The fear of success

“Things always seem to go into a bit of a frenzy when we finish records,” groans Zero 7’s Sam Hardaker. “I dunno if we’re particularly badly organised, but it does get very chaotic.”

Such is the complaint of many a band reaching the end of their promo tether.
“We’ve been doing a lot of press, which is cool,” he continues, “but it also has the effect of making me feel a bit, sort of, how can I put it? [Pauses] Like a whore. It’s just shamelessly trying to big yourself up all the time. We’re about to start touring, so we sort of said we’d had enough now, we wanted to just concentrate on rehearsing for the gigs and the stuff that feels really important to us, rather than the stuff that feels like it’s really important to them.”
Hmmm. Not the words of a man too happy with his lot. Having enjoyed much success on the back of their startling 2001 Mercury-nominated debut Simple Things, the North London duo emerged from their year-long studio hibernation with When It Falls – a collection of dark, emotive lo fi tunes in a similar vein to its predecessor. Nevertheless, reaction has been, as they say, mixed.
“It’s a different time, it’s a different record,” dismisses Hardaker. “It has been getting some really terrible reviews, though. It seems to have really pissed some people off, like, rubbed them up the wrong way somehow. That whole area of music that we got adopted into after the first record was so shamelessly used in so much mainstream advertising as the background music to the hard sell of all these nice lifestyle programmes and goods and stuff. It’s pissed me off. It’s not something we ever foresaw happening or had any desire to be involved in.
“Obviously it conspired to us selling a lot more records,” he reminds himself, “but I think now that it’s become ugly and distasteful to some people. And many of them seem to think that we’ve stuck to that same formula; that we’ve thought ‘Shit, we did well out of that one, we’d better not mess with it too much’. But that couldn’t really be further from the truth at all.”
A mainstream direction combined with internal restructuring at their major label Warners has piled the stress on the indie-at-heart Zero 7, with the pressure of delivering a new level of commercial success seeing them run for the relative safety and comfort of the tour bus (the band kick off their succession of UK, European and US dates in the Olympia this week).
“I have no idea where we fit into the mainstream,” says Hardaker. “I don’t know who buys our records. It’s bizarre. Things are bigger and the setting has changed and sometimes it feels like we are getting this push, like, well not a pop band as such, but it is this mainstream thing. I don’t know if it suits us, really. It feels awkward.
“We struggle with it personally because of the involvement with the press. All that stuff grows and you’re required to do more, and it’s not something we’ve ever been into or felt comfortable doing. It’s this constant conflict that goes on almost on a daily basis. And it gets tiring and you start to think, ‘Fucking hell, I just feel like I’m doing business’.
“You just have to keep reminding yourself what you’re doing,” he affirms, “why you want to be doing it and what you enjoy out of it. Simple as that.”

Zero 7’s When It Falls is out now on Ultimate Dilemma