Music > Interviews
Interview with Hard Fi
08/09/11
The songs from Hard Fi’s first two albums charted our repetitive working lives; they were an anthem to clocking on and clocking off, a doff of the cap to us Suburban Knights, and a soundtrack to our abject abandon come the weekend. Four years since their last release is a long time on the musical timeline, but it finds us as it left. Still here. Still being carried along by the notions of time and the working week, and that’s why even after their time away, Hard Fi still have resonance with us, because we were always waiting. Frontman Richie Archer took some time to talk to Outline ahead of their UK tour…
Hey Rich, someone just asked me if I was looking forward to the weekend and I was like, ‘I’m living for the weekend...’! I wondered if you’d heard that roughly 12 million times? Hey listen, I might have done yeah, but it’s all money in the bank!
Oh God, it doesn’t cost me to say that, does it? No, but I wish it did!
So Rich, you’re off to V Festival this weekend… Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
You must be hardened festival-goers now; is it a piece of cake to roll your stuff up and go on down there? Well it’s always a little bit different from doing shows in a regular venue, I mean, I’ve got a friend in a band who refuses to play festivals point blank – if it hasn’t got a roof, he’s not doing it. You do go out there with no sound check, nothing sounds like what it’s supposed to sound like and the first couple of songs are done in a seat of your pants-type moment. I remember the first festival we ever did, we’d been playing to like 200 people in various little clubs and it was still really early days, then we got asked to support Green Day at Milton Keynes over two days to over 60,000 people! I mean for us, the first day that we went out there, not knowing what it was like to play a festival at all, it was fucking crazy. Nothing sounded like you expected it to sound and you look out at that massive sea of people and you realise that that’s just the Golden Circle and there’s just another sea of humanity beyond them! It was pretty nuts.
You had an explosive return this year though with your Leftfield Stage slot at Glastonbury – how was that for you? It was brilliant actually because the Leftfield Tent there’s just a little stage and we did it really just to get a few shows under our belt. Billy Bragg curates the stage and we’re friends of his and just wanted to do something with him. We weren’t announced, no-one knew what time we were supposed to come on, so we didn’t really know what to expect, whether there’d even be anyone there. We turned up and it was brilliant, the place was packed out, people were queuing up back to the road and the police and security had to clear the path ‘cause there were too many people and it all went off, it was brilliant. It was a really nice feeling to know that people still gave a shit.
We get you all next month in Norwich and we’re actually the first date on your tour – does that mean we get the very best of you, sir? Well I think it means you get the freshest! That first show though, there’s always a few little niggles to be ironed out, but you still get the top match fitness and that nervous energy will all come in the first show, so it should be a special one, I reckon.
I guess you haven’t been for a long stretch on the road for a while – how do you get prepped for a long stint? It must be harrowing… Yeah, well we did loads of touring on the first two records, so we kind of know what to expect and we really feel like we’re playing the best we’ve ever played at the moment. We’ve been waiting for various bits of the album to be finished off you know, waiting for the artwork to come through and the mixes to be tweaked and all that kinda stuff, so we’ve been rehearsing the tunes, getting them all up to standard to play live, so I think we’re just all really excited about it. It’s been so long since we toured that just adrenaline will carry us through. When it starts turning into a yearlong tour, that’s when you really need to get yourself in shape. It’s that fifth show in a row where the lights are really up close and you can’t breathe that’s the really interesting one, when you’re absolutely knackered. But we’ve learnt over the years that if you go out on the piss after every show, you’re gonna stumble at some point.
Monday is a big day for you – it’s the album’s release date; how do you feel, nervous? Do you get nervous on your third album? Obviously there’s quite a lot of anticipation about it coming out, but I’m fairly relaxed about it, because the way I see it, the first album came out, then six months later it went to number 1, then the second album came out and went to number 1 straight away in the first week, but I don’t expect that for this one because we’ve been away too long and the music scene’s changed. I think this’ll be a case of get the album out, then we can start doing what bands normally do, which is go out, promote your album and keep working, then slowly we can push it up there like we did with the first album. So for me there’s no need to freak out about anything, just say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’ll be nice just to have it out there, get the reactions from the fans, just see what they think. We’ve been working on it so long that after a little while you lose a bit of perspective as to whether it’s any good. You’ve been living with the songs so long that it’s nice to give people the chance to buy it.
