Life Is A Highway

What do Thin Lizzy, The Sex Pistols and The Jam have in common with Melbourne pop/punk upstarts Skyways Are Highways? The answer: former UK-based production engineer Steve James. James, whose resume reads like a who's who of mid-to-late '80s English punk and early-'90s Australian rock (he also counts Cold Chisel, Mental As Anything and The Angels as former clients) was made aware of Eli Hood, Angie Brown and their musical adventures by a friend while living in the band's hometown of Byron Bay. Just high school age at the time, it took years of convincing and maturing before the stars aligned and the two were able to work with each other. The eventual result, so long in the making, is Skyways Are Highways latest EP So Young.

“A friend of his came to one of our rehearsals a long, long time ago when we were about 16 and rehearsing at high school,” Hood explains of the seemingly incongruous connection with James, forged initially through a family friend. “He sent the tape to Steve who kind of told us we weren't really ready – but also said to send him through any new stuff that we recorded. So I just kept sending him stuff through the years and only last year he was like, 'Alright, you're ready, let's record'. That was a huge thing because it was ten years of trying to be ready to record with him and when that happened it was amazing.”

This win came on the back of an important couple of years for Skyways Are Highways. Making the decision in 2010 to relocate from sunny Byron Bay to significantly less sunny Melbourne was a choice made entirely for band reasons and to seek out a more sympathetic scene and audience than they had found at home. “There's nothing in Byron,” laments Hood. “It's got a really good hardcore scene but for us there was nothing there. We wanted to find people who actually cared about music and Melbourne was what everyone was telling us to do, so we moved down for the band. For the first year we went through a time when we didn't really know whether we wanted to keep making the type of music we were making before we moved to Melbourne. Then we actually decided that we didn't, so that was six months of practising and then realising that what we were doing wasn't really inspiring so we started writing again, and that took a while. We're lucky to have our manager because otherwise we would've been even more lost.”

After a couple of years of solid gigging and networking, Hood and Brown seem to have finally found their niche in our fair city. One listen to their energetic, sunny take on punk pop makes it clear that Skyway Are Highways are a band for whom energy is crucial, be it on record, on stage or in the audience. “Our musical taste is really wide so we hear bands that we really like all the time – but they're not necessarily the kinds of bands that we can play with or be associated with because their fans are most likely not going to be into us,” Hood explains of his band's presence on the live scene. “Our kind of music is a lot more fun. A lot of the big Melbourne bands – you don't really go to dance to them like you would for us. You kind of go to look introspective and stand against a wall. To us, if that happens at one of our shows it's the worst thing ever because we're up on stage dancing around like a bunch of idiots. If the crowd is lining the walls and being introspective it looks bad. We have more people coming to shows all the time though, who dance and know all the words. It'd be the worst if we didn't have that.”