Backstage With Shelf Lives, Baby

We recently had the opportunity to connect with Shelf Lives during their latest tour to delve into their experiences on the road.

Electronic punk duo, Shelf Lives, have been touring. A lot. In Liverpool for their own tour, having previously supported Skunk Anansie, I catch up backstage with the dazzling personalities and remarkable talents of Sabrina di Giulio and Jonny Hillyard.

Sabrina came to the UK aged 13 from Toronto, seeing in England the greatest opportunity to break into music and with an Italian passport to boot. Jonny, who grew up in Northampton, came to London with musical ambitions after studying production. In 2023, the two were selected as NME and Band Lab’s artist for Get Featured; they’ve played Glastonbury, and they’ve had their records out: album Yes, Offence (2022), mini album You Okay? (2023) and single Where Did I go? (2024).

[Claudia] You’re on tour! It’s your headline tour… how is it?

[Sabrina]: Good! I like it! Scary.

[Jonny]: I think it’s more scary being support. This tour, we’re with our friends- a little crew. Our manager, Amy, was our best friend before she was our manager and [our sound engineer], Jamie, is my best friend.

[Sabrina]: With a headline tour, you want your support acts to feel comfortable, you want the audience to feel good, the promoters, your manager, the booking agent. But at the end of the day… maybe I actually don’t give that much of a fuck about them [all laugh].

[Claudia]: You really put yourselves out there on stage. Do you find that difficult?

[Sabrina] Yeah! This is a really hot rom and you tend to lose steam really quickly. I’ve spent time before gigs thinking ‘I don’t even know how I’m going to do this.’ And then some sort of weird adrenaline kicks in. What’s difficult is doing shows in a row at that high energy- but that’s what we chose!

[Claudia] Take me to the point before Shelf Lives. What were you doing?

[Jonny]: I had one small band- me and a friend who’s now our sound engineer. I stopped and went into composing for multimedia- TV, trailers, whatever I could do to fucking pay rent!

[Sabrina]: I worked at sync, television production companies, labels, publishing at Universal, and music supervision companies. Shelf Lives was inspired by a sync opportunity we had, where we got to work together. And we were like ‘oh, maybe we should do some more stuff in this vein […] add some swear words and write about stuff that we actually care to talk about, not following a brief.

[Jonny]: Sabrina was really into rock music, I was extremely into electronic and hip hop music. And I think those two worlds kind of came together.

[Claudia]: Was there a moment where you thought “I’ve made it”?

[Jonny]: No way! There’s been a couple of [really cool] moments.

[Sabrina]: There’s always a line or goal and once you reach it, you’re like ‘what’s the next thing?’ Unsolicited advice to all the bands out there- enjoy every little milestone.

[Jonny]: Comparison is the thief of joy. Everything’s a bonus, so that’s how we look at it!

[Claudia]: What does a day on tour look like? What did you do today?

[Jonny]: You’ve got to find out how long it takes to drive [to the venue], have some food, drive to the venue at the right time.

[Sabrina]: It’s a lot of driving. [Jonny] It’s really boring actually [all laugh].

[Sabrina] It’s a lot of pee breaks- and- synchronise the crew’s pee breaks, everybody. Otherwise, you will be stopping constantly.

Synchronising the eating as well and snacks. Driving, snacking, stopping for food, synchronising pee breaks, getting to the venue, doing your soundcheck. [Jonny]: going to have some food. [Sabrina]: going to have some more food, changing, coming back to the venue. [Jonny] Waiting around. [Sabrina]: Lot’s of waiting. Maybe doing an interview.

[Jonny]: Yeah, it’s really boring. And then you hit the stage and you do all of this shit for five or six hours.

[Sabrina]: Do your vocal warmups, do your stretches as well, especially if you’re banging your head around! Man, that hurts the next day.

[Jonny]: It’s call a bangover- if you bang your head, your neck can be pretty sore the next day.

