Hard-Fi take the hard road

Sat 26th Aug, 2006 in Features

A couple of weeks ago, English band Hard-Fi played to one of their largest crowds yet. After achieving unprecedented success on the back of just one album, the Staines four-piece found themselves in front of 47,000 people at England’s V Festival. As well as taking hit album Stars of CCTV to the masses, they shared the bill with some of the biggest names in rock.

Despite these dizzy heights, drummer Steve Kemp is well aware that these are still very much early stages. He’s obviously very pleased about the band’s recent achievements but at the same time he makes it clear that the band aren’t getting ahead of themselves yet.

“When we were on tour recently we sold out five Brixton Academies, which we were really pleased about,” he says.

“But when you’re playing a festival you can’t take the same tack. They’re not specifically there to see you — they’re there to see loads of different people and they’re stood around in the rain.

“There were 47,000 people watching us at V. That’s a lot of people. They just want to have a good time so you have to change a little bit and approach it from a different area. We want to tell people they’re there to have a good time, even if you’re on at 3 in the afternoon on a rainy English autumn day.”

But not everyone loved their set. The Dears singer Murray Lightburn blasted the band’s cover of The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army as ‘horrible’. When I mention Lightburn’s comments, Kemp doesn’t seem to care at all.

“If he didn’t like it, I think 46,999 other people did,” he says.

“We don’t really play it live anymore but at festivals and stuff like that, where not everyone’s got our album or has never seen us play before, it’s something that you can throw in that everyone will know the words to and everyone will enjoy.”

Graduating to British rock’s A-list has put the band in good company. V had Hard-Fi billed on the same stage as Radiohead, Beck and Faithless while their five-night stand at the Brixton Academy is a feat only equalled by The Clash, Bob Dylan, Massive Attack and The Prodigy. When I ask what’s it’s like to be alongside so many big names, Kemp says the band has been learning from the experience.

“These legendary bands have been there and done it and we’re always watching and you’re always learning, I don’t think that changes, ever,” he says.

“When you think you know it all, you need to get a new job because there’s always something to learn, young or old.

With the pressure of expectation upon them, Hard-Fi are looking forward to capping off a massive 18-month tour when they visit Australia in September and October.

“There’s only so much you can do in two years,” he says.

“There are always going to be people that buy your albums but for people to really know it you have to tour and you have to tour a lot. There are still a lot of places we haven’t been yet.

“We’ve reached the end to the campaign of this first album so it’ll be the last time we’re playing with just this album’s material.

“We don’t wanna go out with a whimper, we wanna go out with a bang… so we’re gonna go [to Australia] and kick arse.”

And as the Stars of CCTV tour draws to a close, the band are already planning their next album.

“There are over 30 songs all written, all ready to go and that sort of thing but what we haven’t done is sat down and played it as a band — we’ve haven’t actually sat down and gone through the nuts and bolts of it. Mostly things are written in demo form. The vocals and the melodies and everything else are there but we just need to take it to the next level and then record it. It’s all totally ready to go, it’s just a matter of time.”

Though vocalist Richard Archer is the face of the band and is at the centre of the band’s songwriting process, Kemp explains that the songs are very much full-band projects.

“Rich tends to come up with an idea, sometimes an entire song,” he says.

“After that we’ll take it into a rehearsal studio and then it can take on a whole different life of its own when we’re playing with it. Then we’ll demo it up properly and it can change again and then we’ll start playing it in the studio and then we’ll record it and it can change again. It can go through a lot of changes depending on what mood we’re in until the final song comes out.”

And as the band start work on the album, Kemp says the political tone of parts of Stars of CCTV will be back but it’s not the only thing on their minds.

“Richard [finds] it hard to write about nothing — there has to be some kind of meaning there and if you just write about everyday life, everyday life is intrinsically linked to politics at the end of the day,” he says.

“On our first album we just wrote about how we were living at the time and what was going on and it ended up talking about politics. We’re not setting out to make a record really U2-esque, like a really political album or whatever, but [politics] does have its place in music. We’re not about saying do this, do that, vote for this person, vote for that person — we just tell people what we know and our point of view and we’re not going to ram anything down anyone’s throat. Maybe there’ll be a bit of a theme there, it’s hard to say. We’ve got songs about politics on our first album and then we’ve got songs about girls — it’ll probably be the same mixture of both.”

Despite defining their indie-meets-dub-meets-punk sound on Stars of CCTV, Kemp says the follow-up is likely to consolidate the band’s place in the music scene rather than reinventing their sound.

“You always want to move forward, you have to step forward,” he points out.

“It’s your second album â€” you have to make a statement, you have to come out and make an album obviously that’s not exactly the same as the first album. You can’t think ‘right, we’ll stick to what we know’, so you want to step out a little bit. But then you don’t want to be pretentious or up your own arse and make an album that’s going to alienate your fanbase, say ‘look how clever we are’ and turn into Pink Floyd overnight. We want to express ourselves but we just want toa make a great album. I think it will move forward slightly but I think in essence it will sound like the Hard-Fi that everyone knows.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’ve had one album and that’s all so far. We want to do this for a long time. I want to be in Hard-Fi for as long as I can. As long as it’s still interesting and as long as it’s still cool and as long as we’re still making good music and hopefully that can be a really long time.”

Frontier Touring and Faster Louder present the Hard-Fi Australian Tour
September 27: The Palace, Melbourne
September 29:  The Enmore Theatre, Sydney
September 30: The Arena, Brisbane
October 2: Metropolis, Fremantle

For more info on Hard-Fi check out the Full Coverage page here