High Vis: ‘Nothing good comes from comfort’
Third album ‘Guided Tour’ sees the rising London band mix their hardcore roots with dance and shoegaze, with Graham Sayle your refreshingly frank narrator
“Hey, it’s you!” the owner of the Ethiopian café in Dalston’s Gillett Square exclaims as he sees Graham Sayle approaching. He recognises the heavily tattooed scouser from a week prior, when Sayle was 50 yards or so away from the café, conducting pure chaos as the frontman of High Vis, the UK’s most exciting rock band.
In early September, the band held the first edition of new event Society Exists in the east London square. A free and all-ages gathering, it saw the hardcore band play alongside the politically-minded rap of Jeshi, the trip-hop-flavoured pop of Delilah Holiday, jungle-influenced rap from south London’s Jawnino and more. It all came together under the umbrella laid out in the event’s tagline: “Sonically diverse – culturally aligned.”
Gillett Square is most commonly known as the location for pop-up raves, and rarely sees the kind of cultural and sonic cocktail that Society Exists threw up. “I’ve seen music here before, but not like that,” the café owner, who has been holding court in the square for decades, beams to Sayle, offering drinks on the house and a confirmation of his status as High Vis’ biggest new fan.
“That’s made my day, that has,” Sayle smiles as he takes a seat to talk to Rolling Stone UK, about Society Exists but also his band’s excellent and varied third album, Guided Tour. Emerging from the ashes of countless hardcore bands and with all members growing up in the scene, High Vis’ first two albums – 2019’s No Sense No Feeling and 2022’s Blending – saw them keep that aesthetic and ethos while sonically sitting closer to Madchester and shoegaze.
While No Sense No Feeling gained them plaudits within their scene, it was Blending that took High Vis beyond it. The band played Glastonbury’s Woodsies stage, headlined London’s Islington Assembly Hall and headed out on worldwide tours. Its single ‘Trauma Bonds’, one of the best songs of 2022, was and is the epitome of their appeal – on it, Sayle sings frankly and beautifully about the scars that are left after losing people, over a jangly guitar line that could have been penned by Johnny Marr. At every single High Vis show across the globe – whether to a crowd of hardcore day ones or casual newbies at mainstream festivals – it became an instant anthem and a life raft for those grieving together.
Beginning to write Guided Tour as soon as Blending was released, Sayle describes a deliberate attempt to block out the band’s increased success and exposure while carving out their next steps. It’s hard, though, when the release of the new album coincides with he and his bandmates – drummer Edward “Ski” Harper, bassist Jack Muncaster, and guitarists Martin Macnamara and Rob Hammaren – quitting their day jobs.
Sayle had worked in a south London private school teaching metalwork and woodworking, also using the studio at the school to create beautiful bespoke furniture. “It’s a difficult balance,” he says of the five-piece’s new reality. “I’m so reliant on the product of our creativity being successful now… but fuck it, we can always sign on again!”
Across the band’s ever-busier touring schedule over the last 18 months, Sayle would regularly go on the road with the band before landing on a Sunday night and rocking up at school the next morning. “It was mad, but now I’ve had the past week off and I don’t know what the fuck to do with myself” he says. “I’d had the grounding responsibility of going to school, where no-one gives a fuck who you are.” In truth, Sayle had fielded a few questions of, ‘Sir, are you in a band?!’ but before that, “I was just some dickhead who was asking people to cut wood”.
Lyrically, Guided Tour tracks a time of upheaval in Sayle’s life. He went through a breakup and then met someone new to whom he is now married. “I needed to throw myself into it,” he says of chronicling this upheaval on the album. He considers it largely an angry album, somewhat in opposition to a post-therapy clarity that he projected around Blending. Not tempted to portray a clean and tidy narrative of linear progress, Guided Tour instead sees Sayle block out the noise and write honestly and openly.
“You’re never just one thing,” he says. “Things change and situations change. You can be really comfortable and happy, but if you have big changes in your life, you can’t help but feel differently about stuff. Nothing stays the same, and obviously I’m striving to be more at peace with stuff, and don’t want to be constantly in a fight or flight state, but over the past couple of years it’s felt a little bit more tense and not grounded. I just don’t feel very tethered.”
“We’re not comfortable as a band,” he adds, seeing this state as both a struggle and somewhat of a necessity. “Nothing good comes from comfort. When you put yourself in uncomfortable positions, that’s where change or growth happens. I’m just trying not to regress.”
This outlook is laid out on Guided Tour’s best and most sonically adventurous song, ‘Mind’s a Lie’. The track sees High Vis joined by south London singer and DJ Ell Murphy, whose spliced vocals sit atop an intro of thudding kick drum and bubbling synth bass. When Sayle’s signature growl enters as the song ramps up, it’s a simply thrilling concoction of sounds that feels like the manifesto at large of High Vis made flesh.
“No-one has rejected it as being too weird,” Sayle says. “You can write things off and say, ‘I don’t like electronic music’ or ‘I don’t like jazz’ because of your preconceived ideas of what those things are, but when people just accept it as whatever you’re doing, it’s really nice.”
The way High Vis write music is more akin to bedroom producers than a rock band, with Harper and Macnamara working on demos on a laptop away from their singer’s eyes and ears. When they kick into a ferocious gear – like on the huge ‘Drop Me Out’ or twitchy closing track ‘Gone Forever’ – they have the power and bite of a band thrashing it out together in the room, but their way of working makes the songs on Guided Tour brilliantly layered and intricate.
As well as a guided tour of Sayle’s brain, the album also hits back at what the frontman calls a “fetishisation” of others’ lives. “I think about London and the wide array of people I’ve met and have lived alongside for a long time,” he says. “Especially in creative industries, people love to fetishise their idea of what certain people’s lives are like, but never with any regard for them, or by listening to their experiences.”
On Guided Tour, and with events like Society Exists, High Vis are filling the gaps and telling a messier and truer story in all its complexity. They’re also opening doors for others and bringing people together who would otherwise be kept apart through antiquated ideas. As he sings on the album’s first song and title track: “It’s just a visit to you / Some of us don’t get to choose.”