High Vis: “Hardcore was always a place to escape”

High Vis know the world is fucked. But by melding hardcore with flourishes of post-punk and anthemic Britpop, and righteous rage with unflinching social commentary, they are giving more reasons than most to put up a fight

On stage, High Vis frontman Graham Sayle can’t shut the fuck up. He’s famous for going off between songs, delivering impassioned addresses about social disenfranchisement or hardcore as a refuge from it – themes that the band’s lyrics also revolve around. Talk for Hours is born out of late nights spent spilling your soul to relative strangers; Trauma Bonds is a sobering call for healthier coping mechanisms, written in the aftermath of a friend’s suicide; and the recently released Mob DLA rails against the hostile treatment of people living with disabilities by the very services that should be providing support. The fervour of Sayle’s commentary tends to come back at him tenfold, creating an atmosphere that’s half punk show, half union protest.

At the same time, “spokesperson” is a role that Sayle flatly rejects. He’s often approached as a talking head for mammoth issues like the mental health crisis and class warfare in Britain, because they’re such prominent themes in High Vis’ music. But there’s a difference between a mic on stage – which at a hardcore show is really the people’s mic – and the media mic, which inherently puts him on a soapbox.

“When people talk to you as if things are important, it feels really fucking heavy. I feel like I’m responsible for enough anyway, but to be responsible for…” Sayle starts, before changing tack. “Hardcore was always a place to escape. You weren’t treated as a celebrity. It’s a nice horizontal democracy. Obviously some people will try to capitalise on it, but the people I look up to are just doing their thing and making it feel like there’s a space where you can do the same.”

Formed in London in 2016, High Vis combine the energy of hardcore with flourishes of redbrick post-punk, rolling psychedelia and baggy grooves. The quintet have a Madchester swagger about them, though its members hail from everywhere – Drummer Edward ‘Ski’ Harper is an ex-cabbie from the East End, bassist Jack Muncaster is from Lancashire, and guitarists Martin Macnamara and Rob Hammeren are Irish and Surrey-born respectively. Sayle, for his part, was born and raised in a seaside town in Merseyside. What they have in common, for the most part, is background and sensibility. A history of survival by the skin of their teeth.

Partly as a result, High Vis offer something beyond the youthful rage that hardcore, and punk more broadly, is associated with. Their 2019 debut No Sense No Feeling packs its fair share of punches, full of haunted atmospherics and hard-nosed lyrics about economic collapse and emotional wreckage. 2022’s Blending took a more poetic approach; its murky foundations punctured by Britpop melodies and euphoric choruses. Their third album, Guided Tour, takes all that and pushes it to breaking point. Their hardcore chug has become a jackhammer, their melodic touchstones more refined and uncompromising. Instrumental interlude Farringdon directly embraces their love of new wave bands like Echo and the Bunnymen and A Flock of Seagulls, while the thumping bass and chopped-up female vocal sample on Mind’s a Lie wear Ski’s love of house, garage and pirate radio on their sleeve. From start to finish, Sayle’s delivery is as urgent as the state of affairs around him. “Is it easy to live/ With nothing to lose?” he spits on the pile-driving single Drop Me Out.

The stakes are high for Guided Tour. Not just in the subject matter, but more directly: each member has officially quit their job to do High Vis full-time. Ski sold his black cab, which was “a big thing”. Macnamara resigned from his nine-to-five in post-production, and Sayle packed in his position as a teacher and technician at a local private school (which also gave him free rein over a workshop he used to support his side hustle of making furniture out of concrete). At 37, this is Sayle’s first time out of salaried employment. He is, understandably, apprehensive. The day of our interview is his first without the safety net. 

“I don’t know what the fuck to do with myself,” he frowns, cradling a fresh mug of tea with both hands and looking slightly lost in his own living room. “What do people do? I feel like I’m floating.” Fittingly, the muted flat screen in the corner is playing back-to-back episodes of Alone – the reality TV series that drops a group of people in the remote wilderness to see who can survive the longest. “It makes it more scary, because there’s no plan B now,” he considers, when I ask if he feels more pressure around this release given the circumstances. “We’ve just got to do this as best we can.”

