You Am I Reflect On The Massive Success Of ‘Hi Fi Way’: ‘Literally From Day One, It Was Chaotic’

Ask any fan of Australian music about their favourite bands and it won’t be long before the name You Am I comes into the conversation. Ask them their favourite albums, and answers such as 1995’s Hi Fi Way and 1996’s Hourly, Daily float to the top. Frankly, it’s hard to disagree with such responses.

By the time You Am I released Hi Fi Way, they had just passed their five-year anniversary as a band. They’d managed to carve out an impressive following on the local live scene, they’d issued a well-received string of EPs, and they’d even released their debut album – 1993’s Sound As Ever – with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo on production duties.

Just ahead of the record’s release, however, there was a bit of a lineup shift, and drummer Mark Tunaley was replaced by Nursery Crimes’ Russell ‘Rusty’ Hopkinson. It was this lineup – which also featured Tim Rogers on guitar and vocals and Andy Kent on bass – that would head into the band’s next era in earnest.

That era resulted in not just a North American tour with Soundgarden, but the release of Hi Fi Way in February 1995, and Hourly, Daily in July 1996. The response was impressive. They kicked off a series of three consecutive appearances atop the ARIA Chart and, between their associated releases, shared 16 ARIA Award nominations. Ultimately, Hi Fi Way would take out Best Alternative Release, while Hourly, Daily would take home Best Group, Album Of The Year, and Best Independent Release, among others.

No matter how you sliced it, You Am I were on top of the messy pile that was the indie and alternative rock genre in Australia. Even now, three decades later, both albums frequently find themselves listed as some of the greatest Aussie albums of all time, and in 2013, the band even hit the road to bring those records to the people on the Hi Fi Daily Double tour.

Fast-forward to 2025, and You Am I are doing it all over again, taking their two classic albums to the road once more. But as the band will gladly tell you, it’s not an exercise in cheap nostalgia by any means, though some light cynicism might have reared its head regarding the concept in 2013.

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“Other acts were doing it at the time, and whatever reticence we had quickly dissipated when we started doing the shows,” Rogers explains over Zoom. “It was enormous fun. Subsequently, as people are falling off the perch and getting ill, it's really lovely to hear those stories and experiences from fans of what they were doing at the time in their lives.

“Also, the very unexpected experience recently where we started getting letters and communications from folks who are really young who weren't around at that time and are coming to see the band for the first time or the first couple of times,” he adds. “I don’t find myself getting more sentimental, but it feels a bit more purposeful.”

“I think at first it was a bit like ‘pipe and slippers’ time or something, and I think there was a lot of talk like, ‘We’ll do it at the Sydney Opera House with the blah blah blah Chamber Orchestra’ or something like that,” Rusty adds. “I think we made the correct decision to say, ‘We're not gonna do that; we're not going to leave the environment that we’re used to.’

“And that’s a nice stage of whatever size, something like the Enmore Theatre. So, to not do it there rather than try and make it really big and pompous in surround sound, in the round or whatever, that was a thing we discarded straight away.”

This freedom to be able to revisit their earlier work without thinking about the setlist each and every night was an enjoyable undertaking. It provided the band with a chance to rediscover songs that they hadn’t properly focused on for some time. Even now, with their forthcoming tour, it’s provided the You Am I team (which has featured Davey Lane on guitar since 1999) with more opportunity to approach these formative songs with the benefit of years of musical growth.

“We're configuring them musically, and I'm sure we'll configure them in not vastly different ways, but maybe not exactly the same as we would've done in 1994 or 2014,” says Rogers. “I think that we're still developing as musicians and there are always new ways that you can evolve as a group.

“Davey, Russ, and I had had some conversations about recording a new record this year and how we wanted to do that. Then Andy, in his not secretive but ‘from-the-back’ way, suggests that we do this tour. So it seemed the confluence of us thinking about new things and then revisiting the past, I kind of like that. It's always been our thing anyway.”

