Interview #238: Hard-Fi

Having shot to Number 1 with Once Upon A Time In The West - one of the definitive albums of the year, Hard-Fi's blazing new single Can't Get Along (Without You) is out now.

I Like Music caught up with Steve from Hard-Fi to talk about the new album, Richard's action hero antics and the band's forthcoming tour in December.

''I Like Music because.... life is not worth living without it. Everything else could disappear, but music is the one thing that always remains with me throughout my entire life.'' Steve. Hard-Fi

ILM: Can’t Get Along (Without You) is out now. Yet another great song. Can you describe the track’s vibe and how it came about?

Steve: Musically we’ve always been big fans of soul music. It’s something that I totally grew up with, and I know that Rich did as well. One of the things we like about it, the lyrics may be about heartbreak, but the tune itself would always be really uplifting and make you want to shake your ass on the dance floor. And Can’t Get Along sort of morphed into that sort of vibe. It was just something that we’re really into. The Ramones, they were a punk band obviously and they did it with Baby I Love You and we thought it would work for us, to make a soulful track with an uplifting vibe.

ILM: I saw you on Jools Holland this weekend. How is it playing on a show like that alongside loads of other acts? Who did you dig?

Steve: Siouxie Sioux… I’m really into Siouxie and the Banshees. And they showed a clip of her doing Happy Home back in the day and I really like that song. I had a chat with her before hand and it was brilliant. You’re always on that show with legends, it makes me nervous. I don’t like doing TV shows, especially when you’re playing live …it’s weird but it’s cool. Being around in a big circle, all the other bands are watching you so you’ve got to be on top of your game, but I think we did all right.

ILM: On your album, 'Once Upon A Time In The West', which track did you enjoy laying down the most?

Steve: It was a track called I Close My Eyes. We’d just gone through this really difficult period of really analyzing everything and there were a few songs on there that we just had to tweak and tweak to try and get them right, and we just thought right, f*** it, lets just have a couple of days off and we’ll try something else out. And we tried I Close My Eyes and we got the whole thing done in about a day. It just went wack and that was it. So we really enjoyed playing it, the way that we just did it… my first drum take made the final version. So yeah, it was fun.

ILM: So going with the flow…

Steve: Yeah that one just happened, it just came out. It’s one of the real raw tracks on the album and it came about really quickly.

ILM: You write top songs (and are one of my personal favourite bands) with brilliant singalong lyrics, modern classics. Please can you describe the Hard-Fi music making process? Does it tend to be lyrics or melodies first?

Steve: It’s different every time. Sometimes Rich will have a lyrical idea which he’ll then fit other things around or sometimes he’ll have a little melody and just some guitar chords and nothing else; it’s kind of weird how it works. Read our interview with Richard here

And sometimes he’ll have a little idea and we’ll try it in rehearsal and the song will grow from there and other times he’ll sit at home and write the whole thing and record it on samplers and stuff on his computer and record the whole thing, and he’ll bring it to you in like its finished version and say, ‘this is what it’s got to sound like.’ So it really depends.

There’s a song on the album called The King which, we’d practically finished the album and he was still fiddling around on the guitar with it, singing this song and we didn’t have any other stuff. And we started recording it and it grew into this big album finisher. And that was just a couple of ideas on an acoustic guitar and singing. That’s how most things start either on a piano or acoustic guitar or whatever.

ILM: Well, sorry to gush, but there are no fillers, regardless of whether its been quickly written or pain-stakingly spent hours in the studio tweaking away, all your tracks sound bloody good.

Steve: Thanks very much, well, we try. We put our heart and soul into it, you know? We don’t want to make albums with fillers on them. We want people who listen to the album, although I know people don’t tend to listen to albums anymore, because they buy singles, but that’s another story…

But if you do listen to the album, and I hope people do, You don’t want to just know the three songs that came out as singles and the others are just second rate. We never wanted that. We don’t want to take the piss out of people. People who buy our album we want it to be a great album and we want to back it up with good songs, so I’m glad you feel that way, because that’s what we try to put across, that’s what we try to do when we make an album, we try and make it a brilliant album.

ILM: And it comes across live as well because people sing all your songs back to you, even the ones that weren’t singles…

Steve: Yeah, it’s been great. We’re lucky that people who come and see us play live; we try and force them into singing along, there’s no way out of it. It’s good, we try and get everyone involved. Some of the tracks off our first album and now off our second album, for instance, Television is such a really big tune when we play it live now.

Move On Now used to be a massive moment when we used to play it live back on our first album and these were never singles or anything but they become these big live songs and that’s really cool that you can still grow with a live band in that kind of way without just having the singles being the big tunes.

