High Vis Singer Graham Sayle Is Making Peace With Himself

Graham Sayle is making peace with himself.

On paper, the 36-year-old singer is on top of the world. Just weeks ago, his band, High Vis, journeyed from London to complete its first-ever North American tour, selling out shows from Montreal to Nashville. The stateside trek came shortly after a successful European tour, all in light of the hardcore-influenced post-punk outfit’s celebrated new record, Blending (2022).

Across America, the excitement surrounding High Vis permeated the hardcore and adjacent underground music scenes, building an infrastructure of fans far beyond Sayle’s comprehension. Gigs for their recent tour sold out before the musicians even attained their travel visas. It was the first time Sayle visited the U.S. since his previous band toured with Baltimore hardcore legends Trapped Under Ice in 2009.

“It’s just mad,” Sayle explains. “I discover bands on the internet, but I never think anyone would discover our band. It’s just a f***ing weird thing, especially when you’re meeting people in the ass end of Germany or Americans who seem pretty f***ing into it. Hopefully it’ll always be weird.”

After returning to the UK, the band jumped to the Netherlands for a triumphant performance at the annual Roadburn Festival. This July, Sayle is set to be married in an intimate ceremony in England. Then, he’ll rejoin the band and head to Los Angeles for the 2023 Sound and Fury Festival.

Objectively, the vocalist has a ton to be grateful for—and he is. Speaking with humility and sincerity, Sayle makes it clear that he’s overwhelmed by the recent success of his band and he’s truly, for lack of a better cliche, just happy to be here.

But the success of High Vis comes at a time of great transition for the frontman. Sayle—formerly the vocalist for London hardcore group Dirty Money—has entered a new era.

“I’ve made some massive changes in my life,” Sayle explains. “But I don’t have any goals. I’m just trying to get by, really.”

Rightfully so. In an in-depth conversation with Sayle, it’s obvious that the newfound popularity of High Vis is a lot to navigate.

While some assume the band has experienced a classic case of overnight success, High Vis actually first formed in 2016. Three years later, the guys dropped their first full-length record, 2019’s No Sense No Feeling. The album was beloved by fans, but, in retrospect, Sayle believes was filled with much anger and little hope.

In the time since, the vocalist has made a grand push towards self-actualization. For all the joy and gratitude he emanates, Sayle has a long list of emotions he processes every day. Many of those feelings are uncomfortable, albeit universal. He speaks of shame, guilt, and grief; to name a few. He’s unfiltered, but that wasn’t always the case.

“I’m such an open book now,” Sayle says, conflicted. “I used to be so guarded.”

Growing up in Merseyside county (home to Liverpool) in Northwest England, Sayle found little opportunity to indulge in vulnerability. In previous interviews, he’s discussed his backstory: that he was raised by a nurse and a telecoms engineer in a depressed seaside town during the fallout period of Margaret Thatcher’s “managed decline.”

In writing, the story of High Vis has been characterized by the narrative of a punk band that’s ready to take a stand for the disenfranchised and forgotten backbone of England. But, according to Sayle, that metaphor holds little substance to the band’s voice or mission. In reality, the singer has spent more than half of his life in the bustling and culture-filled city of London—where he’s lived since 2005.

Sayle’s upbringing does, however, play a key role in the way he’s experienced the world, both emotionally and psychologically.

“There was just no money and nothing for people to do,” Sayle explains. “It’s just quite a vicious place. It’s f*** all for people to do. People are angry. And I grew up really angry.”

Over the last few years—through therapy and sobriety (Sayle hasn’t drank for about 19 months)—he’s begun to confront his feelings and share them with the world. The band’s most popular song from Blending, “Trauma Bonds,” is sung with such an aggressive candor that it manifests itself physically. At first, performing the song live was such an intense experience that Sayle often belted lyrics through his own tears.

“I used to cry so much,” he says. “This isn’t hyperbole. I’d just cry. You can’t stop it. It still happens every now and again. But I think I’m getting better at controlling it.”

“Trauma Bonds,” as Sayle explains, is a song that developed over time and reached its final form in an emotional studio session.

The song’s namesake is technically an expression used in the mental health field. Medical News Today defines “trauma bonding” as a “psychological response to abuse that occurs when the abused person forms an unhealthy bond with the person who abuses them.” Stockholm Syndrome is cited as an example of trauma bonding.

However, Sayle’s lyrics interpret and define the expression in a different way. He wrote the song while he was deep in therapy and unraveling his own repressed pain. The song came in the wake of a friend’s suicide, but also encapsulates the loss and heartache he’s felt for all his friends who’ve died too young.

“I was thinking about being bonded by trauma in a very literal sense,” Sayle explains. “I was thinking about the experiences that me and friends in my social circle have been through. I had a lot of friends die or kill themselves through addiction or violence. We normalize and accept it. ‘Oh, well, this person is dead now!’ Stuff becomes so trivial.”

