Such is the world view of Hard-Fi's singer/songwriter, Richard Archer, who does pen plenty of anthems about escaping the suburbs or other urban plights, but they're pulled out of the rock & roll rebel handbook, as he inadvertently hits the clichés hard on Once Upon a Time in the West (which perhaps shouldn't be a surprise given the title), so desperate to tie himself to his idols (meaning the Clash, particularly Joe Strummer) that he forgets to create an identity of his own. Far from running from this pigeonholing, Hard-Fi opens up their second album, Once Upon a Time in the West, with "Suburban Knights," a pun that reveals the depth of their cleverness just as the second song, "I Shall Overcome," reveals the depth of their politics, as the title of the '60s protest standard "We Shall Overcome" is turned upside down and inward, making it a plea for personal release. A common thread that ran throughout the wild praise for Hard-Fi's Mercury Prize-nominated 2006 debut, Stars of CCTV, is that the Staines quartet were warriors against the stultifying sameness of suburbia.
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