It is difficult not to be impressed by Richard Archer or by the story of his band, Hard-Fi: genuinely heart-warming triumphs over adversity that have culminated in them shifting a million copies of their debut album, Stars of CCTV, and selling out five nights in a row at London's cavernous Brixton Academy next week. The latter, as Archer notes, is a feat equalled only by Bob Dylan, the Clash, Massive Attack and the Prodigy. "And," he smiles, "none of those did it after only releasing one album."
Even by the standards of rock frontmen, not a section of society noted for reticence or shy charm, he seems driven to a quite startling degree. He is fond of telling interviewers that he wants a big Mercedes, because a big Mercedes would have impressed his late father. "We're one of the biggest bands in Britain - so fucking what?" he says, in what turns out to be a characteristic outburst. "I want to be the biggest band in the world."
Right now, however, it is most difficult not to be impressed by Archer's ability to maintain at least a degree of rock star cool while feeding a pint of bitter to a large dray horse, in the company of the Lady Mayor of Runnymede and some aged, blazer-sporting members of the Fullers' Fine Ale Club. Displaying an admirable devotion to his hometown of Staines, Archer has interrupted Hard-Fi's promotional duties in Europe and flown from Stockholm to re-open The Swan, a pub where one of his friends works. The Swan, the man from the brewery informs us, has undergone £300,000 worth of refurbishments. "We often have celebrities at openings," he adds, airily. "John Motson. Kate Garraway from GMTV re-opened a pub in Hemel Hempstead for us."
Archer goes about his guest-of-honour duties with great good humour. He pulls a pint in the company of the brewery's chief executive, who has no idea who he is, but whose sons have told him Hard-Fi are "really fabulous". He manages to look riveted during a speech by the Lady Mayor that would have prompted a lesser man to weep for mercy, then gives a speech of his own: "I've been drinking in here since I was 16 - I mean, 18." He poses for photos feeding the dray horse bitter until, in another sad indictment of Britain's binge-drinking culture, the dray horse finishes his pint, bites his handler and Archer is ushered away. "I'd offer to shake your hand," he says as he passes. "But mine's all covered in beer and" - he grimaces -"horse spit."
It is not every day you find a man who has sold a million albums feeding a horse beer for the edification of photographers from Middlesex's local press, but, horse spit notwithstanding, Archer seems remarkably unfazed. Perhaps it is testament to his agreeable nature - he's good with the occasional waspish one-liner ("shaggy hair, shaggy minds", he sniffs of his musical peers), but like a lot of artists who find success after years of failure, he is amiable and amenable to a fault.
Or perhaps he has simply become immune to the shock of finding himself in improbable situations. In Rome recently, Hard-Fi played a vast, televised outdoor gig at which they were greeted as the vanguard of the class struggle, news of Archer's desire to own a big Mercedes clearly having failed to reach the Eternal City. Before their performance, an Italian translation of the lyrics to their Top 20 hit Cash Machine was read to the crowd. "This bloke was explaining to the audience that in England, too, the workers struggle to earn enough money to survive," says the band's manager Warren Clarke. Afterwards, the band were interviewed on live television, where the opinions of guitarist Ross Phillips - whom bassist Kai Stephens tactfully describes as being "a bit more into the geezer thing than politics" - were unexpectedly solicited on the state of world events. "He did all right though," nods Stephens. "He said he thought big countries were throwing their weight around too much. I thought he was just going to shout 'big tits' and laugh or something." Archer's bemusement at being hailed a hero of the workers' revolution was tempered slightly by gratitude that someone had noticed a serious note to his lyrics.
In Britain, Hard-Fi's songs about life in Staines - the drunken Friday nights, the planes overhead on their travels in and out of Heathrow, the grim spectre of nearby Feltham Young Offenders' Institution - have seen them bracketed with the Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs, in rock's prevailing social realist cadre, but Archer is keen to point out that only Hard-Fi have addressed wider political issues in their songs. Middle Eastern Holiday concerns the war in Iraq, Feltham Is Singing Out was inspired by Zahid Mubarek, an inmate murdered by his racist cellmate, while B-side Polish Love Song pleads the case for illegal immigrant workers. "It's a bit frustrating," he says. "Because of Hard to Beat and Living for the Weekend, it's like, 'Oh Hard-Fi bleat on about going out and getting drunk.' Two people die on our album. That's pretty dark, you know what I mean? We're not trying to be political, they're just songs about people like us who just happen to have ended up in that situation."
Two years ago, Hard-Fi were famously in fairly desperate circumstances. Broke after his previous band Contempo had split up, Archer was forced to move back to his parents' house, where his father was dying of cancer (his mother also died suddenly last summer, forcing the band to cancel their Glastonbury appearance). He claims music business insiders tried to dissuade Clarke from managing him. "People told him, don't bother with Archer, he's damaged goods, you're wasting your time." When he asked his publishers for some money to record the new songs he had written, they terminated his contract instead. ("Obviously when it all kicked off, they came back, wanting to sign me again. It was like, you know what? You can fuck off.") The bulk of Stars of CCTV was recorded in a disused cab office for £600. Even Archer's spirited attempt to generate publicity for the band through the Staines Observer came to nothing. "We sent them a press release and a photo," he sighs. "The press release was all like, the hard-hitting sound of the streets and stuff. And the article came out going, 'Richard Archer, former pupil of Thamesmead School ...' Whatever you say, they seem to be most interested in what school you went to."
