The New Cue #288 May 30: Hard-Fi's Richard Archer
"I’ve made a career out of wanting to get out of Staines and I’m still here..."
Good morning!
We hope the bank holiday weekend treated you well, and you treated the bank holiday weekend well. Working at these things together really is key. In today’s free edition, we’ve got a bumper chat with Hard-Fi frontman Richard Archer about the 00s indie giants’ reunion shows. All you have to do is scroll and if you don’t want to scroll, you can listen to the audio, and if you don’t want to listen to the audio, you can watch the video. Niall says he’s sorry about his beard in it. His daughter told him he looked dirty soon after so he’s shaved it off now.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Richard Archer
Hard-Fi always felt like the men apart of the mid-00s indie explosion. You had Franz Ferdinand being arty and arch, Razorlight in training to be U2, Kaiser Chiefs as the bombastic light-entertainers, The Kooks as the charismatic young scamps, and then you had the quartet from Staines. Richard Archer’s crew looked a like they’d just stumbled out of All Bar One and they had a string of Friday night anthems to match – songs such as Cash Machine, Hard To Beat and Living For The Weekend, bolshy tunes that blended indie, ska and punk with house-influenced grooves. As well as being absurdly catchy and sounding really good being played loud in cars with the windows down, they also captured something of the shifting, unsettling times in noughties Britain. Their debut Stars Of CCTV was originally a self-released mini-album with the subsequently beefed up and re-released version becoming a huge hit – going to Number One in the UK and selling over a million copies.
A follow-up, 2007’s Once Upon A Time In The West, also went to the top of the charts and showed that they could do excellent Verve-style ballads alongside the pop snarling but by 2011’s Killer Sounds they had started to lose their way – although this tune is a banger:
The band went on hiatus a couple of years later but after a one-off show at London’s Forum last year sold out instantly, they return properly for a full UK tour in October. A few weeks ago, the band’s frontman and chief songwriter Richard Archer told Niall all about the reunion as well as casting his mind back to their period of massive success, the time they got kicked out of the Met Bar because of David Walliams and more. Tickets for the tour are available here.
Rather listen to the interview? Here you go:
Or watch the video below:
Hello Rich, how are you?
Yeah, not bad, trying to get back into the swing of getting shitloads of emails about tours and realising I have to answer them now.
What’s the most annoying thing that you’d forgotten about being the leader of a band that you’re suddenly remembering?
Well, it’s not too bad at the moment, it’s just literally the amount of, ‘Alright, can you just check this? Can you confirm this? Can you confirm that you’re okay with the proposed plan for the social media rollout?’ I’m starting to be like, ‘Well, it really bothered me about two weeks ago but now I’m starting to not care anymore.’ It suddenly dawned on me, I remembered how it was before, constantly being asked, ‘What do you think of this?’ and how the one time you don’t look at it is the one time it’s a disaster.
I guess you didn’t have to worry about social media rollout when the band started either?
Since we’ve come back, everyone’s said how much of the world has changed and how everything is about your social media presence. We hated doing it then as well - we didn’t perhaps totally understand it or we probably worried too much about it, worried how we’d come across and now I don’t care, it’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever’. We’re just trying to have some fun with it. In some ways, you think it would be kind of freeing, you’re not totally beholden to the gatekeepers at radio and things like that. But, on the other hand, it feels like you spend more time doing that than actually thinking about music. I always loved coming up with ideas for artwork and T-shirts, so I’ve just got to try and adapt that to loving the idea of being on social media and speaking out that way.
Talking about how much the world has changed, Hard-Fi originally emerged into mid-00s Broken Britain, but now everything is just great…
Haha! I mean, actually looking back, because I’m still based in Staines - I’ve made a career out of wanting to get out of it and then I’m still here - but back at the time when I was grumbling and moaning, it was actually the probably the best it’s ever been. There was stuff going on, there were some clubs opening up. Now loads of the pubs have shut, the high street is struggling, like everywhere, the Debenhams that has been there forever has closed, those big things that everything was hung around have all gone. That’s the mad thing, looking back at that first album, a lot of the stuff we were singing about is more relevant now than it was then. But whether anyone will care, I don’t know.
