In Interview With: Hard-Fi – Following Their Return Post Hiatus.
After an eight-year hiatus, Hard-Fi are back with two new singles. Frontman Richard Archer discusses lyrics, nostalgia and the changing public relationship to live music with Uta Tsukada-Bright.
Uta: So I wanted to start by talking about lyrics. What’s your process like?
Richard: Well, when we first started out, I would often sit there with a guitar and come up with an interesting sounding riff, and the lyrics would come afterwards. So I then would write the lyrics out, and if the lyrics were better than the melody I would change the melody to fit the lyrics.
But I always try to write stuff that touched on my experiences and what I was thinking about at the time, either something that I’ve been through, or if I’ve read something that moved me, trying to imagine putting myself in the position of that person. Sometimes it’s quite hard to feel like you’ve actually written something with meaning, but also sounds interesting and different.
I know a lot of musicians will sing nonsense words because it sounds good and there’ll often be one word in there that might just flow really nicely, so you think, what does it represent? What am I trying to say here? And you build out from there. There’s a lot to do with the rhythm and the sound of the words as much as what you’re actually trying to say.
Uta: I suppose the words themselves are also like an instrument.
Richard: Yeah. Like on the first album, I was reading Jack Kerouac; the poetry and the words you think just sound cool. And you want to have it in there somehow. Like in ‘Hard to Beat’, ‘straight out of nowhere-ness’ was like something out of that.
Uta: You’ve explored the theme of nostalgia before. For example, in ‘The King’ there’s this longing for something that’s no longer there. As someone who’s just graduated and moved back to their hometown, I’m quite interested in that specific feeling. Of course, a lot of time has passed since you wrote that, but do you still experience something similar?
Richard: Yes and no. Funnily enough, I was chatting to a really old friend and he said, that song ‘The King’ – it actually made me phone up my old friend and we went back to the High Street where we used to hang out when we were like, eighteen. We used to go and hang out at Wimpy and think we were like the big dudes, you know. And you want to go back there. There is that feeling that change is happening and there’s nothing you can do about it. But you wanna try and go back and just live for one little moment in what you imagined was the goal. You know, the sunshine of that past. Whether that was real or not, because a lot of it’s often a fantasy.
It’s a bit different for me now because I’m actually still in Staines. You know, I made a career out of writing about getting out of it and then ended up staying there. I imagine when you finish university, you have some of the most formative experiences in your life there, so it’s a big thing moving on. Certainly in a lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing recently, there is that theme of longing for something, whether it was real or not. But just because now and the future seems a bit frightening you want to wrap yourself up in a warm blanket.
Uta: Yeah, I guess it’s quite easy to go back to the past rather than face what’s in front of you as well. Would you say that your relationship to that feeling has changed as you’ve gotten older and your circumstances have changed?
Richard: I think it’s not so much because of my circumstances, but I’ve just been trying to change my mindset. I’ve been trying to rethink that, because the past is the past. You can’t do anything about it. You can’t change it. You can’t go back and live in it. So it seems to be much healthier and more exciting to be positive about what’s happening now rather than being like, oh my God, what’s coming up? Because that’s all you’ve got, isn’t it? The future is unwritten. You can influence it to some extent, whereas the past is nothing you can do about. I can get stuck in the past and sometimes be quite melancholy about the whole thing. But you’ve gotta try and look forward and move forward. It’s hard, but it might be better.
Uta: In terms of the sound, what would you say has driven the evolution of the band’s sound over the years?
Richard: I mean, there’s been an element of just what sort of technology we’ve been able to access. So the first album, we made ourselves on a laptop and a handful of cheap microphones. In some ways, having those restraints causes you to be more creative. And then suddenly you can do all sorts of other things. I mean, back then with the laptop, it would crash once you had more than ten tracks of stuff on it, whereas now you can do anything. I mean the software you get, it’s amazing. But sometimes you can sit there going, I don’t know what to do because I can do anything, so I think technology always influences the sound of pop music. Whatever the new sound is.
That’s something we’re facing now thinking about what we’re going to do next. It’s like, well, we can do anything, but maybe we need to try and limit what we can do then. Get that feeling of trying to make what we’ve got work. It’s brilliant. I mean, what’s so great about it is that pretty much anyone can make music, if you’ve got an idea. You don’t necessarily have to learn piano for ten years or whatever. You can get the idea out there. But sometimes there’s too much, what sound should we play this melody? Well, we can play on any sound, on any instrument ever conceived and mix it with another one.