Recorded with their usual producer Jonah Falco – the Fucked Up drummer shaping the sound of UK punk through his work with bands like High Vis, the Chisel and Chubby and the Gang – Guided Tour is a mix of bared teeth and burning love. Though their lyrics have always been a fairly open book, it’s High Vis’ most intimate album as far as Sayle is concerned. “I basically blew my life up a bit,” he explains of the period following Blending. He met his now-wife Marina, who lived in America at the time, and ended the relationship he was in to be with her, upending his social life in the process. 

After that, he spent a year isolated and “half-spiralling” – experiences which have shaped the album. There are also tracks about his older brother, Keith, and the difficulties he faces as a man with autism and cerebral palsy. All in all, Guided Tour is candid in a way that’s left Sayle feeling exposed. “I’m kind of worried about it,” he admits. “It’s not really in my nature to talk about myself. You write to make sense of things, or to have an outlet, but I’ve put a lot of myself into this album. It makes you feel like, fuck, why can’t I just write a song about nothing!”

It’s not in his nature to say nothing. Neither is it in the nature of High Vis, who didn’t start as a “political band” but have ended up as one by virtue of being a group of working class lads in a landscape, and industry, that is impossible to look at for two seconds without becoming incensed. Though increasingly offset by rallying cries for collectivism and hope, feelings of anger, disenfranchisement and lack of belonging still ring loudly throughout High Vis’ music. By the end of Guided Tour, they’re almost deafening. “When you’re gone, you’re gone forever,” Sayle spits on white-hot closer Gone Forever, which lambasts the politicians and media class that helped create the hostile conditions that the album so unflinchingly documents. Then comes the kicker: “You won’t be fucking missed.” If High Vis’ first two albums capture the image of a burnt-out Britain, then Guided Tour throws bricks through the windows.

The same sentiment is reflected in the album art – a black-and-white photo of a kid on a bike in front of a mobile shop in Liverpool in the 1980s. It was taken by David Sinclair, a photographer and fellow scouse punk Sayle likes because his work captures the warmth of being a kid, and reminds him of his own childhood spent fucking around on bikes on the promenade. Though they’re keen not to lean too far into nostalgia, the image is emblematic of the same street mentality that High Vis are rooted in. Their name, after all, is a reference to how they would sneak into festivals in hi-vis vests, bowling through the front gates unchallenged because of how they looked. “Even the security guards would be like, ‘Oh he wants you down there,’” Sayle grins, flashing a gold tooth. “You can get away with murder if you’ve got an accent and an outfit.”

The real heart of the album, though, is community. Though it includes some of Sayle’s most cutting lyrics to date (“Is the price of life too much to bear/ If you can’t see it, is it not there?”), the message of the bounding Mob DLA is one of stepping up and supporting those around you, because the state certainly won’t. As far as expectations for political change go, Sayle personally believes that we’re “too far gone”. It’s about survival, now. If you want something done, you have to do it yourself. 

The same philosophy underscores the band’s approach to music, which has always been rooted in the collective DIY spirit of hardcore. A few days before our interview, Sayle helped put together a free show in Dalston’s Gillett Square – a public space that hosts everything from NTS parties to pop-up playgrounds for kids. The all-day event, called Society Exists, saw High Vis top a “sonically diverse, culturally aligned” bill that included Delilah Holliday, Hello Mary, James Massiah and Jeshi, and drew an equally mixed crowd. To my left there was an older punk woman with fried peroxide hair, hoop earrings and a full, gold Adidas tracksuit. To my right, a kid in a Limp Bizkit windbreaker. 

With its self-regulating crowd, trusting security and zero police presence (a rarity for London), the event felt like a microcosm of how society at large should be operating. In this context, it’s Sayle who ends up being the voicebox for why we’re all here, talking to the crowd about supporting people in vulnerable positions and stressing how “not normal” it is to lose so many friends to suicide – issues that are simultaneously underreported and all too easy to become desensitised to. But as far as Sayle is concerned, he’s simply pointing out the obvious and doing “something that we should all be doing as a society”. That’s as far as his role goes.

“I don’t know anything. I don’t have any answers,” he laughs, half-bewildered that he’s in a position to be asked for them, and half-hopeless himself. “I know when I feel that stuff is fucked, and that’s kind of enough.”