Hey Rich, someone just asked me if I was looking forward to the weekend and I was like, ‘I’m living for the weekend...’! I wondered if you’d heard that roughly 12 million times? Hey listen, I might have done yeah, but it’s all money in the bank!
Oh God, it doesn’t cost me to say that, does it? No, but I wish it did!
So Rich, you’re off to V Festival this weekend… Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
You must be hardened festival- goers now; is it a piece of cake to roll your stuff up and go on down there? Well it’s always a little bit different from doing shows in a regular venue, I mean, I’ve got a friend in a band who refuses to play festivals point blank – if it hasn’t got a roof, he’s not doing it. You do go out there with no sound check, nothing sounds like what it’s supposed to sound like and the first couple of songs are done in a seat of your pants-type moment. I remember the first festival we ever did, we’d been playing to like 200 people in various little clubs and it was still really early days, then we got asked to support Green Day at Milton Keynes over two days to over 60,000 people! I mean for us, the first day that we went out there, not knowing what it was like to play a festival at all, it was fucking crazy. Nothing sounded like you expected it to sound and you look out at that massive sea of people and you realise that that’s just the Golden Circle and there’s just another sea of humanity beyond them! It was pretty nuts.
Te songs from Hard Fi’s first two albums charted our repetitive working lives; they were an anthem to clocking on and clocking off, a doff of the cap to us Suburban Knights, and a soundtrack to our abject abandon come the weekend. Four years since their last release is a long time on the musical timeline, but it finds us as it left. Still here. Still being carried along by the notions of time and the working week, and that’s why even after their time away, Hard Fi still have resonance with us, because we were always waiting. Frontman Richie Archer took some time to talk to Outline ahead of their UK tour…
You had an explosive return this year though with your Leftfield Stage slot at Glastonbury – how was that for you? It was brilliant actually because the Leftfield Tent there’s just a little stage and we did it really just to get a few shows under our belt. Billy Bragg curates the stage and we’re friends of his and just wanted to do something with him. We turned up and it was brilliant, the place was packed out; it was a really nice feeling to know that people still gave a shit.
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