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HARD TO BEAT

LX News gets close and personal with Hard-Fi

Carolina Cole

With ‘Living for the Weekend’, ‘Hard To Beat’ and ‘Cash Machine’ essential tracks from their debut album, Stars of CCTV, Hard-Fi have amassed an acclaimed back-catalogue just ready to be plundered for their show as part of Liverpool Music Week. Ahead of the date, we manage to grab some time with the band before the craziness begins.

LX News - How are the live dates shaping up?

Hard-Fi - For this album we did play some small shows in little venues. It was something special for the fans and also a way for us to get things together properly as far as the bigger gigs go. But it was, like, four years since we’d played venues of that size. So it was suddenly back to having the crowd a couple of feet from you and getting heckled by our mates at the front again.

Was it intimidating?

It can be daunting at, say, V Festival when you’re in front of 70,000 people going nuts. But, yeah, it can be weird with people in such close proximity again. One particular date there were a couple of mates of mine that showed-up and they were just staring at me and after a while I was a bit like “fu***ng stop looking at me, won’t ya?”

You specified your tour support as, local band, Rebecca. How come?

We’re in Liverpool so why not give a local band a break? Yeah, and they’re a really good band too.

Is it difficult to keep tabs on new bands with your own schedule?

We’re flat-out constantly and it hard to keep an eye on everything. Yet we do try and oversee supports and the production side of tours as we want each gig to be amazing. We’re sort of control freaks in those respects.

Does being a more established band mean that you can make your demands more easily?

Well when we originally signed and agreed to licence our debut album to a major label we were already in a really good position. We had songs already playing on the radio and we’d made our own video that was getting played on MTV. Every gig we played had pretty much every A&R man in London there trying to sign us. The deal we eventually signed was a really good one: where we are given a lot of freedom. It’s cool. It’s exactly what we wanted.

Are you wary of being moulded into something you never intended to be?

In a way. I mean, some producers have their own sound, don’t they? When you go into some of these studios, you also have the engineer and they’ve got their own idea about what compressors sound better on which drum and whatever. And it’s important for us to finish recording and still have our own sound, you know?

You must have had some external input though. What’s the worst suggestion you’ve ever had?

Oh, about the album artwork. We’d been in the studio for six months – 12 hours a day for six days a week. We’d sweated blood over this album. And then somebody comes along from the label and says ‘yeah, we’ll put a photo of the band on the front because it racks well in the shops and it’s cheap and easy’. And we’re like ‘what?!’ Like we’d put all of this effort into the album and then the sleeve was just going to be a cop-out? After they mentioned that, we did look around and realised that their suggestion is pretty much the way that everybody does their album sleeves but we’ve always been about putting our own spin on everything that we do as a band.

When you’re recording, are you thinking about how the music will translate live?

Yeah, but we always try to do something different for the live show anyway. We try and punk rock it up a bit. It’s boring just going and playing ‘the album’ as it is in the shops. Live is more in your face. We’re ‘avin it. We want people to go away thinking ‘that was fu**in’ ace!’ It’s really disappointing when you go to see a band and they just f*ck it up because they don’t really care.

Are there any bands that have particularly inspired your performances?

Yeah, but mainly from watching their gigs on DVD. So it’s classic bands like the Rolling Stones and The Clash. AC/DC and stuff like that – their live show was out of this world! A band I’ve seen recently is The Hives and they we’re brilliant. They were really, really having it. Cool as fu*k.

Do you ever get sick of playing certain tracks?

Not live - as that’s just a different experience each time. Having the new material has been brilliant for us as we can move the set around a bit more – as well as playing the new songs and watching the reaction to them – which all keeps it interesting for us.

Do you think your success and subsequent experiences has influenced your current album?

I think that the experiences on the second album are particularly personal to Rich. He’s been dealing with a lot of stuff over the past couple of years. Yet I do think that what he writes about are still universal themes that most people can understand. You know – like losing someone, heartbreak and all that kind of stuff.

There was a lot of material about going out on the first album. It felt like it was about a particular generation, I suppose. But then it ends up getting sold in supermarkets and any age group is listening to Hard-Fi. So have you noticed a change in your audience?

I think that we’ve always just wrote pop songs with choruses and hooks. Songs that people can sing along with or jump around to. So that’s not changed. And what we do is for everyone.

Hard-Fi headline Aintree Pavilion on Thursday 6th December as part of Liverpool Music Week. Tickets on sale now: £22.50+BF (Under 14s to be accompanied by an adult), Tel: 0844 888 4401 or go to www.liverpoolmusicweek.co.uk

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