi last released music, I’ve been doing work with other people, written with other people, produced with other people, and had a few other projects going on so in some ways, you get out some of the other things you want to do that’s a little bit different.
“But also, I had this project called OffWorld that I managed to release just in time for COVID so that sort of went straight on the shelf.
“But I remember I got a friend of mine to play it to a guy, he works with Rough Trade so they were playing it to those guys, and they were like, ‘Is that the guy from hard Fi?’
“And I was like, ‘How would he know that?’
“Because to me, it’s completely different so there was obviously something about what I do that people recognise that I didn’t really expect.
“There’s always going to be an element of that but I think there wasn’t that much thought put into it.
“It was just like, ‘Yeah, this feels good. Let’s do these ones’.
“We got so caught up sometimes, you overthink everything and this time around it was like, ‘Let’s just do it, whatever feels right’.
“Because back then you have a big record label behind you, and you’ve all these different departments and there’s a million points of view and you sort of overthink everything so much, whereas now it’s just a bit of a more streamlined outfit and you just kind of go, ‘That feels right. Let’s just roll with that. What’s the worst that can happen?’
“Maybe that’s how that kind of evolved.”
Is that what happened to the band the first time around? Was it that overthinking that you talk about? Did it all just get a bit much?
“Yeah, there’s a bit of that.
“We had just put our third album out and whatever we did, it felt impossible to get any sort of traction with it.
“It felt like there was a change going on and you’ve seen it.
“From about 2012, 2014 there hasn’t been many bands.
“It’s great to see now in Ireland, there’s a scene sort of developing and bubbling up, all these new acts.
“There’s not been many bands.
“It’s been very pop music oriented, a lot of solo artists because it’s so expensive to be in a band whereas if you’ve got a laptop, you can do everything you need to from home.
“It was kind of hard and the guys were like, ‘We’ve been doing this now for a while’.
“And it just stopped being, I guess, fun.
“We had been pushing ourselves from the very beginning.
“We’d always been saying, ‘We can’t f**k this up. We’ve got this opportunity. We’ve got to make it work’.
“We really put a lot of pressure on ourselves and then with the success of the first album, a lot of pressure then came in from elsewhere.
“And I think everyone just kind of got to the point where they were like, ‘You know what?’
“Ross (Philips, guitar) had just had his first kid. He didn’t want to be away loads.
“It just kind of got to the point where people wanted to do other things.
“Steve (Kemp, drums) had never been to university. He wanted to go away and study, so he did that.
“And it just felt naturally that if everyone’s heart’s not really in this 100%, it’s already hard enough as it is so it’s just like, ‘Let’s just take a break’.
“And the break sort of turned into 10 years really.
“Perhaps no one expected that to happen, but that was sort of what went on.
“And then in lockdown, a lot of people were doing live streams and stuff so I thought, ‘I’ll give it a go’, and I did.
“I live streamed the first album Stars of CCTV acoustic from my kitchen, not imagining anyone would really care, but loads of people tuned in and it got a really nice response, a lot of love.
“So it was, ‘This feels kind of cool’. Spoke to the guys and phoned up my tour agent and he was like, ‘Let’s do something, where do you want to play?’
“And I said, ‘Don’t know really’, and we ended up in The Forum in Kentish town and ended up having an amazing gig there’.
“And it was like, ‘Well, maybe we should do some more’.
“There’s been no big plan.
“It’s just been like, ‘Well, let’s see what happens next’.”
You say you were surprised by how much love the material got when you played it acoustic that time, but then it even struck you how relevant a lot of it still was.
Songs like Cash Machine and Living for the Weekend seem even more timely than they were 20 years ago…
“I think, in some ways, sadly, they are.
“There’s a line in one of the new songs, Don’t Go Making Plans: ‘Too broke to eat, nowhere to dance..’
“And the line ‘nowhere to dance’ was a reflection on the fact that when we wrote Stars of CCTV in Staines, there were nightclubs to go to.
“They might have not been the sort of nightclub that was my first choice, might not play the music I liked but there was somewhere to go.
“There were pubs to go to.
“There were pubs that had live music and this kind of stuff, and those clubs are gone now. They’re blocks of flats, all that sort of culture is gone.
“So in fact, things weren’t as bad then as they are now.
“Those songs were always meant as like a celebration really of being like, ‘You know what? We may not be living in a trendy part of town, we might not be the hip kids in your eyes but we’re going to do our thing and we’re going to celebrate our lives and what we do’.
“Sadly it seems to be even more relevant now than ever which is great for the brand, but not great for the country.”
The other line in that song, Don’t Go Making Plans that speaks to me is, ‘Don’t go rising up..’
Have you been surprised in the last few years that there hasn’t been a rising up in spite of how bad things have gotten?
“When that song was written, the government we had seemed much more interested in carving stuff up for their mates and had no intention, no intention of trying to make life better for ordinary people.
“I mean, you see the £20 billion black hole- Well, what is that exactly? It was the fact that they didn’t even set aside a single penny to try and sort out the workers’ disputes: The train drivers, the nurses, the junior doctors.
“They never intended to do anything about that whatsoever.
“There was nothing, no will at all.
“And yet, all the money that went missing through COVID to favoured people and all this sort of stuff and then the laws that changed that make it harder to protest.
“You still see it now to be honest with you. You see climate protesters and the amount of time they’re getting in prison for peaceful protests for something, and the science backs it all up, saying, ‘We are sh*t scared about what’s going on. We’re trying to do something about it’.