Uta: Yeah. I guess like with bedroom pop, which is emerging, all you need is a laptop and you can just make music in your room.
Richard: Yeah, and that’s kind of great, you know. It’s like, who can afford to go into a recording studio and have everyone turn up? You can sit there and at least you can get most of the way there. I guess the only flip side of that is from the perspective of being in bands, there’s less getting in a rehearsal and actually figuring it out, which is sometimes when you get the most exciting things because you make mistakes. “What did you just do there?” Where you get people bouncing off each other rather than a computer bouncing off you.
Uta: I suppose it’s more accessible now, to people who only have an iPhone or something. But it does take away from a bit of the authenticity of live instruments and recording.
Richard: Yeah. I mean, I think for me it’s the human connections. If you’re doing it all in your room. Saying that, I tend to do all my stuff by myself in a room, but then you go to someone else and they might mishear a lyric and say, I thought it meant you were saying this, and you go, well I wasn’t, but that’s better. Because there is something special about people getting together and doing something together. So you start feeling that dynamic of different human beings interacting.
Uta: Thematically, you’ve stayed quite true to previous songs. I’d say ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’ is still quite politically charged, with lyrics like ‘too broke to eat, nowhere to dance’. To me, that mirrors the themes in ‘Living for the Weekend’, but because it’s in today’s social climate it almost conveys the exact opposite feeling?
Richard: The original thought of that tune was that I had the groove which sounds quite happy, and I felt like it needed to have something darker as a counterpoint. And in some ways, a lot of the early Stars of CCTV album was almost quite celebratory. It was like, yeah, we don’t have much money. We are not the hip guys. We are not living in the hip part of town. But we’re gonna do our thing, and we’re gonna try and enjoy life despite what’s going on. Whereas the feeling on ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’ now obviously was just after the last few years of a government that seemed to not give a sh*t about anything, that didn’t seem to have any intention of trying to make people’s lives better. It was really just about carving stuff up for their mates, and when people argued about it, sent the old bill in, and it was an angry and frustrated feeling coming from that. So it wasn’t necessarily deliberately trying to mirror that feeling. It was coming from a different place.
Funnily enough, when Stars of CCTV came out, we were sitting there saying, we’re in a small town. There’s nothing happening. But there actually were clubs, you know; they might not play any of the music you liked and you might end up getting beaten up because you didn’t look like the other guys or whatever, but you could still go there and have a bit of fun, but they’ve all gone now. There’s no nightlife. The culture seems to have gone.
Everyone’s indoors, interacting via their phone, and all that’s shut down because people can’t afford to do it. The rents are too high. So it just felt like something had gone and the feeling was: but don’t argue about it, do as we say and keep consuming. Keep buying stuff. That’s what you need to do.
Uta: How would you say that it’s affected your relationship with your fan base now? Because with buying tickets online for concerts it’s harder now to actually get any, and streaming services like Spotify change how you consume music.
Richard: Yeah, well, certainly we would spend quite a long time programming an album with how we wanted the songs to run, because certain songs would just flow into each other. That’s kind of gone, really. People will just listen to your most popular ones.
I used to love music where I’d close my eyes, and I’d almost imagine being where the music was made. So if you’re listening to like The Smiths, you can imagine you’re in a rainy Manchester or something. And then you create that atmosphere, whereas now it’s a bit more bitty. You’re flicking around from different places.
But yeah, the whole tickets thing. I mean, I don’t know the way out of it. It just doesn’t seem right to me that it feels like you’ve got enough money, you can go. Keep asking people for more and more money, and the merch prices have gone up, the drink prices. At some point artists will go, you know what? I just can’t do it anymore. And what happens then? I understand it, because from an artist’s point of view, it’s probably the only place you might make some money, and it is so expensive to tour now.
It’s kind of f*cked up, really. I don’t know what the solution is but it needs to reset somewhere along the line where everyone can do what they do and an artist can generate some income and make a living out of it. But also the fans can afford to go and not feel like they’re being completely rinsed.
The band’s new EP, Don’t Go Making Plans (2024), is set to be released on the 15th November.