I was thinking about the songs and their context; the songs from the first two albums are working class anthems for our generation, but as you live slightly different lives now, what’s your inspiration? What inspires you? I think inspiration has always been just things that you look and see about you, and might see on the news. For instance, I still live in Staines and although my circumstances are a lot different now than they were six years ago, that’s still in you, that still formed a greater part of my life and the band as well, you know. That formed how we think about things and how we view the world, you know, and that’s never gonna go away. You’ve always got your mates to fall back on as well, to see what they’ve been up to and what’s going on. You look at someone like Bruce Springsteen – and I’m not comparing us to him in any way – but he’s always going to have a bit of New Jersey and car racing about him no matter what he does. With this record, with everything that had happened with the first and second albums – I mean the making of the second album was quite stressful, a pressure-filled period, so with this album it was nice to take a little bit of time out and then come back and have fun making music and almost not worry about it. It didn’t have to sound like this or be about that; it can be however we want it to be – it was about us experimenting and having a laugh, just getting in a room and enjoying what we do. That’s the best way to make music, and that’s what we did this time round; we came up with loads of ideas and had fun with it and tried not to overthink it.
You really experimented with your producers, having four, but I guess the one that everyone’s interested in is Stuart Price. The subtle dancey element that he brought sort of reminded me of how Primal Scream knew how to introduce dance rhythms without ever being a dance band. Did Stuart approach you with this idea, or is that why you brought him in? I think that it was always an unconscious decision that we would push it that way, even before we started looking for producers we knew that we didn’t want to get a producer that worked with ‘regular’ Indie bands – I mean I’m sure there isn’t one of those out there – even though those guys are all really talented, we knew we wanted something different to come in. We often thought when we had a remix done that some of the remixes had moments in them where we wish we’d have done that in the original tracks, and Stuart Price has done a lot of those remixes under his Thin White Duke moniker and it was kinda like ‘if we can get him…’ I’ve always loved what he did as Les Rhythmes Digitales back in the early noughties, doing his ‘I’m French, but I’m actually from Yorkshire’ thing! We only did two songs with Stuart though – we did ‘Fire in the House’ and ‘Love Songs’ because unfortunately he was so busy that that’s all he had time for. Some of those sounds were already there in the demos, and some of the stuff we did with Stuart was getting down to the nuts and bolts of the arrangement of the songs, you know, getting down to how long is the chorus going on for, or should the middle eight be here, that kind of stuff. He just gave that kind of flavour to the songs though, so when it came to making the rest of the record, we did two other tracks with Greg Kurstin in Los Angeles and then we also worked with Andy Grey, who’s mainly known for making music with Paul Oakenfold, so we worked with lots of guys who had a dance background, but we also tried to keep what was important about Hard Fi in there. We’ve done stuff by ourselves before and that’s worked well, but when you get the opportunity to work with these really talented people, you might as well.
That’s quite strong of you actually, handing your work over to someone else, when you’re capable of doing so much of it yourself – is it hard to hand it on to them? Yes and no, because I made a really conscious effort to stop being a producer when I was with those guys, but it’s hard sometimes, because it’s almost a collaborative effort. If they made a call though, I’d defer to it, and then if I thought I know this feels really bad, I’d go, ‘OK, it’s a 50/50 situation, so let’s go with what you say, ‘cause that’s why we got you in.’ There was always that feeling that when we took each of the tracks back to our studio, there were a few little bits here and there that we tied up, so I always knew we could go back and do bits and pieces with them if necessary. It was quite nice not to have the pressure on really.
