Musical Style
Hard-Fi's musical style is a mix of post-punk, indie and a Clash style of punk rock. Richard has cited their influences as dance and soul music. They also take inspiration from other genres such as ska. On Stars of CCTV, they had a very raw sound, loud guitars, and frequent use of guitar, in contrast to Once Upon a Time in the West, on which there is a lot more orchestration, the use of strings is very apparent, most notably in the song "Watch Me Fall Apart".
Upon starting out, the band felt no up-and-coming bands really connected their lyrics to their own lives. Hard-Fi wanted to change this with their own style.
Hard-Fi's lyrics are based mostly on working class life, the band themselves coming from a self sufficient suburban lifestyle in Staines. Most notable in tracks such as "Suburban Knights" ("Those bills keep dropping through my door") and "Living for the Weekend" ("I've been working all week - I'm tired"), while other songs such as "Tonight", despite still being about suburban life, focus more on ambitions. Some songs are also based on social realism, "Feltham is Singing Out" is inspired by Zahid Mubarek who was sent to the Feltham Young Offenders' Institution and was murdered by his racist cellmate.
Other songs, such as "Better Do Better" and "Move on Now", are centred around the premise of how hard romantic relationships can be. Once Hard-Fi were becoming successful, Richard's mother died and the song "Help Me Please" is about how difficult it was for him having his dreams come true after many unsuccessful bands but realises he has no parents to share the joy with. Similarly, "The King" is about Richard returning to Staines and finding everything completely different, and realising everything of which he knew and loved had disappeared. He describes "Little Angel" as Christina Aguilera having a fight with The Clash in a Northern Soul club.
Read more about this topic: Kai Stephens
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or style:
“Through man, and woman, and sea, and star,
Saw the dance of nature forward far;
Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times,
Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)