ILM: Suburban Knights, was nominated for Q's Single of the Year award. What’s the best and worst thing about award ceremonies?

Steve: The worst thing about them is just every other band sitting there and you have to do the whole red carpet thing and be photographed by the cameras and then you just sit there…I find the whole experience uncomfortable and Rich hates them even more, Rich absolutely hates award ceremonies. The one good thing about them is, as soon as whatever you’re up for winning, as soon as it’s gone and over with you really relax and just get sh1t faced, which is what always happens.

ILM: OMG! Totally, we were nominated up against NME for Best Music Magazine and we knew they’d win but we were still all anxious and weirded out, but as soon as they read out our category it was such a relief and we did exactly that, got plastered.

Steve: Yeah, the same thing happens without fail every time. Even if you don’t think you’re bothered about it, you get nervous about it. And they say, ‘and the winner is’ and they either say you or someone else and then you breathe a sigh of relief.

ILM: The video won MTV's Best Video Award – tell us about the video, how it came about, any funny on set anecdotes you can share?

Steve: The video for Can’t Get Along was comedy. I only had a cameo part in it, Ross had a cameo part, Kai had a part in it, so we basically stood around, but Rich had to literally run for two days solid, 48 hours. He was up at 5am in the morning and finished at 10 o’clock at night, running away from this big giant German guy all the time. And he kind of morphed into his own kind of action hero, it was hilarious watching him doing in own stunts.

I have to say Richard Archer did do his own stunts in that video, which is hilarious, because he’s the least action star person I’ve ever met in my entire life. Every time he fell over he’d be like ‘ow’, which was quite funny. So that was a laugh for me because I didn’t really do anything except stood around and watched him.

ILM: You’ve got this 11-date UK arena tour for December. What do you look forward to most about playing live?

Steve: We always look forward to playing gigs, it’s brilliant. As a band, playing live, that’s where it’s at. Playing live in front of people is the best experience in the world. That’s what you got into it for.

We’ll make our December tour really special. These are gigs so we want to make them really special. We’re going to introduce some new numbers, we’re going to do some crazy stage production kind of thing. It’s going to be cool. We look forward to that.

ILM: What are your live highlights that stands out from your career thus far?

Steve: We’ve had so many live highlights. Playing Brixton Academy five nights in a row, every night was just absolutely wicked. We played V Festival and we had 57,000 people singing along at the same time to Living For The Weekend, which was a really amazing moment. We always finish on that song and, by the end of the gig we’d turned the whole of the V Festival into it felt like a Brixton Academy, it felt like a really big club gig, so that for me was one of the highlights.

ILM: Wow. Still, regardless of the number of people, hearing your own songs that you’ve written being sung back to you, that must be a real buzz?

Steve: We thrive off that, we need that. We need that interaction. If they sing along to our songs; that’s a really great experience, it really is.

ILM: What’s your advice to young people on following their dream career, not necessarily in the music industry but just doing what they want to do career wise?

Steve: Where we’re from, we had the odds stacked against it to make it as a band or to make it doing anything, but if you stick at it, it can work. Whatever you’re doing just try and be yourself. If you see someone else who’s been successful doing something that you want to do, don’t try and copy them, try and believe in yourself. I think that’s the most important thing. Stick to your guns, believe in yourself and have the balls to stick with it and follow it through, that’s the most important thing.

ILM: What does the future hold for Hard-Fi? Obviously you’ve got this new album and your tour in December, do you think or plan further than that or is it just, once you get to there you’ll think about the next album.

Steve: Last time we finished touring and went ‘ooh’ and then we sat down for about two minutes and then went ‘right let’s make an album then’, so I’ve got a feeling it’ll be the same thing; we’ll do the festivals in the summer and a tour wherever it takes us and then we’ll probably make a third album, kind of a non-stop situation.

ILM: Do you find time to smell the roses and enjoy the journey and reflect?

Steve: It’s weird because you don’t whilst you’re doing it. You don’t realise how much you’re enjoying yourself sometimes. I really try and stop myself in my tracks now and say ‘look what you’ve achieved, look what you’ve just done, look what you’re doing’. I really try and do that, because if you don’t, you’re always focusing on what’s next rather than what’s just happened. When we played our tour in May 2006 and we did the five Brixton Academy gigs I remember at the time I was so amazingly tired and shattered I enjoyed it, but it was really hard work. Now I can look back and think what a fucking laugh. It does take a while for it to sink in before you can look back and really enjoy yourselves.

But it’s all amazing. We’ve had two number one records. We’ve sold over a million records. We’ve achieved so much that you have to remind yourself how fantastic that all is, and if it all finished tomorrow, then I’ve done what I always wanted to do. But hopefully it’s not going to finish tomorrow and we can continue on to bigger and better things.