There’s also an added benefit for fans, too. While details of new material may have to wait until well after the retrospective tour is done and dusted, this confluence of having one foot in the future and one in the past can also provide the chance for new material to be coloured with the influence of the classic records that turned You Am I into household names.

“There is that chance to talk about other new things in the future and stuff like that whilst playing these songs that are quite sentimental sometimes,” Rogers notes. “Much to the frustration of people who've worked with us, we do often play new things when we're supposed to be ‘promoting other things.’

“That's sort of being in some sort of time flux where it's supposed to be all about the past, whereas we've been together – or barely together – 30-plus years, so for us, it's not sentimental.

“I'm sure some memories will come up, but I think this one is a lot more for people who are coming along,” he adds. “We'll definitely enjoy the fuck out of it, but as we're creating new things together, it felt like it would be great to put on a good show for an audience of strangers.”

The timing of this forthcoming tour isn’t coincidental, of course. It arrived just in time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Hi Fi Way, and only months after a new podcast looking back on the record was launched by revered triple j veteran Richard Kingsmill.

But there can be thought given as to the pairing of Hi Fi Way and Hourly, Daily on the tour billing. On one hand, they’re the two records that signified the band’s commercial breakthrough, and the first to feature Rusty on drums. But on the other hand, the American recording sessions seem to pair Sound As Ever and Hi Fi Way a little better, while the decidedly more Australian vibe of Hourly, Daily can at times seem at odds with what came before.

Ultimately, it’s a pairing which makes sense for both fans and band because, as Rogers says “Sound As Ever felt like a completely different band in many respects.” Indeed, You Am I featured Rusty replacing Tunaley, while the recording experience of Sound As Ever was largely impacted by the passing of Box The Jesuit singer (and Rogers’ mentor) Stephen "Goose" Gray.

“When Russ, Andy, and I got together for the first time, I felt that I wasn't writing for anybody other than ourselves,” Rogers recalls. “A lot of Sound As Ever was written for Mark 'cause he was my friend and I wanted him to enjoy the experience as well, but it wasn’t 100% what I wanted to do.

“That sounds condescending and it possibly is, but I wanted to keep my friends happy and so I wrote things that I wasn’t 100% affectionate about. So when our relationship kind of broke apart and then Russ joined, I thought, ‘Oh, now I'm writing for a band that sounds the way I imagined in my dreams.

“We tried playing Sound As Ever at a festival, and I think it was a mix of how it felt like a different band, or the shocking amounts of cocaine we had the night before and right before – I think that actually had a lot more to do with it,” he adds. “It didn't feel as close to us.

“The memories of making Hi Fi Way and Hourly, Daily are really prescient, whereas making Sound As Ever feels very ancient for many reasons – for grief reasons and for the people involved.”

The reason for the prescient memories of Hi Fi Way’s composition relate largely to the time and place in which it was made. Working with Ranaldo, the album was crafted as far away from the Australian music industry as possible. While Sound As Ever had been made in Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studios (directly after Nirvana wrapped up recording In Utero), Hi Fi Way saw You Am I in New York City, working out of Manhattan’s Greene St. Recording studio.

“Literally from day one, it was chaotic,” Rogers recalls. “We were so apart from the Australian music industry because we were touring overseas all the time and having these very strange and wonderful – and sometimes horribly depressing – times. That impacted us more than anything that was going on in Australia.”

Even the band’s label, rooArt, were hardly involved in the process. While they suggested that the band take some time off from touring, the decision was instead made to head to New York City and work alongside Ranaldo in a whirlwind period of time that was as hectic and chaotic as it was liberating.

“[rooArt said] ‘You’ve got two weeks,’ and I went ‘Right! Let's take the, take the hi-fi way and make it all really quickly,” he continues. “Listening to the record now, you can hear that there's one or two ideas for each song, and then anything could happen, and because the clock was ticking, we let anything that happened just stay in there.