Today, a reporter from the Staines Observer once again takes a keen interest in what school Archer went to. "Nothing changes in that respect," he observes, but everything else has. In addition to the No 1 album and string of hit singles, Hard-Fi seem to have been adopted by the very bands that inspired them. They have presided over an unlikely mini-reunion of the Specials, performing Ghost Town with Jerry Dammers and Neville Staples at an anti-racism gig. Mick Jones of the Clash is a fan, while Paul Weller has turned up to their rehearsal rooms and jammed a version of A Town Called Malice, an event that Stephens delightedly claims "gives us bragging rights over all of Staines". Archer, meanwhile, was recently outed by one newspaper as Scarlett Johansson's secret lover. As libellous rumours go, it's hard not to think you could do substantially worse, but Archer seems exasperated. "I've never even met her and they said I spent Christmas with her," he frowns. "My family are going, 'Why didn't you mention Scarlett Johansson?' I said, 'Well, I spent Christmas with you, did you notice any Hollywood starlets hanging around the house?' Anyway, a week later, Scarlett Johansson, who's in a relationship, is obviously forced to print a rebuttal saying I don't know who this bloke is. So the paper that made it up in the first place run another article going 'Richard Archer, Hard-Fi fantasist', making out like I've fucking made it all up."
No less bizarre is the effect of Hard-Fi's success on perceptions of their hometown. Rock music has a habit of romanticising its origins, from the thrillingly seedy Manhattan depicted by the Velvet Underground to the Smiths' monochrome and rainswept Manchester, but few bands can claim to have created a romantic myth around source material as resolutely unglamorous as the Middlesex satellite town. Even the solitary concession to rock'n'roll excess in Hard-Fi's history - Stephens's conviction for possession of cocaine - has a distinctly suburban ring to it: he was caught in the Feltham Megabowl, home of the "amazing glow-in-the-dark 10-pin-bowling experience".
"I suppose we have played up to it a little bit," concedes Archer. "People asked us where we're from and we told them about it. Now, all of a sudden, it's got this kind of romanticism about it. You get people going, 'Oh, I've got to go to Cheekees'," he adds, the disbelief mounting in his voice. Cheekees, he explains, is Staines' solitary nightclub, where "the clientele goes from 18 to 50, and on Saturday night you can set your watch by the moment where the DJ segues between Livin' on a Prayer and Come On Eileen". Hard-Fi's onstage video screens show its neon logo when they play Living for the Weekend. "As bad as it is there, you go out in Staines, you end up in Cheekees," nods Phillips. "Last Saturday, out for a beer with me mates, one in the morning, there I was in Cheekees, bottle of lager - because you don't touch the draught, right? - looking at all the horrible birds."
For all his complaints about Staines' small-mindedness, and the shortcomings of Cheekees DJs, Archer freely admits Hard-Fi's success is based less on the critical acclaim of tastemakers than on popular opinion, and that their suburban background is as much a key to their appeal as is his ability to turn out such preposterously catchy radio-friendly hit singles as Cash Machine and Hard to Beat, the latter a ruthlessly effective marriage of guitar rock and Daft Punk-influenced house music: "We did an interview with Popworld, and Simon Amstell asked me, 'Why do you have short hair?' I thought, the main reason is because I don't want to look like every other fucking band who look like they should be on the subs' bench for Millwall in the early 70s. He said, 'You look like an IT technician.' I thought, what the fuck does it matter if I look like an IT technician? IT technicians are the people who are going to buy our fucking records, that's not a term of abuse. They're people just like us, ordinary people who come from towns like us, who know where we're coming from. Those people are generally ignored, they're generally taken for granted, they generally have stuff forced down their throats. There's a lot of people out there who don't like the fact that we've connected with them and jumped all that kind of scene-ster shit, all those bands walking around dressed like they're from a fucking charity shop when you know they've got money. It gets on my tits."
A week later in Manchester, on the first night of their tour, you see what Archer means. In the packed audience, scenesters and charity shop clothes are thin on the ground, but every other section of British society seems to be represented: there are greying fiftysomething couples, kids in tracksuits and, it has to be said, a lot of people who look like IT technicians. They know every word, and Archer, whose Estuary accent seems to get noticeably stronger onstage, works them in a manner that falls just the right side of shameless: "It's a Sunday night!" he yells. "Back to work tomorrow! Crap! But tonight, I wanna see yer go fackin' nuts! Make some fackin' noise!" The ensuing roar is deafening. At Archer's side, Phillips grins broadly, and lifts his can of Stella in salute.
· Hard-Fi play Brixton Academy, London (020-7771 3000), Sunday to Thursday.