I was looking at the lyrics to Cash Machine to see if you need to update anything but there’s not really any anachronisms in there – you can still go to a cash point and you can still get Pay As You Go mobiles.
Yeah, we’ll be okay, otherwise I would have had to do some clumsy shoehorning in sort of thing. When we went to America, they had no idea what a cash machine was because it’s ATMs over there, I don’t know if they thought it was a kind of gangster thing. I’m not saying that’s why we never broke into global rock and roll stars over there or anything, but I was always trying to explain ourselves. It’s funny, we’re working on new material and you’re going, ‘OK, what do I want to write about? What do I want to say?’ and there are obviously lots of things but a lot of stuff that you see around, you kind of go, ‘Well, we’ve already done that, can we do it again?’. It’s one of the things that I always struggled with was that record because it’s quite varied in that there’s lots of subjects in it, we covered almost everything on album one and it was like ‘Well, what do we talk about now? I dunno...’.
You seemed to have a real fire in your belly in those early days. Can you relate to that guy now?
Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if it’s getting older but I almost feel angrier now than then. Back then, there was always that feeling of because of what we were, we never felt like we were invited to the party. It always felt like we didn’t fit in. I was in this town where I was into all sorts of music but an indie kid and it was the one town where you went to a club with chart house music, but then when you went somewhere else to find that it was like, ‘You’re just an out-of-town kid from the suburbs’. There was always that feeling of being slightly on the outside looking in. Even just after the Mercurys, we went to the Metropolitan Hotel on Park Lane and we were having a few drinks in the bar and we basically got told, ‘You’ve got to go now because David Walliams is coming’ and they threw us out. It was like, ‘Are you joking?’ Nothing changes!
Did you miss being Rich from Hard-Fi in the period where there was no Hard-Fi?
I don’t know. I still had a lot going on. I had two kids and I was always still making music, whether it be my own music or writing with other people, and younger bands who had been fans of the band back in the day would get in touch, so I don’t think that ever really went away. There were a lot of things I didn’t miss about it, in the way that things had become and where we were with the label. But now it feels fun again, getting the band back together. Some of the things where we’d started to get annoyed with each other, I feel like we’ve grown out of them. There were silly things and now we’ve had some time apart, it’s not really there. It feels exciting again, it’s like ‘Let’s go out and have some fun’. There’s nothing riding on it whereas before, it was always like ‘We can’t fuck this up, this is our shot, we can’t mess it up!’ There was always pressure that was either put on by ourselves, probably mostly, and also outside. As soon as you get into the label machine, every gig is like, ‘Well, so and so is coming to this one, it’s got to be great’. You never get to that point where you can go, ‘Oh, we can go out there and not worry about it being great, it’s just gonna take care of itself being great…’.
You had the one-off reunion gig last year at the Forum. When did you decide you wanted to make it more of a permanent reformation?
We’d quite enjoyed getting together and playing in a room, and when that gig sold out so quickly, it was like, ‘Oh my god, people actually still give a shit.’ We had no idea whether people would be bothered or not and so, after that, we were thinking, ‘Well, yeah, what if we were to do some more?’. The audience reaction was amazing and we all just wanted to keep having more of it really. I have to say, though, I was utterly knackered after the show!
Do you regret putting the band on hiatus for all that time?
A little bit. There was no real plan but at the time everything felt difficult, everything felt a little bit like hard work. You’re sitting there, you’ve been in this label machine where it’s all about getting on Radio 1 and that’s all anyone thinks about at that point. Looking back now, I think the best thing to do is just keep going.
Some of your peers from that era who stuck it out managed to find a whole new audience by doing that.
That’s one thing that quite excites me really, because it feels like there’s not the sort of ageism that there might have been previously. And even though it’s crippled a lot of artists financially, things like Spotify mean that a new audience can discover you. We’re sitting here thinking, ‘Well, if these songs do still resonate, there is a chance that we can find a new audience and new people can discover us and it means that we can play these songs and reach out to new people.’
Casting your mind back to that period when things blew up big, when it felt like a proper crossover from DIY indie band to huge success, what are the first things that come to mind?
