Hard-Fi are quite simply one of the biggest Indie Rock bands around, having shifted millions of albums around the world and written a string of extremely catchy singles. Lead singer and songwriter Richard Archer tells Power On about his love of Roland gear both on tour and in his home writing set-up…

The Hard-Fi story takes the spirit of DIY success to new levels and could also include many rags to riches clichés along the way. Lead singer Richard Archer’s previous band Contempo fell apart and, without any cash, he worked on new material on his own for a while before meeting the band mates who would eventually make up Hard-Fi. They scraped together enough in the way of gear and put it together in a studio (ok, an old taxi office) to record their debut album Stars Of CCTV which became a worldwide hit. The budget for the recording came in at just £600 and the album has so far sold a million and a half copies…

“All the equipment was stuff we got together,” says Archer looking back at the recording sessions. We had a few mics, some people upstairs (from the band’s studio) do some video production and they lent us stuff, and we managed to beg, borrow and steal bits of kit. The £600 was simply the rent for three months!"

And now the album’s done about a million and a half copies around the world, adds the band’s drummer Steve Kemp. Not bad for £600”.

The album spawned singles like Cash Machine and the ubiquitous Living For The Weekend so the pressure was on for a follow-up recording. The band was apparently offered Abbey Road to record it in, but decided to expand the taxi office studio instead…

“It was not like we really turned down Abbey Road,” corrects Archer. I was always more of a Stones fan than a Beatles fan anyway, so when we went to do some mixing at Olympic Studios, (where a lot of Stones albums were recorded), I was more excited. But you can see why a lot of people love Abbey Road, as it’s big, there’s a nice vibe and a great sound. But we thought we had something particular to us (with our own studio) and we didn’t want to lose that so eventually we decided to try and get the record company to pay to upgrade it. It’s always there and we can always fall back on it if we want to make records.”

But before the band finally decided to stay where they recorded their debut, there was one other choice to consider…

“We actually found that Michael Faraday’s old house was on the market up the road and thought ‘Well, he invented electricity, so almost invented rock n roll!’” says Richard. “We thought about getting it for a studio but it was terraced so we thought we’d be slung out by the neighbours. We came back here to get some gear and saw that the place next door was going so we thought we’d just expand this and get a live room and make it our HQ.”

The resulting follow-up album Once Upon A Time In The West hit number 1 in the UK and became a huge word-wide hit. The band became just as well-known for their live performances, topping the bill at many a festivals and becoming household names across the country. However, one fact that is not so well known is Archer’s love and knowledge of music technology. He has a home studio that boasts a list of Roland equipment as long as your arm and the band’s recordings are littered with Roland sounds and dance influences, despite their Indie Rock tag…

“I’ve always had a lot of Roland stuff,” says Archer. “I have a JX-10, a Juno 106, and I’ve also just got the V-Synth XT. I saw it when it first came out and heard some demos and was quite excited about what it could do, and we managed to get one after we finished the second album. I love the way you can just put sounds in and mess about. I’m really excited about it. You have eras of different synthesiser technology with analogue, digital modelling and there have been classics like the D-50 and DX. There have also been stages of synths that do different things and this (the XT) is a totally different way of doing things and not just a rehash of something else or a take on something else. It seems to be a genuinely new way of doing it.”

It is, to the untrained ear, a bit surprising to hear that Richard is such a fan of these synths, as the music his band makes is quite rocky, but Richard’s own background is quite electronic and if you listen closely…

“An SH-101 is all over both albums,” he reveals. “The intro to Living For The Weekend has a kind of filtered bassline from a JX-10 and filtered on the JV-2080 on the internal filter it has. When I was a kid, the first stuff I was into was the Human League and New Order doing that kind of Electro thing and tracks like Blue Monday. That sort of thing is there (in the music) but I was always trying to find a kind of balance. You have to be careful with a band to do a dance crossover thing as you end up falling down the middle and not being anything. You make the track and you want it to be remixed, like the original demo for Hard To Beat was a house track. We get remixed a lot and we use a cutting up approach to produce tracks anyway so we always have that remix/dance approach in mind.”