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 f***ed. Maybe you have been through quite a lot of grief and never really processed it.”

For Sayle, the resounding reflection of “Trauma Bonds” lives in the aftermath of these extreme high-stress scenarios: drug overdoses, suicide, violent assaults, or friends being sent to jail.

“You’re so accustomed to fight or flight,” he says. “And when that stuff stops, what happens when you’re sort of there, just stuck with yourself?”

The notion has resonated with High Vis’ audience. Internationally, fans have told Sayle how the song connects to their hearts. When the band performs the song live, the crowd clamors to the stage, clawing to get to the microphone for an emotional purge. Many interpret the words in their own way, which Sayle finds endearing—even if slightly surprising.

“People will come up to me and say, ‘It really means a lot to me because I had a really similar experience,’ but in my head I’m thinking, ‘You absolutely have not had the same [exact] experience!’” Sayle says laughing. “But it’s amazing that they feel something from that song. A lot of people seem to connect it to whatever they’ve been through. And that’s nice.”

Standing outside of DRKMTTR (a community-driven punk and hardcore venue located in Nashville), Sayle gets ready to take stage. After swigging some Red Bull, enjoying a hot cup of tea and steaming his throat, he’s prepared to command the crowded room, playing songs like Blending’s “0151” and “Talk For Hours,” and 2019 favorites like “Walking Wires” and “Choose to Lose.”

The gig is the 11th stop of an already well-received 14-date tour, but he’s still got some jitters. As Sayle explained previously, he never thought High Vis would have this level of reach.

“It’s amazing seeing it blown up. But it’s also f***ing terrifying,” Sayle explains. “I never thought that any of this would—like, this s*** is just for me. The idea of it reaching people or performing it in front of people and bearing myself essentially […] I didn’t think about these [songs] being more than my own personal processing of situations and feelings.”

But even back in England, it was clear that High Vis’ music was causing visceral reactions. He dates an early example just before the onset of the pandemic. High Vis had played a small club immediately following a Turnstile concert. He says the hardcore energy carried over to his own band’s performance.

“People just went off,” he says. “There were maybe a hundred people there. People were diving off s***. I was like, ‘F***! This is sick!’ People started reacting! The music doesn’t necessarily—you don’t listen to our music and say, ‘F***! I wanna backflip off a speaker stack!’ But people do.”

The timing of High Vis’ success is curious to say the least. Frankly, Sayle’s average day is way more ordinary—and far less rockstar—than fans of his music may expect.

Currently, he’s working as a shop instructor in a high-end London private school, teaching kids aged 11-18 the ropes of woodworking and metalworking. When it came to booking High Vis’ North American tour, the band had to plan its dates around school holidays.

It’s an interesting intersection where he gets to practice a craft he enjoys (Sayle also builds his own hand-made furniture, which he sells locally, on the side), earn a few bucks, and help kids learn without being an uptight caricature of a teacher. These days, he finds his work to be more technical by nature. Students will approach him asking the best way to mount something, then he’ll step in and show them how to weld a bracket.

Having grown up in a tumultuous area, he’s glad the students he works with have a nurturing environment to grow in. A handful of them have caught on to his band’s success and even bumped into him at a concert festival. He says it’s funny to see the moment they realize he exists outside of their school’s walls.

A hardcore/punk frontman who incidentally stumbled into the role, Sayle tries his best to treat the students with fairness and meet them on their level—to teach them whatever small pearls of wisdom he has to share about hard work and pursuing their dreams. But it’s a difficult dance. He’s not there to be an authoritarian figure—that’s the last thing he wants to be—but he does encourage mutual respect. That translates into his role as a musician, too.

“I’ve got no interest in being a powerful figure,” Sayle says. “I don’t wanna exercise control over anyone. People have an idea, especially with bands, that people want to have this ability to control people or crowds. I don’t. I never want that. I don’t wanna tell anyone what to do, but I’d like to make it a space where anyone can do whatever they want, as long as they exercise general f***ing kindness.”

Sayle’s philosophy can be traced back to a particular moment in his life. This mixture of a moral code and total autonomy is a direct result of his introduction to the hardcore community. As a troubled youth (who had a series of arrests) with a difficult family dynamic, it was the music world that showed him a path towards righteousness.

“When I discovered hardcore, I found good role models,” Sayle says. “When I was 15, I met all these people who were cool, straight edge, hardcore kids. A lot of them took me under their wing. The role models that I found in other subcultures were quite bad people. But the people I met through hardcore were inspiring. It was really important to me. I found a community and older people who I could look up to.”

Twenty years later, High Vis embraces that same ethos. Sayle often credits his good friend—who’s also the band’s drummer—Edward “Ski” Harper, as being the person who helped him get into therapy and begin bettering himself.