“I think if we had more time or if someone was looking over our shoulder, then it wouldn't be the record it is. At the time, I thought it was a massive mistake at the end of it, but it was just exhaustion. We were just really tired and beat up and had had too much fun. That's where the charm lies; everything's kind of quick: two ideas a song, and scraps of paper for lyrics

“People think of it as ‘You're going to America to make a record,’ and they have visions of it being very luxurious, but it was literally just this little studio on Greene Street in the West Village,” adds Rusty. “We had to take the wheel. The amplifiers were half-borrowed unknowingly from Sonic Youth, and a lot of things like that.

“When you think about it, it was actually an experience, and I think a lot of people make records under a lot of pressure, and they don't necessarily get to have an experience,” he adds. “There's a lot of bean counters around, and we might not have had that same level of supervision, but we were able to make a great record.”

Despite the chaos that may have followed in the making of Hi Fi Way, the looseness of it all, the decision to not spend any time talking about song arrangements, and the seat-of-the-pants attitude to it all, the record’s critical and commercial response was indicative of the idea that You Am I’s approach to their craft not only worked, but it was the key to their success.

But despite the positive reaction to the record, would they do anything differently if they had the chance of a do-over? “Every single fucking word I would love to do again,” says Rogers. “But I won’t get the chance, and that’s absolutely fine.”

“There's some extremely dubious drum fill choices in there that I probably would not do now,” Rusty admits. “But I can't even think of it in terms of what we did and what we could do differently because it was so uncalculated that it was almost like muscle memory.

“A lot of that stuff we'd just been playing for God knows how many weeks on the road with Soundgarden, and it just felt like it was all just – I don’t know if second nature is the right phrase.

“I think I was just taken up in the rush of being in New York and making this record and really enjoying being with these wonderful people and musicians that I'd only been in a band with for not even a full year,” he adds. “To me, Hi Fi Way was just an absolute cultural tidal wave from all angles.”

“There’s a bit at the end of The Applecross Wing Commander where everything just takes off and we go freeform,” Rogers remembers. “This minute-and-a-half or however long that flip out is at the end; that’s just us losing our bundle.

“It seemed like the past year of touring and the experiences that we'd had put into music, and I vaguely remember recording it. I really just sat back and watched Russ and Andy recording, and it was like, ‘Alright, that's all I've dreamed of for the whole of my life, being in a band that does fucking that.’

“Just this cacophony of stuff, somewhere in the same key and with the same intent,” he adds. “It was us saying, ‘Let's just go fucking wild and try and stop not on a dime, but let's stop on a couple of squashed pizzas somewhere.’”

30 years since its release, Hi Fi Way is rightly considered a classic of Australian music. Having topped the chart, won You Am I a well-deserved ARIA, boasted singles such as Jewels & Bullets, Purple Sneakers, and Cathy's Clown, and being regarded as one of the greats in the Australian music canon, does the band have any qualms as to whether a record such as this should be held in such high regard?

“Nah, fuck it. It should be,” Rogers says with a laugh. “There’s a lot of other records that we love that aren't known by the largest swathes of the public, so if a record like this sort of gets through and gets a little bit kudos, then send those people around to our hotel rooms any night on the tour, and we'll play 'em.

“There's really great things about the record that we're also a band that people can look at and go, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ Whether it's young men, women, and other humans or older people, they can look at us and go, ‘They just sort of work together.’

“I remember a dear friend of ours in London took me out for a pint one night and said, ‘Timmy, you're not a genius. You're a workman-like songwriter, but you're not a genius,’” Rogers adds. “I took it as a really big compliment, but somehow, when we get the three of us – and now four, thank God for David Lane – together, there's something about it that works.

“It’s not that we all know our place, but it kind of works together,” he concludes. “I think people look at us and go, ‘Oh, I, I could do that,’ and there's the charm.”

You Am I launch their Hi Fi Daily Double Down Tour on April 3rd, with tickets on sale now. A vinyl reissue of Hi Fi Way is also available to order now.