So how does Richard use his set-up when writing and recording?
“Usually it starts with me sitting around playing guitar or keyboard,” he replies. “I’ll come up with some harmonies, a chord sequence and a melody. The harmony or melody will come first or I’ll have a riff or abassline. Cash Machine, for example, was a bassline. Hard To Beat though was a riff – that kind of ‘da-nah, da-nah, da-nah’ riff. It had about three choruses. It was almost like I started on the guitar and then went to the keyboard but I’m not a great guitar player –  I don’t know my augmented sixths(!) for example – so I played it on the keyboard, played it a different way and got a different harmony. So that chorus was something I’d never have come to on a guitar.”

“I’ll get a demo together,” he continues. “On the first record some were just finished. My first band had just gone down the toilet so I finished them as I didn’t have anything better to do! Living For The Weekend, Cash Machine and Hard To Beat, they were all finished. I just came in and said to the guys: ‘Play that’ and that was it bar Wolsey (White, producer) making them sound better (with the mixing/mastering). Most songs, you sit at home on your own doing them and it’s quite nice to come in here and get some feedback. You soon know if there’s something wrong with a song or if it’s really good on the reaction you get. We’ll then come in and jam through it and get a rough version, other ideas might come in we might get a better bassline, different drums. It’s all quite fluid.”

Hard-Fi’s live shows have garnered lots of praise, and their reputation has grown to the stage where they are now a major force on the circuit. Indeed, as we’re interviewing them they’re preparing for a US trip and for the (now recent) Rock Against Racism gig.  Another Roland keyboard, a Fantom, is a large component of their live set-up as Richard reveals…

“We wanted to introduce a keyboard and player to the set-up and were looking for something that could play the samples, trigger sounds and effects. We were looking around and speaking to people and this (Fantom) just came up. We looked at it and the V-Synth XT and now use the Fantom as the live keyboard and the V-Synth for the studio. The Fantom has been great out live. The stock sounds are good. If you need a piano sound there’s a good one, or if you need the sound of an organ, there’s a good one, a 303 style bass, there’s a good one…”

“A lot of the time you might not want to use the string sound from the album because the sounds you use for the recording do not work live. You put them through a PA and they don’t sound right, they don’t cut through. But with the Fantom it has great on-board sounds so we can use its sounds and also sample some of the key sounds from the record into it which do work live. There’s a track called We Need Love which has a particular organ sound in it so we use that and you can get it all done from this one box, which is great.”

Hard-Fi are just finishing their new studio expansion (still at the converted taxi office) and are preparing to write and record their third album. So after their £600 debut to its multi-platinum success and number one follow-up, they must have a few words of advice, especially on that DIY ethos…

“I think it’s a good route,” says Archer. “Ultimately you have control and you have no one telling you what to do, but you make your own mistakes and have to face them. Every track we did on the first record we were learning and picking up experience, so learn as much as you can from everything you do.”

Richard Archer reveals how he got into songwriting and production…
“When I was a kid my cousin was into Bowie and Prince and she always had musical instruments and I was always going round there ‘cos I thought she was cool with her crazy hair and stuff. My brother was into guitar and because he was my older brother I started that too but I was also into The Human League and New Order so I decided synths were going to be my thing, so I bought myself a Bontempi organ – I was only eight”

“My parents decided that a synthesiser would be too expensive so they got a piano instead which was always out of tune, but my Nan taught me as she’d played years ago. Then my first synthesiser was this terrible mono synth with a drum synth pad that went ‘boooooom’ and that was it. But I was always into the technology side of it and I didn’t have the confidence to think I was a songwriter or get up on stage, so thought I’d get to work in a studio.”

“I was also lucky in school with the music teacher who set up this music department and said, ‘I don’t care what sort of music you are into but if you are into it I will support you’. He was great and let you take home gear if you wanted as well. I messed up my A-Levels but one of the few places that would take me was Kingston University and they were also one of the few places doing a music technology course. It was good although I probably learned most from reading magazines and just trying stuff out.”

“Where does the name Hard-Fi come from?”
“At one stage we were going to be called Stars Of CCTV,” he says, “but people thought that was a bit of a mouthful so we went for Hard-Fi after hearing Lee Scratch Perry describing that as the sound of his studio and his limited gear. Those limitations were enough for him to go on to greater things so it sounded perfect for us. But even with Hard-Fi we’re forever saying ‘No, not Hard Fly, not Hi Fi…!”