On the cusp of releasing their third album Guided Tour, hardcore favourites High Vis are riding a justified wave of success right now. In a rare moment on home turf, Graham Sayle is taking stock of the grit and graft it took for five working class lads to get here and why it’s finally paying off…
As of now, Graham Sayle is walking a tightrope without a net to catch him should he fall. Prior to this very month, the 37-year-old singer with the London hardcore-adjacent band High Vis paid the rent and placed food atop the table in the one-bedroom flat in Brockley he shares with his Manhattan-born wife, Marina, with income earned teaching metalwork and woodwork at a local independent school. It was a nice gig, he explains, not least because he was able to make bespoke furniture on the premises as a separate means of generating further income. But as of right now he and his bandmates are flying solo. Rock’n’roll is all they’ve got.
“I’ve never paid myself [from music],” he explains. “None of us paid ourselves anything. But I’ve packed in my job, we all have, so that’s it, I’m fucked. I’m fucked now. Even talking about this is absolutely playing into all our fears.”
This is how it will work. In launching the Good Ship High Vis on the wild seas of the full-time professional music business, the London-based quintet – for which Graham and drummer Edward ‘Ski’ Harper are the creative engine – will pay themselves a modest salary in order to concentrate their attentions on making a racket on what appears to be a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis. As their new album, the thrillingly insistent yet often melodic Guided Tour, their third, hovers into view, the group have decamped to the New World for a 31-date tour of the United States and Canada. Two days prior to his 60-minute interview with Kerrang!, Graham rested his bones at the cheap end of a large aeroplane bound for London following a package tour of Australia that saw High Vis perform to four-figure audiences in venues separated by many hundreds of miles. The band, who have never boarded a tour bus, travelled up to eight hours a day by van.
“Because we’ve just never paid ourselves, we came up with a plan,” the frontman explains. “We set up a business so we could figure out a way to pay ourselves. So we put the band on a business footing in order to devise a way of paying ourselves a basic salary of £2,000 each, every month. But we’re not making money. It’s just enough to live off.”
At a push, it is. While High Vis travel in compact conditions from sea to shining sea in North America, Graham and Marina will see the tenancy agreement on their family home come to an end. As it was, they were paying £1,150 per calendar month in rent, while ponying up a further £4,080 each year in council tax and bills. Chopstick thin he may be, but presumably the singer is at least occasionally required to swap cash for food, too. With his wife also self-employed as a freelance tattooist, the winds of economic reality are a rattling concern.
The point is this. The urgency that marbles the music made by High Vis is informed by the bared-fangs of lived experiences. It’s as real as the final demand on the doormat, or the chill of winter in an under-heated flat. As Graham sings on Mob DLA, one of two lead-off tracks from Guided Tour, ‘I’ve seen enough to know for sure, the DSS [Department of Social Security] back at your door.’
Certainly this is not something known by the 19 per cent of recent BRIT Awards winners who, according to a survey by the Sutton Trust, attended private schools (a percentage that is almost three times higher than the national average). In this context, High Vis represent a refusal by a particular demographic to surrender the cultural landscape to people who have never known the sting of being poor, or at least broke. Even the group’s name, a diminution of high-visibility, is imbued with class consciousness. “It is the unifying clothing item of the working class,” Graham once told the NME. “[But] it also just alienates you completely if you put a high-vis on. Nobody wants to see you or to speak to you unless they want something.”
Whatever the cost, though, with their fluorescent music combining hardcore and punk and rock and dance, High Vis demand to be noticed.
“It’s just much easier for people to do what they want when they have something to fall back on,” Graham says. “That’s the fundamental difference, isn’t it? I guess I didn’t realise that, necessarily, until I came [to London] and lived around here. Working class people have to graft harder, basically. There’s a lot of people who have to work five times as hard as those who are gifted a lot of things. That’s really hard; it can be really discouraging. I don’t want to be glib about it, but how do you dismantle that stuff?”
Good question. Barely half a mile away from where Graham Sayle sits sipping Coca-Cola, in The Bow Bells pub in East London, one will find a site of historical resonance. In 1888, following the successful outcome of a strike led by women and girls forced to work with hazardous materials that cause (among other ailments) phosphorous necrosis of the jaw, employees at the Bryant & May match factory founded the Union of Women Matchmakers, at the time the largest female workers’ collective in the country.
