Richard Archer has been a Bees fan since he was eight, dragged into Griffin Park by a cousin who worked pitchside, scarf round his neck before he really knew what he was signing up for. These days he’s still doing the same walk – train to Kew Bridge, under the tunnel, into the ground, now with his own kids in tow. He’s also the frontman of Hard-Fi, whose 2005 breakthrough happened to land at the same time as one of Brentford’s own promotion pushes, which is presumably why the club ended up with an unofficial nod to the band stitched into a kit a few years later.
Beesotted caught up with Archer twice at the Steam Packet where Billy “The Bee” Grant, Dave “Laney” Lane and Martin “The Dutchman” Holland let this second conversation go wherever it wanted, and it went a long way: Oasis, grief, Paul Weller’s tea round, a helicopter built for checking pylons, and a football single that got signed in a flat with Damien Hirst in the room. Here are five moments worth pulling out.
Oasis, Not Blur – And Billy’s Secret Knebworth DJ Set
Archer grew up on The Doors and The Stones before Nirvana properly hooked him, and then Oasis’s first album did something else entirely – Liam haircut, every twelve-inch bought, loyalty that outlasted most people’s. He still rates “There’s No Other Way” by Blur decades on, even while admitting the actual chart-battle singles from both bands were probably the weakest either camp released. Billy, it turns out, has a Knebworth story of his own that even Archer hadn’t heard before – through a mutual contact, Billy ended up as the VIP tent DJ for both nights of the original 1996 Oasis shows, playing soul, R&B and hip-hop to a crowd that had turned up expecting indie deep cuts. The NME’s write-up of the weekend singled him out for it, more or less marking the VIP DJ down for not being indie enough. Neither man’s taste has shifted an inch since.
The Year Everything Happened At Once
Hard-Fi’s breakthrough wasn’t gradual. A mini-album that, in his words, “couldn’t get arrested” in the UK somehow found its way to Rick Rubin in the States, who called it the best record he’d heard all year – and within weeks the band nobody in London wanted was fielding calls from every label in the country. What followed was the best part of two years without a day off: back-to-back promo trips, a Glastonbury slot bumped up the bill at the last minute, and, in the middle of it all, his mother’s death. He thinks he took two weeks away from the treadmill, though by his own admission he genuinely can’t remember. Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters told him at a festival, bluntly, to get himself a therapist there and then. Archer didn’t, and he’s fairly open that he’s still working through the cost of parking that grief somewhere and simply carrying on.
When Paul Weller Put The Kettle On
Being told Hard-Fi sounded like The Clash and The Specials was meant as an insult by parts of the indie press at the time, which still baffles Richard Archer given who actually turned up to play with them. Weller showed up to rehearsals ahead of a gig and the first thing he did, before picking up a guitar, was ask who wanted tea and made a cuppa for the whole room. Mick Jones joined them on the Friday night of their five-date, sold-out run at Brixton Academy in 2006 – a residency only The Clash and Massive Attack had pulled off before them, with Billy Bragg turning up as the nightly special guest throughout. The band changed key on Jones mid-song without telling him; he found his way back in regardless, added the backing vocals, and Archer still talks about the moment as one that sent a shiver down the spine of everyone on that stage.
A Million People In Rome, Sixty-Five Thousand At Milton Keynes
Ask a touring musician about scale and the numbers make football crowds look modest. Hard-Fi played Rome’s Primo Maggio festival to what Archer reckons was close to a million people on a revolving stage he’s not convinced they handled particularly well; two nights supporting Green Day at Milton Keynes, 65,000 a night, needed a battered ex-pylon-inspection helicopter to get the band back from a same-day Channel 4 beach shoot in time. Tokyo and Berlin come up as his favourite cities to actually play – Berlin especially surprised him, somewhere he’d assumed held no interest for him until the food, the beer and the river beaches won him over completely.
Why AI Will Never Write Vindaloo
Archer had a crack at AI music generation for his daughter’s birthday – a song about her cat, knocked out in two minutes, something he describes as ‘genuinely decent’. His verdict: fun, slightly unsettling, and permanently limited, because the software can only ever recombine what has already been popular rather than invent anything new. That view carried straight into a table debate about World Cup songs, where Archer’s own pick was New Order’s “World In Motion,” a track he reckons still gets a room dancing decades on; Laney went to bat for Scotland’s “We’re On The March With Ali’s Army”; and Billy’s personal favourite was Shakira’s “Waka Waka,” tied to watching South Africa 2010 from the stands with fans who played it after every single match. Billy isn’t short of football-single credentials himself, either – back in his A&R days, he was the one who signed “Vindaloo” by Fat Les, after a chance Notting Hill flat meeting arranged through Keith Allen, where he was mistakenly introduced to a fellow guest as “Damien” – actually Damien Hirst – before winning Allen over completely by turning out to support Brentford rather than the Fulham he’d assumed. “I don’t think AI could come up with Vindaloo,” Archer said, and it’s hard to argue with him.
“Sweating Someone Else’s Fever” is out now, Hard-Fi play Brixton Academy in December, and the full two-part conversation – West Ham, Manchester City, Brentford’s near-miss at Europe and everything else that didn’t make the cut here – is up now on the Pride of West London podcast.