I really enjoyed watching the acoustic sessions you did for The Sun, and what I thought was important there was that behind all the clever production, you still have a very strong musical basis when you look at the stripped back songs. Is that important to you, that the songs stand up on their own? I think generally the songs are written on an acoustic guitar, or piano, so they have to work in that way. I think it’s interesting though when you’re asked to play those sorts of sessions that some of the songs don’t lend themselves to that, you know, short choppy guitars don’t lend themselves to an acoustic session. The next thing I write is the bass line and I think bass drives a lot of our music, but that’s a hard thing to get across on an acoustic session. Essentially though, if you’ve got a good song there you can almost take it in any direction.
Maybe it’s not your thing to think about the marketing approach to the album, but I remember from the release of your first album, there was a really good teaser campaign on the TV, which isn’t something record labels always do for Indie bands… To be fair to our label, they have been really patient. They could have been like ‘oh, it’s been three years’, or whatever, but they’ve sat back and let us go and work with these guys who, let’s be honest, aren’t cheap, so they’ve always supported us. I think that when it comes to the marketing side, this time round the big factor is going to be money because record labels just don’t have the sort of money that they used to. When the first album came out, a good selling album went double or triple platinum, whereas now if you go platinum, that’s the same as going triple platinum. Now I think they’ve just trying to be a lot cleverer with what they’ve got, so there’s a lot more online marketing and stuff like that. I think often for us, our fan base isn’t one that will listen to Radio 1 or read the NME, so it’s about reaching those people to let them know the album’s coming out. There were these three guys working on a garden and two of them were Hard Fi fans, but all day they had to listen to Heart FM ‘cause it was the boss’ radio, then they probably went home and watched telly, so you think how are they ever gonna know that Hard Fi have got a new album out? I think for all the press and TV coverage in the world though, if one of your friends says, ‘have you heard that new album? It’s great…’, it’s better than anything else.
Rich, you’ve played Norwich before, but do you have any memories of playing here? I do have really good memories actually; we played the gig and then came back and partied afterwards with some very drunk people I seem to remember. I won’t go into details ‘cause it’s a little on the risqué side, but we had a really good time actually, just a really friendly atmosphere.
Emma Garwood
Hard Fi come to the Waterfront on September 21st. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.
The songs from Hard Fi’s first two albums charted our repetitive working lives; they were an anthem to clocking on and clocking off, a doff of the cap to us Suburban Knights, and a soundtrack to our abject abandon come the weekend. Four years since their last release is a long time on the musical timeline, but it finds us as it left. Still here. Still being carried along by the notions of time and the working week, and that’s why even after their time away, Hard Fi still have resonance with us, because we were always waiting. Frontman Richie Archer took some time to talk to Outline ahead of their UK tour…
Hey Rich, someone just asked me if I was looking forward to the weekend and I was like, ‘I’m living for the weekend...’! I wondered if you’d heard that roughly 12 million times? Hey listen, I might have done yeah, but it’s all money in the bank!
Oh God, it doesn’t cost me to say that, does it? No, but I wish it did!
So Rich, you’re off to V Festival this weekend… Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
You must be hardened festival-goers now; is it a piece of cake to roll your stuff up and go on down there? Well it’s always a little bit different from doing shows in a regular venue, I mean, I’ve got a friend in a band who refuses to play festivals point blank – if it hasn’t got a roof, he’s not doing it. You do go out there with no sound check, nothing sounds like what it’s supposed to sound like and the first couple of songs are done in a seat of your pants-type moment. I remember the first festival we ever did, we’d been playing to like 200 people in various little clubs and it was still really early days, then we got asked to support Green Day at Milton Keynes over two days to over 60,000 people! I mean for us, the first day that we went out there, not knowing what it was like to play a festival at all, it was fucking crazy. Nothing sounded like you expected it to sound and you look out at that massive sea of people and you realise that that’s just the Golden Circle and there’s just another sea of humanity beyond them! It was pretty nuts.