As it should be, today, this significant landmark in industrial relations is memorialised by a mural on what was once the location of the shop floor. The remarkable fact that the residents of the high-end apartments in the gated community that now occupies the site are the only people permitted to behold the artwork on a regular basis says, if not quite everything, then, certainly, rather a lot about life in London.
“It was at art school that I learned about class,” the singer explains. “Growing up, class wasn’t a thing. Everyone was the same, even if they lived in a bigger house than I did. But down in London… it was a completely different thing. It’s difficult, though, because you can’t judge someone because of the privileges they’ve been given. It’s how you deal with those privileges. If you’ve been given everything on a plate and you deny that or try to mask it, then that’s kind of weird. But if you use it to help other people, or to elevate them, then that’s cool.”
Born in the Merseyside coastal town of New Brighton, Graham hopscotched from nearby Liverpool to a place at the always over-subscribed liberal arts college, Goldsmiths, in the New Cross area of South London. Millwall country. With his Wirral accent – kinda Scouse, but a bit less so – he rubbed easels with people who pronounced the word “class” in a markedly different way from himself. That these well-to-do friends lent a hand when he was hard up helped him distinguish between kind-minded individuals and the over-representation of this cohort in public and artistic life. In other words, he learned to distrust the game rather than its players.
But the pressure of money, of capital, continued to crowd him. Six years spent living on the Pepys estate, in nearby Deptford, were both the “the best time of my life” and a period in which local residents were required to fight a campaign against Lewisham council’s plans to gentrify the area by selling off one of half a dozen tower blocks to developers. Working at the aforementioned private school, he was able to continue living in London only after his employers, realising he was good with kids, promoted him from technician to teacher. It may have been a different kind of class but, for once, he was at the front of it.
“I started teaching welding and carpentry,” he says.
Are those kids ever going to need to weld anything?
“Absolutely not,” comes the answer. “But if they need to, they can. And they now know that if you burn yourself, it hurts.”
Of course, Graham had already learned this lesson. While studying at Goldsmiths, he ferried himself from the south-east to the north-west to attend the trial of a best friend who’d been killed after being attacked by three young men who were attempting to steal his bike (the assailants were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment). It was, he says, “a terrible and traumatic time”.
The deaths by suicide of two other close familiars caused further anguish. To contextualise matters, being part of a family in which difficult or stressful conversations were withheld so as not to cause anxiety to an autistic brother fostered an environment in which silent fortitude trumped talking things through. Years later, in song, lines such as, ‘Alone and terrified – if I shout, will you try and hear me?’ from Untethered, one of Guided Tour’s rawest tracks, suggest this taciturnity has been a hard habit to break.
“I think for years I was a closed book,” Graham says. “It’s kind of a running joke that it’s better to keep things bottled up inside you. [In my family] we ended up not talking about anything, even the maddest things. My brother would get into altercations that I’d try and protect him from, but then I wouldn’t tell my mum about them. There’s never been any honesty or release.” In London, though, with the precious commodities of art and music, he learned to alter his ways. “I did Psychodynamic Talking Therapy with a geezer called Adam, who was amazing,” he says. As he would be. If you can’t trust a geezer called Adam with your deepest fears and problems, who can you trust?
“I think, for a long time, I was just this little ball of hatred,” Graham says.
In a band where everyone seems to have had at least three jobs, it was High Vis’ drummer who provided the catalyst for change. Having successfully passed the (on average) 34-month ‘Knowledge of London’ exam – the arduous qualification required for a license to drive a black taxi cab in the English capital – Edward ‘Ski’ Harper decided that in the hours when he wasn’t asking, “Where to, guv?” or else playing the drums, he would train to be a therapist. Whether or not he actually needed formal credentials to realise his friend was in less than good shape, though, remains a moot point.
“I was on my arse,” Graham says. “I didn’t want to do anything anymore. I didn’t want to be here. I was really in a bad place.”
You weren’t suicidal, though, were you?
In an interview in which words ricochet around the bar like bullets at the end of a Chinese gangster movie, for the first time in almost an hour, Graham Sayle succumbs to silence.
“I don’t want to say it,” he offers. “But I was definitely in a dark place.”
And now?
“Starting on with therapy and stuff like that has made me a convert when it comes to opening up, and about the freedom that being honest gives you,” he says. “You kind of become a spokesperson for saying, ‘Why don’t you have a go at this?’ You know, because it’s okay.”
