Hard-Fi Tickets

Hard-Fi's Richard Archer spoke with Ticketmaster while the band was playing a select number of shows across the U.S., before returning for a larger, multi-city tour in March.

Ticketmaster: You're currently playing a handful of shows across the U.S. Is this your first time playing in the States?
Richard Archer: It's actually our third time. We came to South by Southwest (a music festival in Austin, Texas) last March. We did a couple of shows there. Then we did a two- week tour in June, just to come out and dip our toe in the water really. This is our first tour where we have some radio going on and we're in the press. We're still touring when the album's not out yet. But it's good to be playing. I think we're coming back in March when the album's out. That will be an exciting time. It's exciting now too. We go to this radio station, now to that radio station. We talk to the promoters at gigs, and they're like, "We think you guys are going to be huge." We don't get carried away or anything, but it's nice to hear people say that. It's quite exciting.

TM: Are there any particular cities or venues you've enjoyed playing so far? null
RA: They're all kind of exciting in their own way. We did Detroit. I love a lot of '60s soul music and, more recently, Eminem and the White Stripes. So Detroit was a big thing for me. We went to the Motown Museum and stood in the studio where Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and all these people have recorded amazing records. That was huge. And then in Chicago we went to Chess Records. Now we're off to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco. That will be amazing. And we end up in Seattle as well. We're all Sub Pop fans. That will be a cool moment, if a bit rainy.

TM: How did the band first get together?null
RA: I'll try to do a brief Hard-Fi history. I was in a band called Contempo. We were singed to London Records. It was at the time when U.K. dance music was king. Bands just weren't given any notice. No one really cared about them...Then usual story: record label gets taken over by a bigger one. People get made redundant. People there don't know what to do with you...Our A and R man got made redundant there. We managed to negotiate our way out. We were all broke ...Eventually the band fell apart. That band was my whole life. At the same time, my father died. I found myself back at home with this big hole where everything I knew had been before. The guy who had signed my old band, Warren Clarke, got in touch and said, "Look, I'm fed up with working for labels who are run by people who don't know what they're talking about. I've always loved your music. I signed you at London and I want to sign you at my own label. I haven't got any money, but I've got belief and I've got passion. I want to make this work."...I started writing some new songs, started trying to put a band together. I found a drummer quite easily. The drummer was doing drums for a DJ friend of mine....I wanted someone who could play all these different styles: slow, dub, hip-hop, all this different stuff. And he could do it. So then we started looking for a guitarist. Ads in the paper. And it took us ages. So many people turned up. We wanted people who would sweat blood for this band. Live and die for it. People would turn up who all they'd do was solo in front of the mirror, or they're in five or six bands at once, or they like their jobs too much to actually take a sickie here and there to do gigs or whatever. We were pulling our hair out, thinking, "Are we ever going to find anyone?" So I started looking around my hometown, thinking there probably won't be anyone here but you never know. I remembered that I used to chat with Kai, our bass player, down at the pub... And I put the word out on the street: "Where the hell is he these days?" Eventually he got in touch. I gave him the CD. Two days later he turns up and he plays it perfectly, he sings perfectly, he looks great...We got three down. We try to find a guitarist. My friend says to me, "My brother plays guitar." And I'm like, "Yeah yeah. Just a kid. He must sound terrible." I'm going into this hi-fi store in Staines, where we live, to listen to the mix of my demos on their expensive speakers, and there's this guy there who's like, "Who is this playing guitar?" And I'm like, "It's me. What's the problem?" He's like, "I can play better than that." And I'm like, "Come down then and let's check you out." And he comes down and he's so tight. He's not trying to solo all the time, He's just on it. It turns out he's my mate's brother. A month later we had our first gig.

TM: Many of the songs on Stars of CCTV originally appeared on a self-released, low-budget version of the album in 2004. When you had a chance to re-record the tracks in a professional studio for wider release, you decided to keep the original, lo-fi recordings. What was the thinking behind that?  null
RA: We made the mini-album for about 300 pounds or 500 dollars. And that was basically the cost of rent for our little room. We got everything through rehearsing, because there was nowhere to rehearse where we lived...When we dealt with the major label, they were like, "You can go to Abbey Road and record this with whoever you like." We were like, "This record sounds great. No one else sounds like it." A lot of records are polished to the point of having no humanity or no soul. Whereas this record, it's there. There are mistakes in there. You can hear the planes going over but that makes it sound human. It gives it a sense of time and place. So we ended up keeping the tracks on the mini-album. They're the tracks that you can buy when the (full-length) album comes out in March. We recorded five new tracks in the same studio and mixed them in the same place. Me and the producer, Wolsey White, would drive around in his 20-year-old BMW, 'cause we couldn't afford to go into the studio with the big speakers. It was all about where people listen to the records. They listen to them in the car. They listen to them in their bedroom, in the kitchen, in the club, So that's where we'd mix them. Drive around in the car and we'd go, "We need some more bass." Or maybe, "The vocals are a bit quiet." Then we'd go back in, readjust it, burn another CD and go drive around with it a bit more. And what's out there is the album we made that way.

TM: People in the U.S. are just starting to hear your music. In the U.K., though, you've already become a huge success. Did you expect your debut album to do so well? null
RA: I'll be honest with you. When we made this record, we always believed in it. We always believed that the music could stand up to anything else out there. We made this record in an old 24-hour cab office on a broken down computer that kept crashing and budget equipment. I also knew that we weren't doing what was in at the time. We weren't doing what the hot, new sound was, because we were never about that. We just did the music we loved.  If you try to follow a scene, you're always late. It's always gone by the time you get there. I thought that the music we were making probably wouldn't appeal to the sort of people that were the tastemakers, if you like...I knew it was going to be a real tough journey and it'd take us a long time to even get to the stage of getting the record out. A lot of heartache, frustration, blood, sweat and tears. But we always believed the music was good and could stand up to it. If you could have said to me a year ago that we'd have a #1 record, a top ten single, sold out tours, play in front of 130, 000 people with Green Day at Milton Keynes, be on stage with The Specials...tour the states, tour the U.K., go double-platinum, get Mercury nominations and Brit nominations--that would have seemed like a whole world away, a lifetime away. It was just like dream land. But it's gone that way. Part of that is because we've finally managed to connect with those people that we wrote these songs for. It took a while to get to them. But now we're getting there and it's kind of taking off for us.