Graham Sayle opens up

This story is originally published in Huck 82: The Music Issue. Order your copy now.

Forks of lightning split an indigo sky as rain lashes down, and I pound the belt of a prehistoric treadmill in my parents’ garage – one foot at a time – staring into a gold-framed print of Muhammad Ali, a prize my dad won for me playing darts at the rodeo.

He’s in the hospital, fighting like a rockstar to get back in the proverbial ring after two back-to-back seizures this morning. Meanwhile, I’ve already been knocked for six.

I’m attempting to summon a sliver of Ali’s smarts in the face of adversity when, just a week ago, a national paper dealt the first blow: printing a disgusting article about the inquest into the death of my friend – a Soho trans icon. They claimed she drunkenly fell into the Thames while ​“pissing like a man.” Why? Because that was easier than printing that she climbed over Westminster Bridge as a woman, carrying the weight of the world on her delicate shoulders.

I crank the volume until Graham Sayle’s viscerally poignant vocals on ​‘Trauma Bonds’ reverberate at deafening decibels into my skull ​“When the party’s over, it’s over – and where do we run?”

I first heard the track when High Vis test-drove their critically lauded sophomore album Blending at a subterranean London joint in 2022. The gig felt like a gritty calm before a global storm – before the motley quintet launched their emotionally charged, genre-warping blend of hardcore, post-punk, shoegaze and Madchester from the eardrums of the UK underground to wider hardcore and adjacent scenes on their first-ever North American tour, selling out shows to a cult fanbase bubbling to boiling point.

On stage, Sayle is a raucous elixir, igniting a sweat-soaked swarm who rush the stage, shouting the lyrics back as he spits: ​“Something beyond the sweat and tears / the blood is enough to keep us in the clear / And are we still lucky to be here?”

The words land like a throat-choked sermon for loved ones gone too soon. Then, with a duty of care, he urges the heaving crowd to look out for each other and keep checking in.

Through a stream of my own tears and moshing, I gripped the hand of my mate Jake Lewis – who’d just lost a best friend under 30 – while I was still reeling from a year spent sparring with suicide myself, after being sexually assaulted twice by men in the industry.

“I guess I want to make people feel like we’re all in it together. If people can feel something from our music, if a High Vis gig gives them a purpose to get shit off their chest and feel a part of something, or walk away with the same feeling I had when I first started going to shows – that’s enough really.” Sayle later told me, backstage, behind humble, sparkling eyes and a gold toothed smirk. ​“It’s nice when people sing our music and really personal songs back, it feels good for me that those songs had a positive impact.”

Fast forward to 2025. When we meet, the sun is blazing and Sayle and I are both on happier terrain – wearing our hearts on our sleeves just a few blocks from the first place I caught High Vis live. It’s also close to the Scouse speakeasy-slash-dive bar where we became friends, shooting the breeze at Supreme parties while I bartended over half a decade ago.

In the interim – amid playing shows around the world and releasing their third album, Guided Tour, High Vis’s most musically and personally ambitious record to date – Graham Sayle’s kicked booze, married the love of his life, and the whole band has gone to therapy. He’s also defeated demons and battled trauma that would flatten most.

Sayle’s tanned, in a purple t‑shirt and glasses, sitting in his wife Marina’s Soho studio, flanked by her paintings, his Akai MPK Mini, and a stack of graffiti books. He cracks jokes about making bootleg passes for his mates so they can come watch him support Deftones in front of 15,000 punters at the Crystal Palace Bowl.

I pull up a stool to talk about pouring pain and lived experience into music, navigating fame, finding peace in a pit full of punks and what it took to get there.

• Read next: In Birmingham’s punk underground, hardcore is queer

Graham Sayle was born with a powerful voice, a righteous rage and resilience to roll with the punches time and again, alongside a charming enigma destined to electrify – against all odds.

He grew up in Merseyside, a working class seaside town in the wake of Thatcher’s ​“managed decline”, raised by bikers and trying to fit in. 

“It’s fun now, but when I was a kid I thought my parents were weirdos. All my mates were into happy hardcore and going to Spain, while my parents were into Guns N’ Roses, getting on motorbikes to go to rock festivals like Download at Donington Park, or putting me in a side car to go camping with a bunch of other bikers.” 

At 15, Sayle discovered hardcore. ​“I was a hyperactive angry kid, trying to find myself. I used to hang out at this café in Liverpool with all the other skaters, punks, hardcore kids and freaks. Some older lads took me under their wing and started taking me to shows.”

