Hard-Fi: 'I’m quite excited about new music, what does it sound like?'


Yet here they are, a year on, promoting new music and a fresh round of dates in cities such as Sheffield and Leeds.
“We didn’t even have someone representing us until fairly recently, so it’s turned out quite nice. It felt like it did a little bit in the early days,” says the 47-year-old singer and songwriter.
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Hide AdThe difference, he feels, is that where 20 years ago they “put a lot of pressure” on themselves after experiencing setbacks with other bands and not wanting to “mess up” a golden opportunity when it presented itself in 2004, now they take a more relaxed view.
“It is obviously easier when you’ve got a major record label behind the thing – that’s very different now, we have to cut our cloth accordingly,” he says, “but I’m getting excited about touring these dates, and even though we’ve been thinking about the (20th) anniversary of Stars of CCTV (their double-platinum debut album), I’m quite excited about new music, what does it sound like?”
The initial answer comes in the form of a six-track EP, featuring four new songs and two remixes and titled with a degree of irony, Don’t Go Making Plans. Now, Archer is toying with what a future Hard-Fi album might sound like.
“When we made the first record we just made it and then you get people (at the label) going, ‘The next one needs to be a development, but also it needs to be the same – and by the way, Radio 1 are saying they’re only going to play bands with a dance influence’. And then of course, they only go on to play Arctic Monkeys and Red Hot Chili Peppers. So while all this is going on I’m trying to make some music that I like and actually that sounds like a lot more fun than people trying to pressure you into second guessing.”
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Hide AdThe EP’s title track is said to have been inspired by the former Conservative government’s 2022 Law and Order Act. “It wasn’t just that,” Archer says. “It seemed to me that we had a government that didn’t seem to care about trying to make ordinary people’s lives better. It just seemed to be ‘let’s keep spinning the whole culture war thing’, trying to keep everyone fighting, not coming up with solutions and stuff starts coming out about wealthy donors getting kickbacks.


“You imagine if this was France we’d probably be on fire by now, but nothing seemed to be happening about it. It was brought in because of the climate protesters and people complain about their tactics, but you know these people are doing this for reasons that they sincerely believe are dire and instead of trying to engage with that, it’s like, let’s just throw them in jail, let’s clamp down on being able to protest. As soon as anyone complains about what’s going on, it’s like, ‘OK, let’s change the law to make it harder to do that’. It seemed like they were out of control.
“For a while we had a Labour government here and it felt like the Conservatives, who were so used to being in power, were so shocked by this that they went further the other way. In America, they had a black president and the right wing couldn’t compute and had this massive overreaction to it. That kind of made me feel frustrated, angry but also powerless.
“That particular tune, I had the groove and it felt quite up and I wanted to counteract it with something and it just all came out in that first verse and the chorus. The second verse I wrote later – the main point of that one is ‘too broke to eat, nowhere to dance’. Stars of CCTV is 20 years old next year and when I was making it there were two nightclubs in Staines. I was complaining about there not being anything going on, I was frustrated, but there was more culture then than there is now.
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Hide Ad“The nightclubs have closed, all these small venues have gone and flats built in their place which have generally been bought by someone miles away as a property investment. There are families that desperately need housing and they’re building those one-bedroom apartments. So that was that feeling. Still everyday there are reports that there’s nowhere to play, the grassroots of music are really struggling and the only people making money are the massive artists.”
Archer says he is trying to be optimistic about the new Labour government. “Give it time,” he says. But he’s aware that the Blair government was “so afraid of being hammered by the right-wing press...that they were spinning all these plates to try to keep everyone happy and I don’t think you get as much done as you could do then you could see very quickly with the Conservatives come in and implement austerity measures straight away”.
“I think that they need to be braver and they need to stop pandering to a group of people who are never going to give them a break, who are never going to get off their back,” he says. “We’ve seen the stuff about the free tickets but you’ve only got to go and look what Boris Johnson was up to. Did they ever mention that? Of course they didn’t, the hypocrisy is off the scale. But I’m saying you’ve got to be positive.”
The Don’t Go Making Plans EP is out on November 15. Hard-Fi play at The Leadmill, Sheffield on November 26 and Stylus, Leeds on November 29. https://bnds.us/v7b2d4