Shogun, the frontman of Sydney garage band Royal Headache, lives in Petersham in the city’s inner-west. Barely liveable townhouses sell for A$1m in this once affordable neighbourhood, but at 34, Shogun works in a call centre, lives in a share house, and recently announced his intention to leave the group.
The cover art for Royal Headache’s second album, High, due out this week, shows a monolithic water tower situated on Petersham’s eastern fringe. It is poised nakedly between townhouses on New Canterbury Road, and can be seen from rooftops as far as the CBD.
“I’ve been in there and it’s really beautiful,” Shogun says. “It’s a weird tranquil glade around this ugly industrial structure. It seems to symbolise something about inner-west life.”
Before singing in Royal Headache, Shogun spent a decade playing in noise and hardcore bands in the city’s warehouse spaces. Tonight, he’s sitting in a beer garden three blocks west of the tower, at a pub seemingly immune to the area’s rapid gentrification.
Royal Headache’s music is similarly conflicted. Their first single, Eloise, was released in 2010, at the crest of a garage punk resurgence in Sydney’s underground scene.
Noise and hardcore had dominated unlicensed venues in Surry Hills and Marrickville in the mid-noughties, but Royal Headache made a dent because they were joyous – if only on the surface. The band’s punk leanings were buoyed by Shogun’s powerful, soul-baring vocals, a rich melodious howl that communicated despair and abandonment in equal measure.
The group’s 2011 self-titled debut album was a big word-of-mouth success for an independent Sydney band not backed by a major label subsidiary. The four-piece – Shogun, Chris Shortt, Lawrence Hall and Joe Sukit – toured the US in support of it and, from an onlooker’s perspective, gained serious momentum doing so.
The band’s now infamous appearance during Sydney’s Vivid festival in June, where 60 fans “stormed” the usually sedate Opera House stage, was only a taste of what it’s like to see Royal Headache in an environment where people are free to respond with their bodies. Surely this was not the show of a man about to call it quits.
Yet Shogun’s lack of confidence was so self-sabotaging he insisted on driving his vocals – arguably the band’s strongest asset – into the background on their debut record. The singer says he never had the opportunity to use his voice properly in other groups because he “wasn’t good looking or arrogant enough”. He remembers early bad press for Royal Headache live shows, and he blames himself.
“Because I was drunk, because I dressed like a fucking lowlife, because I ran around the stage and I was unsightly. The way I sung and looked reeked of despair. They didn’t want that,” he says.
So, yes, he wanted to leave the band after the second album, but now he’s sticking around. “I’ve got nothing else going on in life and I’m done with that tantrum,” he says. “I was in a bad place when we recorded the first record. I was beneath the line of human functionality. I felt disgusting and had no faith in myself.”
But the songs, he adds, they were always nice. “I thought I’d pull the voice back so people could hear the songs without hearing too much of me, or else they might cotton on to some detail that would show how much I was hiding, or how much pain I was in. If they heard that, maybe they wouldn’t want to know me anymore.”
Shogun’s voice is front and centre in the mix on High. “Shit or get off the pot” is how he rationalises it. “You do it or you don’t. Don’t go into a studio and sing a track for an hour trying to get it right, and then turn the fucking thing down.” He shakes his head. “That’s fucking absurd.”
High is ostensibly a song about falling in love, even if it is sung long after the fact. The loss isn’t explicitly stated but you can hear it in Shogun’s voice. “I care about people, I don’t want to be isolated,” he says, repeating the sentiment several times over during our talk. He’s worried about his future. He’s worried about loneliness.
“I want to communicate and I don’t want to be afraid ... because when I started in this band I honestly had fucking nothing,” Shogun says. “I pictured myself chain-smoking in a mental institution for the rest of my life. So I might as well be a little more truthful with everybody and see what happens. I guess I got to a point where I chose to see my sadness as a resource rather than something that was going to destroy me.”
- High is released on 21 August on What’s Your Rupture?
