Twenty years ago, Britain was becoming disillusioned with a Labour Prime Minister losing his grip on power. Ordinary people were struggling to make ends meet. War was raging in the Middle East. Sound familiar? Now, as if to complete the feeling that history is repeating itself, Hard-Fi are back.
The alt-rock quartet provided the soundtrack to 2006 when their debut album, Stars of CCTV, topped the UK charts. The band’s socially conscious hits were both a celebration and a damnation of life under a rigged economy, where the only sensible recourse seemed to be going out and sinking seven pints. Their songs were inescapable – featuring everywhere from Fifa video games to Carling commercials.
“You’d watch an episode of EastEnders or something and hear our song in the background,” drummer Steve Kemp remembers. “It was the same with the radio. We were on all the big stations. This sounds really arrogant, but I got so used to it that it would just wash over me.”
Like many bands of the period, Hard-Fi burned brightly but briefly. By the time their second album, Once Upon a Time in the West, came out in 2007, the culture had already shifted. “The whole world had changed,” frontman Richard Archer says. “Suddenly everyone had broadband internet and record sales had fallen off a cliff.”