Smaller scenes like Liverpool offered a lot of crossover. ​“You’d have crust punk bands playing with doom bands, playing the New York hardcore bands and playing with youth crew bands,” Sayle explains. ​“It really helped me understand that most music – even electronic genres – is all just punk as fuck! Especially DIY labels like The Trilogy Tapes.”

He sunk his teeth into a diet of classic Black Flag, and heavier stuff such as Hatebreed, Spazz, New Orleans sludge metal band Eyehategod and New Jersey hardcore outfit Rorschach. Then he made connections further afield by diving off stages at iconic Camden venues like The Underworld.

All of which also became a positive outlet for anger and expression. ​“I’ve said it before: hardcore is a place to escape, a horizontal democracy where no one’s better than each other,” he beams. ​“There was an unwritten agreement that you could mosh hard in that environment and it would kind of police itself. London was especially rowdy. You’d have 6ft 2in, shaved head geezers in full Burberry rigs and other people wearing trackies. That kinda opened my eyes to something different. I’d always thought to be a mosher you had to look like one.”

• Read next: Wholesome photos of goths at Download

Heavy hardcore band Knuckledust blew his mind further. ​“Growing up in a predominantly white working class town and seeing a band like Knuckledust was fucking amazing. You’ve got Pierre, who’s this small, rowdy, best mosher. Wema who’s this 7ft, Jay‑Z look-a-like with a tiny guitar. Nic, who had a bright red mohawk! It was so mad but it made so much sense that musicians shouldn’t be separated based on aesthetics. Just because you don’t look like each other doesn’t mean you can’t jam together.”

Eventually he started a band called Dirty Money. ​“I thought: ​‘Fuck it why not?!’ That’s the thing with hardcore, is that you CAN just do it. I found some mates I knew, some people I didn’t, had a practice and played.” he laughs. ​“I couldn’t sing for years really, I just shouted. But I knew I had the energy for it!”

Sayle found inspiration from lead vocalists who were abrasive, in-your-face, and scary. ​“That’s obviously not me, but I think you just learn on the job really. I’d go all in every time we played. Our very first show, we played twice. I was so obnoxious. I was a narky little prick! It was at The Dome – we got off stage and we’re like: ​‘Fuck it let’s do it again,’ and played upstairs with all the lights on.”

Dirty Money cut a couple of records, gained local traction and connections across the pond, but the band imploded and broke up right before they set off on a North American tour. 

Around the same time in 2007, Graham Sayle’s friend was murdered in Liverpool. He took a year off music and found solace in a house his father had built by hand in Wales. 

“When my mate got killed I didn’t know what to do with myself. I don’t think I properly grieved at the time because I was so angry and had people to blame for his death. I was going to court and seeing the lads who had killed him, and them not be arsed – it was so fucked! I’d just be staring and legit starting fights with them.”

Those boys got six years for manslaughter, but it’s something Sayle will carry with him forever. ​“I’ve been thinking about it a lot at the moment. I went and saw his mum in Liverpool recently, and it brought back loads of stuff I couldn’t face before. It was really nice seeing her again, but also really hard hearing about her seeing those lads’ mums around town.” 

Between drinking a lot and being angry, Sayle secured a spot at Goldsmiths to study fine art. ​“I was pretty lost. I met a girl who was studying there and I knew it was a really good art college. Looking back, it was mad really! I had no idea what I was doing. I felt so thick when I went there,” he confesses. ​“It made me realise I didn’t fit in. My education wasn’t the same. You’d go and show your work, and you’d just be terrorised by people much brighter than you.” 

The vibe at Goldsmiths was crushing his creativity. ​“I just didn’t fucking make anything. I was crippled by overthinking and not believing in myself.” Music became a place to put pen to paper – and channel his anger. In 2016, High Vis was born (the name derived from a stunt the group famously pulled where they donned hi-vis vests and snuck into festivals).

• Read next: Riot grrrl is back. Do we need it more than ever?

Fronted by Sayle, High Vis is also made up of his longtime bandmate, drummer Edward ​‘Ski’ Harper – an ex-cabbie from the East End – bassist Jack Muncaster, and guitarists Martin Macnamara and Rob Hammeren.

Within three years, they dropped their first full-length record, No Sense No Feeling (2019) – a post-punk release powered by the intensity of hardcore and a melodic punch of Britpop. The album is fuelled by verses about broken societies, failed relationships, the search for meaning in a nihilistic world – and a shitload of anger.

Fans loved it. It also sparked a wider narrative: that Sayle was becoming an accidental spokesperson for mental health and class warfare in Britain, and High Vis were making music with a message – for the disenfranchised, the forgotten backbone of England.

On sophomore album Blending, tracks like ​‘0151’ (a nod to Liverpool’s area code) pay tribute to his late uncle and the ghost of the shipbuilders and factory workers that built the North. Sayle bellows over blown-out guitars: ​“The working class is good as dead.” 

