Hard-Fi pull into Norwich's Waterfront venue on Tuesday 1 November for a show which sold out almost as soon as it was announced. Their debut album, Stars Of CCTV, has gone gold - not bad for a record which was originally laid down for £300 in an old taxi office on an industrial estate in the band's home town of Staines. The tiny studio, dubbed Cherry Lips, could now be redundant but the band say they are determined to remain in the thrall of the gritty realism which has sculpted their sound. The four-piece - singer Richard Archer, drummer Steve Kemp, guitarist Ross Phillips and bassist Kai Stephens - notched up a top 10 hit with their foot-stomping anthem Hard To Beat, while latest single Living For The Weekend has proved another ear-catching hit. Hard-Fi's Lancashire-born beat master put down his drum sticks for a moment to chat to Zoe Applegate about how the band are enjoying their success, why they intend to stay grounded and how he finds long-time friend and front man Richard an inspiration. You're fresh from the Mercury awards, which was the band's first awards ceremony. What was that like for the band? Well, I can't speak for the rest of the band but me and Rich, the singer, were actually quite bored. You have all these preconceptions about what award ceremonies might be like but we got there and there was the whole paparazzi bit which was a bit full on but the actual awards itself... it was a bit, 'Oh, this is quite dull'. Hopefully, the moment when you heard you were nominated was better. We heard that we'd been nominated while we were in America. We were just about to play a gig in the Mercury Lounge in New York. Then someone said, 'Oh yeah, you've been nominated for a Mercury'. And we thought, 'Do you win a prize for playing in the Mercury Lounge?' We were quite confused and hung over at the time and jet-lagged so it was very strange. We found out we'd been nominated ages ago. It was nice to be at the awards, nice to be nominated especially as we made our album for £300 or something... bands like Coldplay and stuff like that. How did you meet Richard? I met Rich because... there's a guy who does remixes for us called Wrong Tom, he's our DJ as well and he's going to come on tour with us. I was playing for him doing breaks and stuff on the drums and Rich knew him and he was looking for someone to be a drummer in his new band who could play other stuff - who could play breaks, hip-hop, soul, jazz and all of the rest it rather than just being a normal rock drummer. He found me and that was about five years ago and we ended up becoming good friends. How did you end up in Staines? I moved down when I was about 16. I came down to London to go to Brunel University College, which was Isleworth, Twickenham kind of way. I just ended up living around there. I went to music college and ended up living round that way and pushed out further west and further west and ended up in Staines. You only pressed up your mini-album last year, so what do you think it is about Hard-Fi which has pulled people in? It's almost as though people were waiting for a band like us to come along. We just talk about everyday things and look like everyday blokes. I think people can sometimes really relate to that. Since Radiohead did OK Computer and stuff like that there are a lot of bands who have tried to capture that same kind of sound and those same kind of lyrics but without having any of the content and it just ends up sounding like sixth form poetry. They're not really saying anything - it just sounds really emotional for no particular reason. And we're just talking about things which matter to people. Much has been said about the different influences on the band, but do you think living in the suburbs has led to your sound not being constrained as opposed to perhaps living in London and being more fashion led? Absolutely. That's definitely the reason for it because we were just doing our own thing in Staines because that's all there was to do.  | | Hard-Fi take a moment |
Staines is close enough to London to get in there and still be influenced by stuff but it's just far enough away so that it can't be influencing you in your daily life. Being from Staines, we weren't part of any particular scene. There were all kinds of scenes in London... the whole New Cross scene and the art rock kind of bit but we just weren't able to be completely influenced by that because no-one round our way listened to that stuff, looked like it, dressed like it. Being from where we're from has definitely influenced our sound. What sort of music did you listen to growing up? I always listened to soul music when I was a kid because my dad used to be a soul drummer back in the late '60s, early '70s. That was the kind of background I was from, but then we're all into so many different things. I'm into hip-hop and I try to bring some of that kind of stuff into the band. We all bring our different things but there is a core of influences which we're all really interested in. Hard To Beat was one of this summer's anthems. How aware were you that it was something extra special when you were recording it? We didn't think it was something extra special, we just thought, 'This is a good record'. Once we recorded it we all thought, 'Wait a minute' and had a little dance around - this is all right! We didn't really think it would be a big hit of the summer because I don't think you can think like that. If you're too over-confident or you think, 'This is definitely going to do really well,' chances are it probably wouldn't. We