[Sabrina]: And it usually doesn’t start until like two or three pm the next day. So, you think you’re fine until midday and then you’re fucked.

[Jonny]: You basically strangle yourself on stage.

[Sabrina]: And then you play a show, load out, you maybe sleep, maybe go for a drink first then you do it all over again the next day- unless you have a day off.

[Claudia] How do you get your creative juices flowing?

[Jonny]: I listen to music and try to keep a really open mind. If inspiration comes and hits you, you just have to act on it and it’s really difficult to do that. We’re constantly writing and producing […] I feel like I’m always in the creative juices

[Sabrina]: It’s natural when you’re touring a lot [to] hit some moments where you feel like you have nothing left. But all you have to do is start listening to music, read, experience things… take a fucking walk! [all laugh].

A lot of things we talk about are just experiences- going out with friends, people you experience in a public setting, an emotion that you feel rather than a political statement. Sometimes it just sounds cool.

[Jonny]: To be honest, that’s a lot of the times!

[Claudia] You touch on some pretty serious issues in your records [Sabrina, jokingly] Do we? [All laugh]. What role does politics play in your music?

[Sabrina] In Skirts and Salads, we played on gender stereotypes [as if] everyone liked those stereotypes. We were just being facetious with it, we found it fun. You hear a lot of songs talking about gender roles or how a woman should feel- blah, blah, blah. We wanted to flip it a bit and put it in a light manner. We do that a lot in our songs to make issues easier to digest- it’s like putting a bit of chocolate syrup on it!

[Jonny] Yeah. The line from Skirts and Salads “I like my girls like that” just sounded cool as well! It kind of went off. We never sit there and go “what should we write about”. It’s subconscious.

[Sabrina]: All the Problems is about men not being able to be emotionally vulnerable. We got quite dark with it. It was how an emotionally stagnant man can be pushed so far that he gets violent publicly.

[Jonny]: The most extreme version of that is a mass shooting and that’s where that meaning came from.

[Sabrina]: It’s reminding people to nurture emotions.  

What do you want listeners to take from or do as a result of your music? Are you trying to inspire any activism?

[Jonny]: I just want you to hear it, get what you want from it, and do what you want with it. I wouldn’t try to control anyone.

[Sabrina]: I’m not sure we expect anyone to do anything- we’re not that type of band really. If you want to be an activist about it, fuck yeah! If you want to listen and come up with a story about [the music], make up a character about who you think that song is about, write it down and never show anyone, that’s really cool. Well, show me!

[Claudia]: How does live compare with being in the studio for you?

[Jonny]: Sometimes I hate being on stage, sometimes I hate being in the studio. If I’m gigging a lot, I really miss the studio and I don’t feel creative. But then, when I’m in the studio, you feel like a sloth and you need to move your body.

[Claudia]: Do you have a pre-show ritual that you’ll use to hype yourselves up for tonight?

[Sabrina]: We just jump around.

[Jonny]: We don’t have much of a routine- music really does help, jumping around, running around.

[Sabrina]: Like a boxer or an athlete, [putting] headphones in.

[Jonny]: It’s something we try not to do… But drinking alcohol really does help!

[Sabrina]: I personally don’t like drinking before a gig- super rock n’ roll. But I don’t mind a shot of tequila. It gets me hyped.

[Claudia]: Do you have anything in mind for your warm-up playlist?

[Jonny]: I usually listen to Turnstile. They hit just right.

[Claudia]: Thanks so much for squeezing me in after soundcheck and whatever mission you were on before. I got a mysterious message from your manager earlier to reschedule [all laugh]- what were you up to?

[Both]: Pizza slices!

[Jonny]: We went to American pizza slice.

[Sabrina]: It was soo good! Fully endorse. By the time we finish our gig, everything’s closed- unless it’s McDonald’s and we’ve hit our quota for McDonald’s already.

[Jonny]: We’ve had it once.

[Sabrina]: That’s our quota.

[Jonny]: I at least try to leave a four-year gap between each one. It’s bad for you.