And on, Guided Tour, the recently released ​‘Mob DLA’ rails against the mistreatment of people with disabilities – inspired in part by Sayle’s own brother.

“There’s a song called ​‘Shame’ on Blending which made me feel really vulnerable to record. ​‘Untethered’ on our new album has felt the most difficult, but playing ​‘Mind’s a Lie’ live is the one where I feel most exposed sonically. There’s a lot of space in the song and I feel really isolated.”

But when asked if he thinks artists have a responsibility to have messages in their music, Sayle doesn’t hold back. ​“I think everything is inherently political. I say what I think when I’m playing, but I don’t think it’s anyone’s responsibility to do that. What bands like Kneecap are doing, by highlighting stuff, using their platform and legitimately putting themselves out there, it’s really important to do that. It’s important for people with a platform to speak out in the real world. But internet activism can draw the humanity out of what’s going on, and things can quickly descend into divisive competition between people who started with the same good intentions. When what we’re actually talking about is the blanket bombing of women and children, and the complete destruction of people to a point that just becomes fodder.”

• Read next: Throwback portraits of the UK’s first punks

Speaking out often on suicide awareness and coping with loss, Sayle speaks from experience: ​“I had a lot of friends die or kill themselves through addiction or violence. We normalise and accept it. ​‘Oh, well, this person is dead now!’ There’s no shock anymore.” He continues: ​“But there’s all this stuff that your body hangs onto. When you’re giving yourself the space, you can say, ​“Oh, well actually maybe that is quite fucked. Maybe you have been through quite a lot of grief and never really processed it.”

As someone whose been paralysed by shame and silence while being haunted by suicidal thoughts, another critical point I’d address is the importance of normalising a safe space for folks going through it to open up with each other.

“I’ve been through things in my life, but I don’t think I believed in burn out. I’m learning now the hard way that it exists.” he reveals. ​“The best lesson that I’ve learned is to accept the things that you can’t change and try to change the things that you can. That’s it. You can only really only be responsible for yourself.”

For the past 15 years, when he’s not on stage, Sayle has been boxing and practicing Muay Thai fighting, to build confidence and have another positive channel for his feelings. While outside of the ring and the band, Sayle’s held down a job teaching woodwork and metal work for students with disabilities, having been headhunted for the job after he helped a fine art student complete her show in college.

“While the rest of the band was off, I was coming off 12 hour bus journeys and walking into class. But I do miss teaching, I used to really like working there. It was always good to be on tour and come back to a normal life, working with kids who just think you’re a dickhead,” Sayle laughs. 

• Read next: Gritty scenes of Liverpool in the 1970s

Back when Sayle started High Vis, he also started making furniture. He’d already done a lot of building work as a DT technician and had studio space he could share with the school. ​“I started out making things for friends and it went from there. ​“While the rest of the band have shifted their focus solely to music, Sayle continues to make his bespoke concrete pieces. ​“I just really enjoy making tangible things and working with my hands to be honest. Especially with concrete, it feels like a meditative practice. There’s a lot of degree in doing what you can and letting go. I’ve had to learn patience in waiting for objects to cure and then accepting the outcome.”

As Time Out proclaims 2025 the ​“Summer of Hardcore”, High Vis are gearing up to hit the road for their North American leg and jump on tour with Baltimore, funk-inflected hardcore punks Turnstile. 

“We’ve seen old iconic New York hardcore bands wearing High Vis t‑shirts and that’s so sick! Like legends I looked up to when I was young,” Sayle reflects on the band’s trajectory and success. ​“We didn’t compromise. We’ve never made art of music for commerce. We’ve just done what feels right to do at the time. My proudest achievement musically, I think, is that we’ve done three albums. I can recognise that High Vis is important to people and that it’s bigger than what it was, but I never thought I’d be doing this sort of thing like we are, none of us did. Because it’s not like we’re a well oiled machine. The idea that we’re still holding it together as a DIY band and still making stuff feels good, and given our dynamics, really fucking impressive really.”

Looking brighter into the future, Sayle concludes ​“It feels mad, I still feel out of place, but right now I’m making the most of it, and trying to take it in, enjoy it. I’m excited about playing some more, and I’m excited about getting better at sitting with myself. I just want to keep doing it. I want to keep feeling creative, making stuff and finding that flow that makes you go ​‘Fuck, this is cool.”

• Read next: Turnstile benefit gig raises $35k for Baltimore homelessness charity

Tracy Kawalik is a freelance music and culture writer. Follow her on Instagram.

Buy your copy of Huck 82 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.