just thought, 'This is a good track - let's see what happens,' and we've been made up with the response. You had loads of labels chasing you so why did you choose to sign to Atlantic? We'd already got our independent deal with Necessary Records. A guy, Warren Clarke - who signed Rich before in his old band - he'd then set up his own independent label... which we put our mini-album out on. There was no money or anything like that involved, but some people at Atlantic had been into the music for quite a while. There's a guy called Hugo Bedford, who's our A & R man, and he just really understood it. The label were really understanding. They let us record the rest of the album back in Cherry Lips instead of going into Abbey Road or something to finish it off. They let us carry on doing things our way because they understood where we were coming from. I think that understanding was really important for us. After getting signed you had the choice to go and record that album anywhere so why was it so important to go back to Cherry Lips? I think because we'd recorded the mini-album there and it was our sound. We'd done it our way and we wanted to carry on doing it our way because we didn't want to lose that energy - that vibe that we had on the mini-album. Cherry Lips was our thing, our sound. We wanted the album to sound coherent. We didn't want half of it [the mini-album] to be in there and half of it to be by some posh knob-twiddler up at Abbey Road. It had to sound like Hard-Fi, it had to sound like us and that's the only way we knew how. Will you be heading back there for the second album then? We're not sure. We're having a little look at Cherry Lips mark two because we've got some new kit and we might have outgrown it. Back when we were in Cherry Lips we didn't have anything hardly and the place is small. You've outgrown it. Certainly not creatively but perhaps just physically. The plan is to record the second album ourselves again with the help of Wolsey White, who did such a great job on the first one. Who knows what will happen but at the moment that is the idea. We're having a little nosey around for other little Cherry Lips kind of places but perhaps we've outgrown it, I don't know. Has there been any one moment where you've thought, 'We've really made it now'? I don't think I'm the kind of person who will ever go, 'This is it. We've really made it now,' even if we're on the front of every magazine and the album's gone platinum. I'll still go, 'We could have done that better' or 'We should be there more,' because that's what I'm like. We're a very ambitious band. If you sit back and rest on your laurels and go, 'Ooh, we've made it now and we're doing really well,' that's when you'll start to get sloppy and we can't afford to do that. There is a lot of hype surrounding the band, so how do you think you'll stay grounded? I think we stay grounded from the fact that we made the album ourselves. Everything we've got we've worked for - no-one did us any favours. No-one's put anything in our laps. All the success we've created it ourselves and you have to sit back and be grounded about it because you have to remember where you were beforehand. It's no good getting carried away with stuff and ending up being some kind of pretentious idiot because that's not what we're about. The content of the band's songs is very much about the everyday, for you to get too far away from that you would lose what the band is about. Absolutely. It's not saying that the next album is going to be Hard-Fi on a beach... in Miami or Hard-Fi in a... posh members' bar or whatever. It will still be gritty, talking about what we did before because we've got a 20-year backlog of all that stuff creatively. Staying grounded is important to us - don't get me wrong, we want the finer things in life. We're quite looking forward to having some money, we're quite looking forward to having nicer cars, better homes and being able to afford clothes. [He laughs] But we'll still be us. Despite all the good things this year, with Richard's mother dying it's given you perspective, hasn't it? Yeah, Richard's been very unlucky, obviously, because just at the time where the single was going into the top 10 that was the time when he lost his mum. That was a hard moment but it just shows what kind of character he is, the way he's been able to come back from it: bounce back, carry on, keep working and be able to enjoy the fact... enjoy the success that we're having. Richard is one of the bravest guys I know, I think. Your UK tour has sold out and you've already announced another tour for December - what does it mean to you that your tour has sold out across the country? It means everything to us, absolutely everything to us. At the end of the day, we can win a Mercury award or be nominated for a Brit award or whatever and be on the front cover of the NME and be the toast of the town in the media but it doesn't mean anything until you sell records and sell out shows. It's the public liking us which means something to us. Hard-Fi do transcend a lot of boundaries. People across the country can relate to it. People aren't from London or Manchester or Glasgow or these big cultural cities - a lot of people are from shit towns outside. It means everything to us that people from across the country are coming to our shows and want to see us live. That's another reason why we can't get too big for our boots - because these people have paid money to see us and we've got to put on the best show possible every night of our lives. | 
