Interview: HighSchool (AUS) - Auckland Show This Week

Melbourne duo Rory Trobbiani and Luke "Scotty" Scott started HighSchool during the 2020 lockdowns – and have spent the years since taking it from the Trobbiani family home to festival stages at SXSW, All Points East and The Great Escape, and tours alongside Sam Fender, CHVRCHES and Wet Leg. Produced by Ben Hillier (Blur, Depeche Mode), last year's self-titled debut album is forty-two minutes of post-punk and nostalgia for moments both lived and imagined. Interviewer Johnny Smith (Phys Ed / Washwerld Prod.) caught up with the pair ahead of their first-ever New Zealand show this Sunday at Whammy Bar in Tāmaki Makaurau, to talk romanticised youth, place names, and why melody always comes first.

HighSchool
Sunday 10th May - Whammy Bar, Auckland
Tickets on sale HERE via UTR

Johnny Smith: How'd you two come together?

Rory Trobbiani: We met just after high school, a year or two after we graduated, working at a bar in the city together – actually two bars that were across from each other. One of our managers asked me to help someone carry a table and it was Scotty, then we ended up carrying this table together. We got chatting about mutual mates and we realised we had a bunch of friends. Within a week Scotty moved into our spare room at our shared house.

Luke "Scotty" Scott: I was breaking up with my girlfriend at the time and I needed a place to live, then I moved in with Rory next week.

Rory: A week after meeting – the rest is history. It's just a musical connection that was undeniable.

Something special about that time of your life, aye? Something like nineteen and you work in the bar and you just happenstance into — how old are you guys now?

Rory: We're both in our 30s now... (we've been working together) I think about 10 years. We were in another band together initially, which was a sort of shoegazey kind of project, very classic as a 20 year old to do a Brian Jonestown-sounding band. Then that sort of dissolved a year or two later and we took a break. Then we sort of came back together for this project sort of around the time of COVID. We've been working creatively together pretty much since day dot.

It's interesting that you say you started working on this project around COVID time, because a lot of people are feeling nostalgic for their youth right now. I was looking through your Instagram and you posted something about how people could feel nostalgic for a time that they didn't really go through. The people that find joy in your music might not have even had the chance to go through those lived experiences. What draws you to writing about that period of your life – growing up and all that comes with it?

Rory: With the name of the band, we've never taken it, sort of, completely literally. We hadn’t really used the actual name or the themes of high school in our music. But from our first EPs, we've had so much response from people saying, "Oh, the music's so nostalgic, it reminds me so much of youth." So on this debut record, we thought it would be cool to try and open up some of those very intense, visceral emotions and feelings you have while you're in school. Try and sort of tap back into them sonically and evoke those kind of feelings.

I do feel like as you get older, everything sort of numbs out a little bit. The highs aren't as high and the lows aren't as low. When you're at school and when you're young, you're experiencing all these things for the first time and you have these intense feelings. It felt like a cool mission to write tracks that didn't necessarily talk about that, but somehow brought up those feelings.

Scotty: Yeah. But I also think you're right. COVID was a particularly contemplative time, where it was stressful and it was kind of boring in lockdown and people were probably reminiscing about the past. Maybe we were doing that in an unconscious sense.

I think life goes in seven-year cycles. The time that you released that EP, it would have been around like 6 or so years ago now that people went through COVID and maybe they are looking back. I totally agree with you, I think nostalgia hits whether or not you actually lived through it. Is there anything that you two are nostalgic for, that you've never lived through yourselves?

Rory: It's interesting. It's almost like a Mandela effect of music or something. You hear songs that make you feel a certain way, even though, like you said, you don't know if it's actually a lived experience.

Scotty: I feel like a lot of my own memories are actually so fabricated. I probably didn't really live them, but I'm nostalgic for something. I reckon the accuracy of memories is really not very accurate. I think we exaggerate or make up heaps of the things that we long for. And if we could go back to that time, we maybe didn't have such a good time, or such a bad time, you know?

Rory: We definitely romanticised the period our parents grew up in. I always wish I could have lived through that time and experienced all these big movements in music. But when I talk to my folks about it, it's just what it was — you didn't miss out on that much. They kind of play it down, but maybe when you're away from something and you're looking at it, you always kind of seem to romanticise it and put it on a pedestal.

I agree. The grass is always greener, right?

Rory: Totally.