“It was interesting.
“I just saw a video, Kris Kristofferson and Sinéad O’Connor on stage, everyone booing her because she basically told the truth and you kind of get that feeling of the similar sort of thing.
“People are trying to say something and everyone has been led to believe one thing and those people are then vilified.
“I’m not a kid anymore, right? But I’ve got kids and I was ready to go out marching because I felt that it was getting to the point where, ‘How much longer can this go on for?’
“It was a complete sh*t show.
“I get it.
“People are having to work two jobs to get by.
“They haven’t got time to do anything else.
“How did we get to this position?
“It’s sad.”
Like Noel Gallagher, you were once invited to Downing Street when Hard Fi one of the biggest bands of the time.
However unlike Noel Gallagher you turned down the invitation..
Do you have hope for the future now under this Labour government?
“I do because I think at least we seem to have some grown ups in charge now.
“I mean, they need to be held to account.
“But you know what? It’s still early days.
“It seems there’s actually people who want to make a difference running things but on the other hand, the country is in such a state from the last 14 years plus the state of the world.
“Everywhere is struggling.
“I can’t see things suddenly getting great but at least it feels like someone’s trying to make it better rather than, ‘Don’t give a sh*t, mate. I’m all right, Jack’.
“I do sometimes look back at that, the invitation, and I sort of think, ‘It would have been nice to have gone for the experience and to be able to tell my kids: I went to Downing Street’.
“But you know what? At the time, it didn’t feel right and so that was the right thing to do.
“But I’d almost like to go now and just try and sit there and be championing the cause of musicians.
“Like I was saying about all these places closing, where do new bands play? How do bands go and play in Europe without being tied up in paperwork and it costing a fortune?
“We would love to go over and play Dublin but I know right now it’s like, ‘Guys, you can’t afford it because it’s just too much’.
“This is just all crazy if you’re starting out and you’re trying to play small venues.
“It was hard enough back when we were starting out and now it seems really, really difficult.”
So as timely as a record like Stars of CCTV still could be, if you were starting now would it be a case of not knowing where to take it?
“Yeah, we were very lucky.
“A lot of it is timing.
“When we came out, there was a wave of new British bands: Franz Ferdinand, Libertines, Maximo Park, Futureheads, Kaisers, Subways.
“And, perhaps if we had come out two years later or two years earlier, no one might have cared so we came out at a good time, so that always helps.
“But there were so many places to play.
“There was so much going on.
“It felt exciting.
“Now a record label literally wants you to do all the work for them, they want you to do their whole promotional budget, constantly be making videos and all this sort of stuff.
“And that’s fine, you can be creative with that and have fun doing it but it will take over your life.”
What was the highlight of your meteoric rise? You did incredible things back then like supporting Green Day at Milton Keynes Bowl, you also played five nights at Brixton, played with people like Paul Weller and Mick Jones…
Is there a particular pinch me moment?
“Milton Keynes definitely because we had been playing to like 200 people in a back room of a pub.
“We’d never played anywhere without walls so you’re so used to sound bouncing off the back wall and then suddenly you’re in this big field and you’re like, ‘There’s a lot of people. Oh no, that’s just the golden circle that. Beyond that..’
“And we were literally sh*tting bricks.
“It was a major moment for us.
“So many people said, ‘I saw you at Green Day’.
“But I think for me it was those Brixton shows because it was such a special time. It felt like it was our home. We were there five nights, Billy Bragg playing with us every day.
“I think Professor Green supported us a couple of the shows and then Mick Jones and Paul Weller. It was just dream come true territory really.
“It was brilliant.
“It was just sort of sad it all had to end.
“We could have kept going if we’d had half a chance.
“Because when I was growing up, that was the gig.
“It wasn’t Wembley, it was Brixton Academy.
“That was where all the bands I wanted to see, where they played.”
You have a new EP coming out but are there any plans for another album or more new music?
“Yeah, there is.
“Believe it or not next year is 20 years since we released Stars of CCTV.
“We want to mark that somehow so that’s something we’d like to look at and then definitely want to put some more music out.
“We kind of like the EP idea because sometimes you spend so long making an album and you get so tied up in it and everything like, ‘This is a heavyweight thing of where we are now’.
“It feels like back in the 60s, they just put an album out like an EP and then get the next one out.
“But you put it out and everyone goes, ‘Now you can’t do anything else because we need to go through all the sales bits and pieces to make sure that blah, blah, blah’ whereas with the EP, it feels like you can put it out and be on to the next one.
“But definitely some new music.
“But obviously next year we’d like to at least reissue the album on vinyl because it’s over 100 quid on Discogs if you want to try and get it now, if there’s one there at all, so it would be nice to do something like that.”
You’re going out on tour and did some touring last year also, what is it like to play again for fans old and new?
“It’s just been amazing.
“It’s just been amazing that people still come out to see us and how the songs still resonate with them and then new people coming along to check it out as well.
“It still feels like we haven’t quite let everyone know yet because there’s still people going, ‘Oh my God, you’re back’.
“And we’re going, ‘Yeah, we’ve been back for about two years’.
“It’s just trying to get the word out there that, ‘Hey, come along and see us. It’ll be a good night’.”
The track Don’t Need You is out now.
Don’t Go Making Plans the EP is out now.
Hard Fi are touring the UK.
For more information, search Hard Fi on social media.
