Hard-Fi on new music, hiatus return and ‘great weekend’ for GMF

Indie rock band Hard-Fi will be performing on the Gibraltar Music Festival Summer Sessions stage on September 3, where the four-piece band have returned to touring after a hiatus. Richard Archer, the band’s lead singer, told the Chronicle about their new music, being on the road and their major sucesses over the years.  

Q. How are you looking forward to coming to Gibraltar and performing at the newly reinstated Gibraltar Music Festival for the first time since the pandemic? 

A. We're really looking forward to coming to Gibraltar, it's the first time anyone in the band has been so we're excited to have a look around. In a very difficult world for live music, it's such great news that the GMF is back on, kudos to those behind it to not give up. I'm sure it's going to be a great weekend. 

Q. What can the audience expect from your set?   

A. Energy and some cool tunes! We've got a new record out which we're very proud and excited about, but we also know people want to hear the likes of Hard To Beat and Living For The Weekend, fortunately we still love playing them. 

Q. What was the inspiration for your newly released album Sweating Someone Else's Fever?  

A. The first thing we wanted to do was get back to the feeling we had when making our debut Stars Of CCTV, before record companies and radio pluggers, and just make music that made us happy and we enjoyed the process of creating it. As always, we looked around at the world and wrote about what we saw, how we felt or tried to imagine how someone else might be dealing with life. 

Q. And how was it for the band returning after the hiatus, touring again and releasing music? 

A. It's been (surprisingly) easy and a good laugh, when we first got back in a room together it was probably the most relaxed and fun it had been for a long time! It's also so good to be touring new music but also playing the songs that changed our lives, to both new fans but also familiar faces who've stuck by us over the years. Forever grateful for that. 

Q. Hard-Fi has had some major successes over the year with charting singles and critical acclaim, in the midst of this what have been some of the personal highlights? And challenges?   

A. We've been trying to celebrate even the small wins and achievements, we're just so fortunate to be able to do what we do. I think a personal highlight was going round doing record in stores, seeing the new album on vinyl for the first time and meeting the fans. There's not been many challenges aside from the ones every artist is facing at the moment (which are many but I try not to think about them). Going out on the road having a young family can be hard though. 

Q. How has the band seen indie music transform over the past 20 years? 

A. The whole music scene has changed massively since we released Stars Of CCTV in 2005, from the surge in illegal downloads as everyone got broadband, to the creation of Spotify, the end of music on TV by and large, the move towards more solo artists as they're cheaper and easier to discover on whatever the latest social media channel is, to maybe a slow backlash to the devaluing of music.