You had an explosive return this year though with your Leftfield Stage slot at Glastonbury – how was that for you? It was brilliant actually because the Leftfield Tent there’s just a little stage and we did it really just to get a few shows under our belt. Billy Bragg curates the stage and we’re friends of his and just wanted to do something with him. We weren’t announced, no-one knew what time we were supposed to come on, so we didn’t really know what to expect, whether there’d even be anyone there. We turned up and it was brilliant, the place was packed out, people were queuing up back to the road and the police and security had to clear the path ‘cause there were too many people and it all went off, it was brilliant. It was a really nice feeling to know that people still gave a shit.
We get you all next month in Norwich and we’re actually the first date on your tour – does that mean we get the very best of you, sir? Well I think it means you get the freshest! That first show though, there’s always a few little niggles to be ironed out, but you still get the top match fitness and that nervous energy will all come in the first show, so it should be a special one, I reckon.
I guess you haven’t been for a long stretch on the road for a while – how do you get prepped for a long stint? It must be harrowing… Yeah, well we did loads of touring on the first two records, so we kind of know what to expect and we really feel like we’re playing the best we’ve ever played at the moment. We’ve been waiting for various bits of the album to be finished off you know, waiting for the artwork to come through and the mixes to be tweaked and all that kinda stuff, so we’ve been rehearsing the tunes, getting them all up to standard to play live, so I think we’re just all really excited about it. It’s been so long since we toured that just adrenaline will carry us through. When it starts turning into a yearlong tour, that’s when you really need to get yourself in shape. It’s that fifth show in a row where the lights are really up close and you can’t breathe that’s the really interesting one, when you’re absolutely knackered. But we’ve learnt over the years that if you go out on the piss after every show, you’re gonna stumble at some point.
Monday is a big day for you – it’s the album’s release date; how do you feel, nervous? Do you get nervous on your third album? Obviously there’s quite a lot of anticipation about it coming out, but I’m fairly relaxed about it, because the way I see it, the first album came out, then six months later it went to number 1, then the second album came out and went to number 1 straight away in the first week, but I don’t expect that for this one because we’ve been away too long and the music scene’s changed. I think this’ll be a case of get the album out, then we can start doing what bands normally do, which is go out, promote your album and keep working, then slowly we can push it up there like we did with the first album. So for me there’s no need to freak out about anything, just say it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’ll be nice just to have it out there, get the reactions from the fans, just see what they think. We’ve been working on it so long that after a little while you lose a bit of perspective as to whether it’s any good. You’ve been living with the songs so long that it’s nice to give people the chance to buy it.
I was thinking about the songs and their context; the songs from the first two albums are working class anthems for our generation, but as you live slightly different lives now, what’s your inspiration? What inspires you? I think inspiration has always been just things that you look and see about you, and might see on the news. For instance, I still live in Staines and although my circumstances are a lot different now than they were six years ago, that’s still in you, that still formed a greater part of my life and the band as well, you know. That formed how we think about things and how we view the world, you know, and that’s never gonna go away. You’ve always got your mates to fall back on as well, to see what they’ve been up to and what’s going on. You look at someone like Bruce Springsteen – and I’m not comparing us to him in any way – but he’s always going to have a bit of New Jersey and car racing about him no matter what he does. With this record, with everything that had happened with the first and second albums – I mean the making of the second album was quite stressful, a pressure-filled period, so with this album it was nice to take a little bit of time out and then come back and have fun making music and almost not worry about it. It didn’t have to sound like this or be about that; it can be however we want it to be – it was about us experimenting and having a laugh, just getting in a room and enjoying what we do. That’s the best way to make music, and that’s what we did this time round; we came up with loads of ideas and had fun with it and tried not to overthink it.
