HEAVY DISCIPLINE

Hard-Fi- Hard To Beat (Necessary Records)
www.hard-fi.com
June 2005
by dizzzee
 
Hard-Fi?  Four white kids from Staines get their diy label (Necessary Records) signed á lá Two Tone to Atlantic.  Become NME favs through the ‘shit I’m broke and my girlfriends preggers’ chavtoric dubpop of their debut ep ‘Cash Machine’.  And next single ‘Tied Up Too Tight’ scrapes its collective fingers down the top 40 chart skiffleboard.

A lot has been made about their Staines connections, so I was gonna avoid the Ali-G isms, but when their chorus is 'straight out of nowhereness, like a fist', and when their last single's first lines were 'where I come from I just don't come from, get me out of here',  I haven't really got a lot of choice.  From Bruce Springsteen (NJ) to Nirvana (Seattle) to Bob Marley (Babylon) the Manics (Wales) and even Eminem (8 mile), a longingness to escape from some provincial shithole to somewhere better (and if you don't come from a shithole, pretending you are Jack Kerouac regardless) runs throughout modern music like its some kind of Brighton cock rock.  When you're a pissed off kid with one last chance to make it real I suppose you tighten up, and it becomes do or die time.  It's either joining your dad in the local Factory, your mates in the local prison, or Elvis in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame.  Which doesn't seem like much of a choice to me.  

Anyway, this is a fucking unique song for 2005.  Everybody knows if you wanna picture England circa 1980, just listen to the specials’ ‘Ghost Town’.  Hard To Beat is nowhere near that, but for illustrating a ratwheel life of bored demonized kids in hoodies hanging round graffitied bus stops trying not to infringe their ASBOs, of signing in signing out every day just to blow your shit wage every friday nite on the town dancing to shit music when all you really wanna do is cut off the DJs fingers but you can’t coz you’re too Stella-ed and that pretty girl's looking at you, and of being stuck in some hellhole shawdow town when your eyes crave the bright lights but you fear they’ll blind, Hard To Beat is a brilliantly simple and effective stab at all our pathetic lives.  This will send Hard-Fi them in the direction where they crave to go, SOMEWHERE BETTER.  Which is where you lot wanna go too, but your too scared to figure out anything for yourselves.

The beautiful irony of Hard To Beat is that it’ll become a soundtrack to our petty lives, not a remedy.  The third verse wouldn’t sound out of place in Ibiza let alone your local underage dancehall, and I’m sure some European DJ’ll make a fortune through a club mix.  I suppose this makes them some kind of pseudo-Faustian band, having sold their music for a better life.  But this is all irrelevant.   

If you want an indiebeat soundtrack to remind you how shit your life is, and how stimulating it could be, get Hard To Beat.  If you wanna stay chained by your own ignorance, go and lose your money and your mind down the clubnite.  And who knows, you’ll probably even hear this.

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