Sayle’s hardship goes deeper than losing friends to damning circumstances. His life, like many of our lives, has a greatly nuanced and layered history. And even now, he struggles to reconcile this all publicly through his music and conversation. He’s endured some heavy stuff, but is clearly uncomfortable with any sort of “woe is me” narrative. Despite that concern, he acknowledges that his lifestyle and condition hit a tipping point: a cycle of depression perpetuated through alcohol abuse.

“I just wanted to stop feeling like I did,” Sayle says. “We were going through a pandemic. I was just in a bad place. I thought I was always gonna feel that way. Then all of a sudden, I found some hope.”

Through quitting booze and beginning therapy, Sayle has been disciplined in examining his feelings. He hasn’t had a drink since August of 2021—and says it’s hard work, but the best thing he’s ever done. Without a mind-altering escape mechanism, he’s been turning to activities like Muay Thai—or on the other end of the spectrum—meditation.

But therapy is where the bulk of the work is getting done, like grappling with the harsh realities of human behavior. Much of his anger and home-dynamics stemmed from the Sayle family’s efforts to protect his older brother, Keith, a gentle soul who has autism and cerebral palsy. Sayle also credits his newfound sobriety to a desire to become a better man and caretaker for his brother.

“Keith had some really horrible traumatic s*** happen to him,” Sayle explains. “He was just terrorized by people who, looking at it now, through some more mature lens or something—I’m just trying to understand why people would terrorize a disabled person, you know? I still can’t really understand it at all, but, people are f***ing angry and bored and don’t understand.”

In therapy, Sayle actively faces a mixing pot of issues: the neighborhood in which he was born, the adversity his brother faced, the residual effect it had on his family structure, his own anger and actions, his addiction, and the loss of his friends.

“Going to therapy and addressing all the stuff that I just had f***ing clogging up my mind for so long, that’s really helped,” he says.

It’s enabled him to learn more about himself in other ways, too. Sayle says he’s recently been diagnosed with ADHD—which he’s found a healthy way to manage—and has been able to reassess a lot of his own childhood behavioral issues.

In this newfound headspace, still a work in progress, Sayle is trying to gain control of his virtues—that starts with truthfulness.

“I’m trying to be more honest about everything now, which is hard when you’re also filled with guilt and shame and s***,” he says laughing.

As Sayle explains his history of emotional unavailability, it’s more appropriately described as omission than outright lying. Ultimately, his family kept up barriers to protect his brother, who easily became overwhelmed with anxiety. But it’s clear that they also were trying to protect themselves.

It was too hard for his parents to acknowledge the insurmountable hardship of parenting a child who is differently abled. Sayle says that he felt the same way: closed off and faking the strength he knew his family needed to carry on.

“It’s really f***ing hard,” Sayle says. “I only really started to understand that stuff later on. I always had to be alright. I’ve never felt like I could go and be vulnerable. I ended up being distant from when I was young.”

Now, Sayle has found more empathy for his parents. He understands the enormous weight they carried. And he’s found strength in understanding and forgiveness. Recently, his parents and brother even came to see the band perform in Manchester. It was a wonderful moment.

In his mental health journey, Sayle still finds it difficult to sift through the guilt and shame he carries.

“I think I feel ashamed of who I’ve been,” Sayle says. “Especially with my brother—this is getting quite deep in a sense—but seeing the hardships that my brother has had to endure and I’m an able-bodied white, straight male. I f***ing, I haven’t had necessarily much of a regard for my own life at times. I feel quite a degree of shame in that.”

He’s also felt a lot of guilt associated with loss. The guilt of only bumping into friends at funerals. The guilt of not doing more to help others overcome their demons. And the guilt that makes you wonder whether your own grief is valid. While he tends to harp on those thoughts, he knows they’re mostly “bollocks.”

“It’s just f***ing embedded,” he says. “I went to a Catholic school. That s***’s just embedded in your psyche about punishment. It’s something I’m really trying to rid myself of.”

He continues: “I’m accepting that you can only do what you can do. Do your best. Be supportive, be open and be honest.”

With the success of Blending, his personal wellbeing, and the recent U.S. tour, Sayle is gradually rewiring his perspective—and flattered by the experience.

“The tour was insane,” Sayle says. “I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, but having people singing all the words back to us night after night was amazing. It was really overwhelming to meet so many people who had stories to tell about their own connections to these songs—especially when the situations were really heavy.”

Back to work in London, the frontman is still reeling from the adventure. He says the band was lucky to reconnect with old friends and make amazing new ones.

“I was reminded how important this music and scene can be,” he says. “I’ve always known it was important to me but this definitely made me feel the effect it has on others—however scary and heavy that is.”

While feelings of trauma, grief, and shame can hold enormous power, so can acts of kindness, healing and forgiveness. Today, Sayle is learning to accept the good things in his life and find the best version of himself.

It seems like a lot to juggle, but doesn’t need to be that complicated. Sometimes, it means just sitting and existing. And that’s just fine.

See High Vis this July in Los Angeles at Sound and Fury Festival.

Order Blending at Dais Records.

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