Glastonbury festival: our fans from the suburbs must rock against racism

Love Music Hate Racism invited us here and we had to say yes. It's pretty shocking how few bands are politically aware

Richard Archer of Hard-Fi at this year's Glastonbury festival

We've always felt that we've had unfinished business at Glastonbury. And it is a big thing to come back after what happened last time - it's quite weird, actually; it's very strange. But we're back here on our own terms now. Love Music Hate Racism invited us here and we believe in their cause and wanted to do something. A lot of bands are playing festivals because they get easy money for it. We're not getting paid for this - but some things are more important than money.

For a long time now there's been so much suspicion and misinformation about things like immigration - people are scared, basically, with everything that's been going on. That's exactly the sort of climate that extremism thrives on, and there has been a rise in the right wing. When I was a kid there used to be an NF group and then that whole thing sort of seemed to die down and you never heard anything more about it, but I go around Staines now and you sometime see stuff daubed on walls.

It would be all too easy to look at it as some kind of problem from the 70s - almost like strikes and three-day weeks; an old-fashioned problem - but it's not. Love Music Hate Racism has a relationship with the whole Rock Against Racism movement, which in the 70s had the Clash playing Victoria Park, and that's a great heritage. However, to someone who is now aged 15 to 25, that's probably not that relevant to them, so it's important that you get current bands. I can't go out there and make an eloquent speech to try to convince people to change their minds, but me and my band, we're fairly popular, and people are into us who maybe have never thought about these things before and never thought there was a problem. They might come to see us and maybe go to one of the stalls tonight when we play and get involved - at least it might make them think and take an interest and open their eyes to what is going on around their area.

Music can do that. A lot of contemporary bands around us don't do that and I think that's pretty shocking and shameful. We've never taken ourselves too seriously, and we never take our crowds for granted. It's not cheap to see a show, but so many bands don't care about their crowd. For so long there's been a feeling that music is for a small clique of hipsters in the city, but we made it cool and ok to come from the suburbs. Lots of people looked down their noses at us and were quite scornful of what we did, but they just had to shut up because they realised at the end of the day that they're just a small minority. There's nothing wrong with saying, 'You know what, it's Friday night, the end of the week, I want to go out and get pissed'. All those people came to our shows and bought our records - those people who were just like us. If it weren't for them we wouldn't be where we are now.

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