It’s always the excitement as things keep building up, going from playing the Water Rats, hoping there’s gonna be some people down there and then, ‘Oh, can you go and support Green Day in front of 60,000 people’. We got booked to do T4 On The Beach and the only way we could do both was to get there by helicopter, so we spent the fee we got from the Green Day gig chartering a helicopter from Weston-super-Mare to Milton Keynes. I mean, it was just stupid, all your dreams had come true, we’re in a helicopter going to do a stadium show - alright, we’re first on and nobody knows who we are. I’ll never forget wandering out onto the stage for the first time at Milton Keynes Bowl and Ross [Phillips, guitarist] had a fag on and there’s so many pyrotechnics on the stage that literally all the Green Day crew jumped on him. It’s those moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my God!’ but it still felt like you were in control. Once you get right into that whole machine, you feel like you’re on a bit of an oil tanker, everything is slow to move, slow to change, you can’t adapt and be nimble and be like, ‘Let’s do that, let’s do this,’ it feels like everything has to go on a pre-designated course.
How did all that success affect you?
The first year, in one way, was incredible. In December 2004, we played at the Water Rats and we got signed after that. Then the following year, 2005, we did three nights sold out at the Astoria. Then, in the next 18 months, we did the Brixtons [the band played five consecutive sold-out shows at Brixton in May 2006]. In the middle of all that, I lost my mum quite suddenly – around the time we were doing Glastonbury, we’d just been bumped up the bill, we’d recorded Top of the Pops the week before and it was put out on air, and at the time, it was like, ‘We just need to keep moving on this’.
I remember getting to the end of the year and things weren’t right. I was worried about my voice, I was never a trained singer or anything, I just went out there and did it purely on vibe. You look back now and think ‘Well, fucking hell, the amount of shit that was going on, no wonder you were starting to like feel the pressure by the end of it.’ But you probably wouldn’t have done anything different because what could you do? You just had to keep moving. It was a little bit of a double edged sword in that, finally doing what you’ve always dreamt you wanted to do and it was brilliant but you always want to be doing it at the best of your abilities. We never didn’t give everything but sometimes your body is going to crap out on you on certain things.
That was fairly extreme for us but a lot of new bands and new artists go through a similar thing. I was looking at the calendar trying to find some anniversary dates for social media stuff and saw that we did nine shows in a row, then you go to America, and you do five shows in a row and on your day off, you fly from the West Coast to the East Coast to do a make or break TV show, ‘Don’t fuck it up, lads!’, then fly back and go again. That’s gonna be the same for anyone in that position, you’ve just got to hopefully make it work and get through it. But sometimes you think, ‘There’s gotta be a better way of doing this...’ a bit more of a plan to make it work.
I’ve got a funny memory of interviewing you for the second record, Once Upon A Time In The West. We met in the same pub in Staines where we’d done the Stars Of CCTV interview and afterwards you were really reluctant to give me a lift to the station. You were trying to convince Kai [Stephens, bassist] to take me but he said, ‘You’re going that way, you take him’. As we were walking to the car, you said to me, ‘You know, I haven’t changed since the last time we met… I’m still in Staines, I still live in the same house, this is the only thing really…’, and then we arrived at your brand new Porsche.
Hahah, ah, fantastic. The mad thing is I’ve still got that Porsche and the state it’s in… that Porsche has been like a physical representation of my career because back then it was all nice and shiny and now it’s absolutely fucked. I’m terrible at looking after cars, I don’t care about them enough. My neighbour loves his car. He’s always out there cleaning it, he always looks at me and shakes his head.
Haha! What does the future hold beyond the tour?
Who knows what happens but I want to put a new album out at some stage, I don’t want to just be reliving old glories, cash in and then disappear, I always want to be doing some new music. The tour we’re doing is a UK tour but I’d love to go and play Europe, I’d love to do some festivals. We never really did a lot of festivals, we always had a live plan which always worked - one of the reasons we did five Brixtons was because we didn’t do any festivals that summer - but I’d like to do that. It’s not long until the 20th anniversary of Stars Of CCTV in 2025. It’s 18 years old this summer. It’s still early days, we’ll do these shows and then see. It’s a difficult time at the moment, I know the cost of living is biting, so wherever a gig ticket is on that list of people’s priorities I don’t know. But we’ll go out there and hopefully we can give some people a good night out. That’d be the main thing.
ND