As the East London rain echoes off the pavements like a round of applause, inside The Bow Bells, trade is a bit slow. An older lady nursing a pint asks if anyone has a light. Around the corner from the bar, the clack of balls atop baize signifies action at the pool table. Really, though, the only sign of genuine life is a lad from the Wirral who, because of ADHD, can’t sit still for a moment. For someone who claims to “fucking hate” talking to the press, he’s quite the talker, too, even if keeping him on topic is not always easy. Graham is covered with tattoos; he has a warm and lovely smile. The times when it seems he’s forgotten that he’s being interviewed at all, rather than being asked personal questions by a stranger in an old fashioned boozer, can likely be explained by him being wedded to the idea that being in a band is nothing special.
“I don’t like the idea of people treating me differently ’cause of what I do,” he says.
“I couldn’t take the anxiety and the constant ups and downs from drinking”
Staring into an empty glass, he requests a pint of pop from the bar. Red Coke, full fat. These days, the singer has forsworn alcohol, a decision that invites questions. Asked whether or not matters of addiction lay at its root sees him dancing on coals.
“I don’t drink,” he says. “I don’t drink.”
You seemed to hesitate there…
“Well, I’ve slipped up every now and again, like everyone has,” he explains. “And I’m embarrassed by that. And I’m quite a good drunk – I’m a gold medallist. But I think there’s a certain shame in those kind of avoidant techniques for dealing with life. I don’t know where all this stuff comes from. My mum is Scottish and Scouse and so in my family drinking is a thing. During lockdown, when I was absolutely on my arse, I drank a lot. And it was fine, really, until the point where I couldn’t take the anxiety anymore. I couldn’t take the constant ups and downs. So I’m just trying to do what’s best for myself and my own mental health, really.”
In the post-lockdown world, though, he happens to be doing this in the dysfunctional world of rock’n’roll. And it really is the weirdest place. As Frank Turner once put it: “For the entirety of my adult life, I’ve [worked] in an environment in which alcohol has been much more readily available than food – and if you drink it all, someone will bring you more.”
Then again, perhaps there’s rather a lot to be said for Graham Sayle taking in the sights High Vis are currently enjoying with eyes that aren’t shot with blood. Notwithstanding a preference for “presentism” and understatement, he can hardly have failed to notice that his band are the beneficiaries of the most priceless commodity in the music industry – a buzz. Even without a plan for success of the kind harboured by even the most ostensibly modest musicians, last year the group successfully headlined the spacious Assembly Halls in Islington, a venue at which Jack White recently appeared. After knocking audiences dead in Australia, they’re now doing the same in North America. And as Guided Tour hovers over the horizon, its arrival is keenly anticipated by a fast-growing constituency of attentive admirers.
So, yeah, if you don’t mind, he’ll have a Coca-Cola.
“I’m trying to take the more difficult route, and the more difficult route for me is to not drink,” comes the explanation. “It helps me to really enjoy and to remember the experiences I’m having with the band, and to make the right decisions. You can have a bevvy and be a little bit more unhinged, because the bevvy will help you do that. But I’d rather make coherent decisions. ’Cause I feel fucking mad in my head. When I’m playing shows, I want to be myself and to not cheat.”
“I want to do things that feel uncomfortable to me, the thing that feels scary”
It’s funny, though, how it’s all worked out. When he was a kid, Graham didn’t dream of guitars and amplifiers and microphones and mosh-pits. Instead, he wanted to be a plasterer, which was how his uncle earned a living, because it looked like fun. In a way, it’s like the world turned upside-down. When careers in rock’n’roll fail to prosper, or to materialise at all, its practitioners usually submit to what they all call “proper jobs” (making music, by the way, is a proper job – it’s just not a normal one). Graham Sayle, however, who wanted a “proper job” this week finds himself on the cover of Kerrang!.
“It’s funny,” he says, “but when I was a kid, no-one told me I could be in a band. That never came up. They never said that I couldn’t do that, or do anything, it just wasn’t discussed…
“But everyone’s love language is different, isn’t it? The love language of a Scouser who’s had a hard time is different from other people who’ve perhaps had an easier time of things. In northern working class families, you’re taught to just get on with things and go to work.”
Guided Tour is released October 18 via Dais Records
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