You can admire Hard-Fi from afar, like they’re dots on a grainy screen – the devastatingly effective simplicity of the artwork, the straightforward identification you feel with the song content and the truths spoken therein, the innate unfussiness of the music, their lack of direct affiliation with any passing fad, that sort of thing. But get closer up and things become less than convincing. We realise that to be so very ordinary is perhaps the point here, triumph of the lad stood next to you in the kebab queue, but that can’t be used as an excuse too. Under scrutiny the songs seem much shallower and not at all as important as continued comparisons (like a sponsored link) to The Clash suppose. And while the songs are generally lean, punchy and efficient, the superficial stuff – the stuff you can’t avoid (you wouldn’t scoff a cake with mouldy icing, would you) – is what grinds and ruins whatever is there at the core.
Their first DVD release only serves to underline these aspects tenfold. The characters we see performing at the Astoria are spirited but devoid of any quality other than mass affiliation with their audience, a desperate lager-fuelled yearning to be part of the same club where they can holler along blindly to the same beat while attempting to prove how similar their experiences were in the Weatherspoons pub down Charing Cross Road before the gig. Rock and indie music normally at least perform under the auspices of individuality even if they can objectively claim nothing of the sort. Not a jot of that here, which might be more truthful and indicative of UK 2006 we suppose, but it makes you wonder what the point is.
The real problem though isn’t necessarily that the band as a whole lack quality, but that they lack leadership. Lead man Richard Archer is on the evidence available a vile, emotionally-inarticulate, lairy nobody trapped in the body of an amateur dramatist drunk on the over-pronunciation of choice vowels. He has the air of someone who was once told that they were a cool motherfucker by somebody who has no idea about these types of things, and then went on to exaggerate and caricature traits that really shouldn’t have been. It’s quite an embarrassing watch from this perspective. But, y’know, the songs are there. It’s filmed partially with the predictable funky CCTV views. All the promos in their numerous forms are stacked up. There’s a bonus CD. It’s value for money if you have the stuff to burn. For us, cash machine says no.