Richard Archer of Hard-Fi: 'It’s nice to get in there again and make some noise like it was your first band'

“You want to do the best you can and for everything to be great,” says the 46-year-old. “Having been a while, you’re thinking ‘Are we match fit?’ But it’s not too bad. Compared to what we used to do, it’s quite sedate.”

The signs have certainly been promising at the smattering of shows that the four-piece from Staines, Surrey have already played. “There’s been such a good vibe between us in the band and between us and the audience,” Archer says, adding that he enjoys travelling and meeting people. “I love just seeing different places and hanging out and talking to people. Going to a town and rocking up in a new coffee shop. I love sitting down and watching people.”

Hard-Fi never officially broke up after releasing a greatest hits album in 2014, but their hiatus “possibly” lasted longer than Archer had anticipated. “Everyone experiences it, don’t they, but you don’t quite know where the years went. The start of it was Ross (Phillips), our guitarist, had his first child and said, ‘I want to spend more time at home’, and that was all fair enough. Then Steve (Kemp, the band’s drummer) wanted to go and do a degree. It was just people wanting to do things they hadn’t had a chance to do before. I was quite interested in writing and working with other people and then I had kids, and suddenly you look around and go ‘blimey’. Throw into that Covid, which just stole two years, really – and in the music business it’s still having knock-on effects now – and it was quite surreal where the time went.”

Saying that, he says, he even has difficulty comprehending the fact that it’s 18 years since Hard-Fi’s million-selling first album, Stars of CCTV, was released. “I just can’t imagine that, it just seems ridiculous, but here we are. What was actually quite nice, having had that time, was us in the band realising how lucky we were to have been through what we went through. When we actually got in a room together it was a really great feeling, it was nice and relaxed and fun. We used to worry quite a lot that we’d got this opportunity, we can’t blow it, we’ve got to work hard – obviously for good reason, we wanted to make the best of what we could do, but sometimes you want to be able to stop and look around and enjoy the ride. So it’s nice to get in there again and make some noise like it was your first band with your mates.”

Archer found writing for others “in many ways liberating” but occasionally it was “frustrating” pouring all his energies into a song then being reliant on “the artist working hard and the people looking after them knowing what they’re doing and getting a lucky break”. “There are so many things in the way of that song actually ever being heard,” he says. “At least you know if you’re doing it for yourself you have some input as to what might happen to it, but it was good, I worked with some younger artists and that was really inspiring to me – I think I learnt more off them than they did from me. I still do it occasionally.”

Just before lockdown, Archer had a side project called OffWorld with the actor Christine Cummings. He says he’s “pretty gutted” the album they made didn’t get to see the light of day – “We all thought that it’s good,” he says, explaining that it featured musicians who’d worked with Amy Winehouse and Joe Strummer – but at least it gave him “a taste of being in a band again” and got him thinking about reviving Hard-Fi. “During lockdown, just to see if anyone was interested and maybe cheer a few people up, I did an acoustic session of Stars of CCTV and the response was really nice,” he says. “People were warm and generous with their comments and seemed to like it, and I thought maybe when we come out of the other side of all this we should do a show and see if people want to come along.”

Just as importantly, the socially conscious subject matter in Archer’s songs seems more pertinent than ever after 13 years of Conservative government. “In some ways, looking at how things are and how things were then, I kind of feel what were you moaning about?” he says. “It wasn’t so much complaining, I was just commenting on what I saw around me at the time and the way I was feeling. If you look at stuff we’re dealing with now, this schools thing (the Raac concrete scandal) is disgraceful.

“It’s hard to say. I should be pleased that our music does still resonate but I’m kind of not, it’s bittersweet. We’ve kind of got a zombie government at the moment, they just need to go and we can get started with something else. They’re just killing time and trying to screw thinsg up as much as possible for the next lot, and we’re just sat here like a bunch of idiots, really, being played. It’s shocking.”

These days Archer can’t help but feel a certain nostalgia for the period just after the turn of the Millennium, when they made their commercial breakthrough, topping the UK chart and being nominated for the Mercury Prize and two Brit Awards. “We can’t complain because we were so lucky coming in on that wave of British bands from 2004 to 2006. Originally you had The Libertines and Franz Ferdinand and then Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs, Futureheads, Maximo Park, The Subways – loads of bands all popped up at that time and they were all pretty good and suddenly there was a wave of stuff happening.”

However, it didn’t take too long before downloads, digital piracy and then streaming took hold, and CD sales nosedived “and it’s never gone back”, he says. “Now it’s so expensive to take a band out on the road, you see loads more solo artists and duos, stuff on laptops, that kind of thing. You’re sitting there going ‘Well, there’s no point trying to fit in with it’.

“I remember we were told ‘You’re not going to get on Radio 1 unless you’ve got basically a dance track’,” he adds. “We’d always been influenced by dance music and as it happened we had this track called Fire In The House that had been produced by Stuart Price, Les Rhythm Digitales, but then they would go and put on Red Hot Chili Peppers and it was all nonsense. No-one knew what was going on. The whole thing is mad, you’ve just got to do your thing and hope for the best.”

On this tour fans can look forward to “at least one new tune, maybe two”, Archer promises, alongside “the back catalogue that people haven’t heard for a long time”. Reissues of their three studio albums – two of which have never previously been available on vinyl – are also on his mind. “There’s plenty of time for getting out there with some new tunes...We’re kind of playing it by ear a little bit,” he says.

Hard-Fi play at The Leadmill, Sheffield on October 6 and Leeds Beckett University on October 7. https://www.hardfiofficial.com/