The Staines Massive Strikes Back

It can be a very risky move starting an interview with, ‘How are you?’, especially when you’re talking to the notoriously mouthy Richard Archer.

“Alright,” he answers, “although signing 1,000 CDs is wearing a bit thin. I’ve done about ten of them or 20, maybe. See, I sign ‘em Richie Archer but Kai the bass player just does Kai, which means that he has like 30% of the work that I do. I think he’s cheating a little bit…”
“Well, don’t let me stop you,” I interrupt, “You can scribble while you chat.”
“I’m gonna try,” he says, “but what if I mess one up? Imagine that one was yours, you’d be gutted!”
Already, I can tell that this is a very different Archer than the one who once told Hot Press that he wanted to be as big as Eminem. Somewhere between Stars Of CCTV and relative obscurity, the snarling singer decided to keep his lofty ambitions to himself.
“We had people come down to the studio to listen to our second album,” he begins, “people from all the big TV stations and radio stations in the UK, all saying, ‘You’re gonna be bigger than U2! This is going to be huge!’ All that sort of stuff was just crazy. We’ve learned to switch off all that chatter that comes in from outside our world. It can sometimes lead you down the garden path.”
Having shifted 1.2 million copies of their critically-adored debut, if anyone was going to fall victim to second album syndrome, it was Hard-Fi.
“There’s always that feeling that it could all come tumbling down. Any minute there could be a tap on the shoulder and a, ‘Who let you fellas in? Who are these pretenders?’ We were always beating ourselves up about everything we did. We were touring for two years pretty much solid and while that was going on I lost my mother, and I came out of that and all of a sudden it was like, ‘We need to make another album and it needs to be bigger than the last one!’ The pressure and the expectation was huge. Making that second album wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience.
‘I mean, it might have had something to do with the fact that we were eating ready meals every day,” he adds, “our salt intake was through the roof and blood pressure was atmospheric, but it was really tough!”
Now sitting happily on their third record, the genre-hopping Killer Sounds, Hard-Fi are no longer buying into declarations that they are the voice of a generation.
“It’s great that people feel that way,” Archer shrugs, “and it’s great that they think what we have to say is valid, but that’s such a responsibility! All those guys who heard The Clash and The Jam in your music, they want you to be that band for them and you end up being torn in two.”
When asked about inspiration for the new record, Archer cites César López, a Brazilian mathematician and artist who crafts guitars out of guns.
“It’s like an AK-47 with a fretboard,” he laughs, “but it doesn’t look as cool as you think it’s going to look, unfortunately! I think I will probably try to get one, although trying to get it through customs would be a nightmare! It’s a symbolic thing, there’s one up on the wall in the United Nations, and it’s that feeling of turning something negative and destructive into something positive and creative.
‘I mean, sometimes pressure and adversity brings things out, but we were under pressure and adversity when we did the first album. The pressure of not having money, of feeling like no one really gave a shit about a band from Staines, but that almost inspired us to try even harder. It gave us the positive attitude of, ‘Right, we’ve got to do something about it!’ and I think you’ve got to find the thing that gives you that push. It’s all about positivity.”
Not so fast, there, Polly Sunshine. “I tell you,” he whines, as we say our goodbyes, “I’ve been signing these CDs for a few hours now and the pile doesn’t seem to have gone down at all!”
Easy come, easy go, eh?

Killer Sounds is out now on Atlantic Records.For archive interviews, see hotpress.com.