You really experimented with your producers, having four, but I guess the one that everyone’s interested in is Stuart Price. The subtle dancey element that he brought sort of reminded me of how Primal Scream knew how to introduce dance rhythms without ever being a dance band. Did Stuart approach you with this idea, or is that why you brought him in? I think that it was always an unconscious decision that we would push it that way, even before we started looking for producers we knew that we didn’t want to get a producer that worked with ‘regular’ Indie bands – I mean I’m sure there isn’t one of those out there – even though those guys are all really talented, we knew we wanted something different to come in. We often thought when we had a remix done that some of the remixes had moments in them where we wish we’d have done that in the original tracks, and Stuart Price has done a lot of those remixes under his Thin White Duke moniker and it was kinda like ‘if we can get him…’ I’ve always loved what he did as Les Rhythmes Digitales back in the early noughties, doing his ‘I’m French, but I’m actually from Yorkshire’ thing! We only did two songs with Stuart though – we did ‘Fire in the House’ and ‘Love Songs’ because unfortunately he was so busy that that’s all he had time for. Some of those sounds were already there in the demos, and some of the stuff we did with Stuart was getting down to the nuts and bolts of the arrangement of the songs, you know, getting down to how long is the chorus going on for, or should the middle eight be here, that kind of stuff. He just gave that kind of flavour to the songs though, so when it came to making the rest of the record, we did two other tracks with Greg Kurstin in Los Angeles and then we also worked with Andy Grey, who’s mainly known for making music with Paul Oakenfold, so we worked with lots of guys who had a dance background, but we also tried to keep what was important about Hard Fi in there. We’ve done stuff by ourselves before and that’s worked well, but when you get the opportunity to work with these really talented people, you might as well.
That’s quite strong of you actually, handing your work over to someone else, when you’re capable of doing so much of it yourself – is it hard to hand it on to them? Yes and no, because I made a really conscious effort to stop being a producer when I was with those guys, but it’s hard sometimes, because it’s almost a collaborative effort. If they made a call though, I’d defer to it, and then if I thought I know this feels really bad, I’d go, ‘OK, it’s a 50/50 situation, so let’s go with what you say, ‘cause that’s why we got you in.’ There was always that feeling that when we took each of the tracks back to our studio, there were a few little bits here and there that we tied up, so I always knew we could go back and do bits and pieces with them if necessary. It was quite nice not to have the pressure on really.
I really enjoyed watching the acoustic sessions you did for The Sun, and what I thought was important there was that behind all the clever production, you still have a very strong musical basis when you look at the stripped back songs. Is that important to you, that the songs stand up on their own? I think generally the songs are written on an acoustic guitar, or piano, so they have to work in that way. I think it’s interesting though when you’re asked to play those sorts of sessions that some of the songs don’t lend themselves to that, you know, short choppy guitars don’t lend themselves to an acoustic session. The next thing I write is the bass line and I think bass drives a lot of our music, but that’s a hard thing to get across on an acoustic session. Essentially though, if you’ve got a good song there you can almost take it in any direction.
Maybe it’s not your thing to think about the marketing approach to the album, but I remember from the release of your first album, there was a really good teaser campaign on the TV, which isn’t something record labels always do for Indie bands… To be fair to our label, they have been really patient. They could have been like ‘oh, it’s been three years’, or whatever, but they’ve sat back and let us go and work with these guys who, let’s be honest, aren’t cheap, so they’ve always supported us. I think that when it comes to the marketing side, this time round the big factor is going to be money because record labels just don’t have the sort of money that they used to. When the first album came out, a good selling album went double or triple platinum, whereas now if you go platinum, that’s the same as going triple platinum. Now I think they’ve just trying to be a lot cleverer with what they’ve got, so there’s a lot more online marketing and stuff like that. I think often for us, our fan base isn’t one that will listen to Radio 1 or read the NME, so it’s about reaching those people to let them know the album’s coming out. There were these three guys working on a garden and two of them were Hard Fi fans, but all day they had to listen to Heart FM ‘cause it was the boss’ radio, then they probably went home and watched telly, so you think how are they ever gonna know that Hard Fi have got a new album out? I think for all the press and TV coverage in the world though, if one of your friends says, ‘have you heard that new album? It’s great…’, it’s better than anything else.
Rich, you’ve played Norwich before, but do you have any memories of playing here? I do have really good memories actually; we played the gig and then came back and partied afterwards with some very drunk people I seem to remember. I won’t go into details ‘cause it’s a little on the risqué side, but we had a really good time actually, just a really friendly atmosphere.
Emma Garwood
Hard Fi come to the Waterfront on September 21st. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.