It's been 20 years since Hard-Fi were called the next great British band. They tell Christian Kriticos what happened next - and why they're making a comeback
Prime Minister losing his grip on power. Ordinary people were struggling to make ends meet. War was raging in the Middle East. Sound familiar?
Now, as if to complete the feeling that history is repeating itself, Hard-Fi are back. , topped the UK charts. The band’s socially conscious hits were both a celebration and a damnation of life under a rigged economy, where the only sensible recourse seemed to be going out and sinking seven pints. Their songs were inescapable – featuring everywhere from Fifa video games to Carling commercials.or something and hear our song in the background,” drummer Steve Kemp remembers.
“It was the same with the radio. We were on all the big stations. This sounds really arrogant, but I got so used to it that it would just wash over me. ”Once Upon a Time in the West , came out in 2007, the culture had already shifted.
“The whole world had changed,” frontman Richard Archer says. “Suddenly everyone had broadband internet and record sales had fallen off a cliff. ” That second album still topped the charts. But it couldn’t match the success of their million-selling debut.
A third album,, reached the top 10 in 2011. But the momentum was gone.
“We didn’t really ever break up,” Archer says. “We just kind of drifted. ” The subsequent years saw the rockstars return to ordinary life. Bassist Kai Stephens worked as a private detective.
Kemp moved backstage, rigging lights for venues like Wembley Arena and Alexandra Palace.
“Those were places we’d actually played. So it was a really good way to keep myself grounded. ” But this week, after years away from the spotlight, the band are making a comeback with the release of, their first album in 15 years. Over the summer, they will play a string of festival dates, before rounding out the year with headline shows in London, Birmingham and Manchester.
Hard-Fi’s return isn’t the only way the late Noughties are making a comeback In another instance of history repeating itself, the new album has seen the band return to the space where their earliest recordings were captured.
“It looks a bit posher than it did,” Archer says with some understatement. Their original makeshift studio was actually a converted taxicab office in Staines. The band shared those nicotine-tinted walls with rats and ants.
“There was no big record advance, no superstar producer,” Archer reflects. “It was just us. We were always quite proud of that. ” The space has since been kitted out into a proper recording studio.
But its humble beginnings were representative of Hard-Fi’s shoestring early days. Taking advantage of their hometown’s proximity to Heathrow, they broke into the airport to record their first music video, capturing impressive shots of passenger planes coming in to land over Kemp’s drumkit.
“It was a time when you could make something happen differently than you can nowadays,” he remembers. “That video ended up being on MTV.
Then we got played on Radio 1. We did all this stuff which eventually resulted in us getting a record deal. ” The band’s biggest break came when American superstar producer Rick Rubin praised their demos. Before their debut album was even in storesmagazine was hyping them as “the next great British band”.
They were made an international priority by their label and sent on overseas tours and gruelling press circuits.
“I wish I’d stopped, soaked it all up and enjoyed it a bit more,” Archer reflects. “But it was exhausting. We had to be everywhere at once. We’d be touring round America and we’d have one day off.
Then the label would say, ‘Actually, can you fly back across the country and do Jimmy Kimmel? ’ It was like there was always a journey and never a destination. ” But if the stresses outweighed appreciation of the successes, the band themselves were partly to blame.
“We put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure,” Kemp says. “We were always trying really, really hard to be really, really great. And sometimes that can lead to you not enjoying the experience as much. ” Part of that intensity came from them having tasted success before.
Archer’s previous band, Contempo, had signed a record deal. They even scored one of his heroes, Clash guitarist Mick Jones, to produce them.
“We fell in love with him and working with him,” Archer recalls. “But the band didn’t work out. So to have this second chance with Hard-Fi, it was like, ‘We cannot blow this. ’”Archer’s awareness of the fickle nature of the music industry meant he was haunted by imposter syndrome during the peak years with Hard-Fi.
The press didn’t help. Once they cottoned on to the fact that the band shared a hometown with fictional rudeboy Ali G, an obvious elitism emerged. One article described Staines as “a verruca on the sole of the south”. Another reviewer stereotyped the band as “four indie-chav chancers”.
The snobbishness stung.
“If you ever meet someone who’s been to public school, the one thing they seem to have is this bulletproof confidence,” Archer says. “But when you don’t come from that background, you go into that mindset of, ‘Have I just lucked out here? ’ There was always this feeling like you might be found out. ” That self-doubt stayed with Archer during Hard-Fi’s hiatus.
“I had a slight feeling that no one really cared anymore,” he says. It was only when he dusted off his guitar for an acoustic livestream during the Covid lockdown that he realised the strength of affection audiences still held for Hard-Fi’s tunes.
“People were commenting, ‘We had this song at our wedding,’ or, ‘This got me through a really difficult time,’” Archer recalls. “It was humbling. Back in the day, we might have one guy saying, ‘You’re a bunch of wankers. ’ And somehow that would hold more weight than all these other people saying, ‘You have been the soundtrack to my life.
’ I don’t know why we got so caught up with the criticism. The positivity weighs so much more than any negativity. ” The new album seems to reflect a new, more dismissive attitude within the band towards critics and false friends. Lead single “They Ain’t Your Friends” contains a few digs at the music industry .
And the album title comes from a Central American expression meaning to worry about someone else’s problems – something the band are keen not to do any longer.
“We’re just going to take it as it comes,” Kemp says of the band’s next phase, with zen calm. “Our first record sold a million copies. I’m not expecting that kind of success again. If people are willing to press play and they can appreciate it, that’s my hope.
” Archer is equally relaxed about the fate of their new album.
“We can’t dictate what happens with it,” he says. “It could be the best record we’ve made and on the day it comes out John Lennon might reappear and say, ‘Actually, I’m not dead. I’ve been living on a Pacific island and I’ve made a new album. ’ No one would ever hear our record then, you know?
You don’t have any control over that. All you have control over is enjoying the process. ” It’s certainly a different attitude from Hard-Fi’s first time round, when stress and anxiety weighed heavily on the band’s shoulders. So if it’s a case of history repeating itself, at least they’ve learned from history. The rest of the world should take note.
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