‘Once Upon a Time in the West’: the only album where the content is even cornier than the cover
The list of artists who’ve sold out five nights at the Brixton Academy is a real murderer’s row of talent, with one notable exception.
We’re talking Bob Dylan. The Clash. The Prodigy. LCD Soundsystem. The XX. Genuine inspirations who have done something daring and new with their music. The kind of artists you can imagine shifting (roughly speaking) 25,000 tickets for a single run of concerts in the same city, yet wouldn’t simply do two nights at the Wembley Arena and call it a day. Then you get the outlier. A band who are pretty much on that list as a way of showing that sometimes people can get in a massive tizzy over a band really not worth it.
On May 18th, 2006, Hard-Fi completed a five-night stand at Brixton Academy by bringing out The Clash’s Mick Jones for a climactic run-through of Big Audio Dynamite’s ‘E=MC2’. This was the last hurrah for the band’s phenomenally successful debut album, Stars of CCTV, and arguably for the band themselves. It’s fair to say that most people who went to those gigs woke up the next morning, head sore, mouth dry, and their neatly coiffed Blochead hairdo barely salvageable, and wondered why the hell they’d gotten so worked up about the band who gave the world ‘Cash Machine’?
Or perhaps it was a little bit after that. After all, a band like Hard-Fi would know to strike while the iron is hot, and after little more than a year, the band had a new album ready to go. Perhaps the first sign that the emperor had no clothes was when the cover art for their second record, Once Upon a Time in the West, dropped. Kind of. You see, the cover for said album was a solid yellow block with white text saying ‘No Cover Art’. Would you believe it, it was an artistic statement, maaaan.
You see, the band figured that, since they were active in the age of illegal downloading, no one really paid attention to the album artwork anyway. Thus, they decided on this ugly, shallow mess of a record sleeve. One that was probably decided on to make them look like edgy pranksters, kicking back against modern culture. It did not. It made them look like they quite simply didn’t give a shit about the actual music. Weirdly enough, this went against a lot of the band’s whole ethos.
Hard-Fi may have been a harbinger for the rise of landfill indie, but they had a hard-on for themselves as rabble-rousing poets of the people. They may have covered a Big Audio Dynamite song with Mick Jones, but they fancied themselves as a new Clash more than anything else. Now, that kind of ambition is nothing to be ashamed of. The Manic Street Preachers built their whole career on trying to mix Joe Strummer’s political mind with Guns N’ Roses riffs, and it worked out pretty well for them.
A band deserves respect for trying to force comparisons with the greats. However, the other side of that coin is actually having to judge those bands by standards as high as The Clash and the Manics. Dear reader, I’m not going to blow your mind with this, but Hard-Fi do not measure up. If their debut album had a few great singles and some decent filler, Once Upon a Time in the West jettisoned all those great singles in favour of more filler. This time pumped up with unearned pomp and bombast, paid for with a major label chequebook. Not to mention all the money saved by the cover, the savvy little poppets.
This may sound like I’m judging Once Upon a Time in the West by its cover, but I assure you I’m not. The record is actually even worse than its godawful cover. Frontman Richard Archer spent the entire press cycle railing against the record label rushing them, and to be fair to the lad, we can tell that just by a cursory listen to the record. Lead single ‘Suburban Knights’ (Christ) is a warmed-over ‘Hard To Beat’ and ‘Tonight’ asks “what if Hard-Fi suddenly decided they were Coldplay at their sappiest?” Some questions were never meant to be answered.
This would all be a lot easier to stomach if the pugnacious, defiant attitude they’d shown on their debut album hadn’t calcified into smugness. Stars of CCTV wasn’t exactly Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, but Archer and Co did at least come across as lost, panicked and confused as everyone else. We may find that adorable from 2025s vantage point but not everything in the mid-2000s was sweetness and light. Credit where it’s due they were vocalising things that everyone was feeling at the time.
The vague platitudes of ‘I Shall Overcome’ and the cringe-inducing sixth form politics of ‘Television’ are the opposite of that. They portray Archer as what he was at the time. A suddenly very rich rock star with a sense of superiority to match. He was no longer one of us, and yet was still trying desperately hard to convince us of this.
In the end, perhaps the whole ‘No Cover Art’ gambit summed up Once Upon a Time in the West perfectly. A self-impressed, vapid attempt at social commentary that only throws the truth into harsh relief, that this was a band out of ideas, running on borrowed time.
