Hard Fi’s rise was of the cliched, meteoric variety. From playing pubs to supporting Green Day and appearing live on Channel 4 on the same day, a few months in 2005 changed their lives forever. Frontman Richard Archer, no longer ‘Living For The Weekend’, is currently building up to revisiting the ‘Stars of CCTV’ record around its 20 years anniversary, and remembers a particularly wild experience.
“The album cost £300 to make. We’d been playing to 200 people in the back of pubs when we got the Green Day gig [in Milton Keynes Bowl], and suddenly we were in front of 60,000 people. It was terrifying, a completely different experience. There were no walls, and we were used to the sound bouncing off a back wall. But so many people have come up to us since and talked about that show, it was such a big deal to us.”
“We were backstage going ‘they’ve got three tour buses, and one’s got a smart car that comes out of the back’, it was incredible. But then we were booked to do T4 on the Beach. The only way we could do both – and you had to keep Channel 4 sweet – was to blow the entire fee on a helicopter. So we had these tiny helicopters, and got choppered in. People thought it was Green Day coming in. Good times.”
Things would explode and then fade from there, and eventually Archer focused mainly on his alternative project, Offworld. Until recently.
“When lockdown started, the singer with Offworld, Krysten Cummings, got stuck here for a month longer than planned, so we did some bits and pieces together. It was daunting at first, but good fun, it’s not like we had anything else to do. The reaction really surprised me, there was a lot of love. People did care. So we explored Hard Fi, too, and decided to take that further.”
“On the new EP, there’s a line ‘too broke to eat, nowhere to dance’. When Hard Fi started, there were clubs where I live, and you could have a good night out with the wind behind you. Those places are all gone now. They’re flats. Those were cultural assets, people came together. The Stars of CCTV album was bleak, but it feels bleaker now, so perhaps those songs still resonate. It’s sad, but there we are.”
“We came back in 2022 and did the London Forum. Off the back of that, we decided to do some shows around the country, but there was still that thing of ‘what are we doing here’? We felt we couldn’t just keep going out playing the same songs, we wanted something different and new. I had never stopped writing, so it made sense to do an EP approaching the 20 year anniversary. It let us be freer, instead of just sitting there looking at an old album. We had some fun with it.”
The result was ‘Don’t Go Making Plans’, which is very much designed for the live realm. “Getting back in the room with the Hard Fi boys with none of the feeling that we can’t screw up, which is what we had back in the day… that dynamic… it’s nice. We should have just enjoyed the ride. I had been in previous bands that were signed and nothing happened. It’s a lot about timing, and we really had that pressure, it felt like we wouldn’t have another chance.”
“Now we don’t need this, but we’re doing it because it feels good, just to be in a room with your mates again. My best memories of it all are before we were signed and just doing it ourselves.”
