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‘The lawsuit was my life. Of course I’m writing about it’: Hard Life – formerly Easy Life – on being sued by easyGroup and starting afresh

When the Leicester band were forced to drop their old name after a legal threats from a certain budget airline, it could have been curtains. But frontman Murray Matravers’s trip to Japan has prompted a bold new outlook – and an upbeat new album

It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. Instead of spending years in legal limbo, the group swiftly rebranded to Hard Life (although the financial impact was still huge; they didn’t gig for 18 months, and the complex task of scrubbing references to their former moniker from online artwork and streaming services was a full-time job in itself for a while). An ode to the south-east London neighbourhood with panoramic views, it sees Matravers visualise his own future from the vantage point while grappling with his mental health history – an evergreen subject for the artist.

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