In your music you often refer to places by name, like Johnson Street, Grace Darling, which I'm assuming is the Grace Darling Hotel, a venue in Victoria.

Rory: That's right.

What makes a place special enough for a shout out, and do you have any memories of those places that you'd like to share?

Rory: For me, when a song is about a place, it encompasses a time in my life that felt like its own little world, a whole scene. I worked at the Grace Darling for a couple of years and it felt like a pivotal time in my life. It opened me up to meeting a whole lot of different people in different bands. It definitely felt like those couple of years working there were the heyday of that pub. It was just a really cool scene.

It was cool to write a song about that specifically, and try and bring myself back to that time or whatever when I listened to it. We're always shouting out different places. It's cool to rep where you're from as well, especially if you're traveling the world and taking your music around the globe. It's cool to have these little... Easter eggs almost for people that do know. Because not that many people around the world would know Johnston Street or Grace Darling. It's cool to have. You might have a fan in the UK or America that's singing those lyrics, even though they have no connection to that place.

Scotty: I like this in lyrics, where it's maybe abstract or lofty and then it's hit with something super specific and real, like a place. Very tangible. I like when lyrics do that.

I totally agree. That thing you said about specificity and vagueness, it's something special about your songwriting.

Scotty: It's vague and then something is unable to be interpreted any other way, like place.

Rory: We always do that. We'll go on a tangent of writing very open-ended, lofty lyrics and be like, damn, we need to throw something in that's real. That people don't have to think about, that can just sort of hit them.

I think that speaking about lyrics in general and interpretation – how people digest certain lyrics and get their own take – it's also interesting how much emphasis we actually put on the sonic element of our songs, on the melody first. As important to us as lyrics are, they're quite secondary for us, because we really like the sort of forceful nature of melody and music and harmony. It doesn't really give you an opportunity to interpret anything. It just hits you and you feel it without choice or without having to dissect anything. Obviously lyrics are cool too, but they act as a sort of secondary role in the band. We're very music focused first, lyrics are just a sort of cherry on top.

Once you write the melody, I imagine it can evoke the lyrics afterwards, right?

Rory: Yeah, exactly. You can't really describe how the song makes you feel straight away. Once we've written out a couple of verses or a chorus and got some vocal melodies, we can use the lyrics as a tool to hammer home that feeling.

 

How was your first show together, and how have your live shows evolved since then?

Scotty: Well our first show together, because we started in lockdown, was actually in London. We released music in lockdown and we couldn't play live shows, then we signed to this UK label, then as soon as lockdown lifted we moved to London. So we'd never played a live show under this project. Our first show was at the Seabright Arms in East London. We've come a long way since then, it's been really formative playing so much overseas and kcutting our teeth first and foremost in Europe and the UK.

Rory: It takes such a long time to develop confidence as a live performer. Only in the last year or two have I truly felt as comfortable as I want to feel, without getting bored playing shows. Like at the moment — this last tour we've done specifically — I feel so familiar on stage now and finally feel I'm in a position to properly engage with the audience, allow each show to be its own individual thing and act a bit more spontaneously. But it takes so long to get that level of comfortability.

Scotty: It takes years, actually. It's not too hard to get a live show together, but to get a good live show together, it takes years.

Totally. Comfortability with the crowd, the music, your band, all of it.

Rory: And sort of realising more and more that the show is very little about nailing every single part or being as tight as possible. There's so much about just being a performer and learning how to engage with the crowd – in a performance sense rather than as an amazing virtuoso musician, I used to care so much about messing up. Now I put so much more emphasis on engaging the crowd, because all of that sort of falls to the wayside when you've got a crowd in the palm of your hand. It doesn't matter if you nail each part or not, the energy is there. I think that's the main thing we've sort of learned these last couple of tours.

Awesome. We're all excited to see you at Whammy Bar on the 10th of May.

Rory: Yeah, Whammy Bar! Can’t wait. It's our first time in New Zealand, actually.

The first time! Well, I think your music will play super well here. Last question, if you could say anything to your high school selves, what would it be?

Rory: I'd say nowhere near as many people are talking or thinking about you or care about you. That would be my main thing, I reckon.

Scotty: That's a good one. I was thinking a similar thing – just take an attitude of: don't worry about it. Maybe it feeds into our music, everything matters so much in high school. That's really beautiful. But I cared too much about other people and how everything went and it didn't matter in the end. You can really realise that with hindsight.

Rory: Definitely.