Jul
20
4.40pm

ENDLESS HEIGHTS // Tour Diary with Touché Amoré and Turnover


Last month, Endless Heights hit the road with Touché Amoré and Turnover. Along the way they took shots of one of their most exciting tours so far. Produced on film, the photo diary is an insight into the life of a young band with the world ahead of them.

Photo comments provided by Joel Martorana (Vocals), Matt Jones (Bass), and Jem Siow (Guitar).

Jem: We’ve been playing a bunch of new songs on this tour, which is great, and it’s also really awesome that we’re playing to a crowd that’s really relevant to us with Turnover and Touché Amoré.

Jem: This is like the first tour that we’ve done since we finished writing and recording our album. After this tour we’re gonna be releasing some new stuff, so for us it was a big step towards, I guess we’re putting our new vision out there and representing that new vision from this tour onwards.

Jem: This is the most excited we’ve been for a tour since we went to Europe, probably, which was in 2015. We were really looking forward to this because we really love Turnover and Touché Amoré.

Jem: You can’t just do boring stuff. We try to do fun stuff, we make it happen. We prefer to drive through the night, less in the Winter, to go swimming somewhere and have time before the show.

Matt: I guess because we’re playing with bands that are more relevant to us on this tour, it seems that most of the people that are at the shows actually already have an idea of who we are and what we’re about, which is pretty cool.



Joel: We have like our own different family in every city, families in every city. In Melbourne, we have a big group of friends and family that are part of our circle, who do art for us, who do photos for us, who cook for us, who just hang out with us, and we have the same thing in Brisbane, we have the same thing in Adelaide, we have the same thing in Perth, same thing in Sydney. Jem is very intentional about having bands stay with him in Sydney. It goes both ways … you’ve got to be in it together.

Matt: Me and Jem were even talking about it and we were saying to each other it’s probably the biggest melodic hardcore show seen in Sydney in ever, if not in like ten years or so.

Joel: I feel like we’re in a kind of unique position because the five of us have been like, essentially best friends since we were in the start of high school, and we’ve all been in the same band, we’ve never had a member change since we started, and we started when we were 15. I’m 24 now.

Jem: We’ve had the opportunity to play massive rooms such as the Factory Theatre, the Corner Hotel, the Triffid, and see this music live, not on a dramatic scale, with 500, 600 people. But at the same time, this music is like punk rock, hard core music, you know, it’s meant to be enjoyed intimately… it’s kind of nice because you can just focus on more how you play than trying to get people to come on the journey with you, so that’s been a bit of relief.

Jem: It’s really good to be able to experience both worlds on this tour, as opposed to playing only big shows or only small shows, you know.
Matt: Now we recognise these things that we need to work on, we just want to make everything better so that when we play on big stages it sounds fucking great.

Matt: It’s cool because we’ve all kind of got our own shit going on back home and I don’t see these guys a whole lot outside of the band, but then we all come together as a band and it’s the best time. It’s actually crazy, coming up this year is actually, I’ve known Joel for two decades.

Jem: I think we also have a very, very strange sense of humour that only us five understand, and even to some extent we don’t actually understand each other sometimes.

Matt: Another thing that keeps us really sane when we’re on tour together is that we all fucking love going out and exploring things. We always go and find a sick waterfall to go swim in, or go to the beach, or like. There’s always like, meeting up with other mates from these places and they’ll take us to their special spots.

Jem: It’s actually nice, we were flying a little bit more than usual this year, just because flights were cheap for some reason this year, and now they’re not again, so we’ve been driving again, but it’s been really nice just to hang out again properly.

Jem: Playing small rooms forever, you can feel the guitars, you can feel the bass, you can feel … it’s rock music, you know, you can feel it kind of around you. So it’s easier to get that adrenaline rush kick into gear. On a big stage, sometimes the lighting so strong, you can’t even see anyone when we start …

Joel: I traditionally have just jumped around the entire set like a crazy person, and I still have that in my mind, or in the performance, but it’s something I’m very conscious of now … I still tend to get a bit too excited and lost in the music, which is not necessarily a bad thing, I just want to be able to do both a bit better. It needs to translate well live, but I also can’t let go of that little DIY hardcore kid inside of me that has to move you know!

Joel: We’re just first and foremost really good friends so it’s very easy for us to travel together. It’s very easy for us to tour because we’re just friends. You know, it really is just like being round your best friends all the time.



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