Static Dress: “I don’t have the ‘cool guy’ mentality… I still freak out that I get to do this”

Olli Appleyard remembers it well. Stood onstage at the Camden Underworld with his Static Dress bandmates – anonymous masked guitarist Contrast, drummer Sam Ogden and then-bassist Connor Reilly – the quartet were playing their biggest-ever London headliner to a sold-out crowd, having released their killer debut album Rouge Carpet Disaster three months earlier. It’s a moment they’d been dreaming of since they formed in Leeds and sharpened their art in the midst of the COVID lockdown. But for Olli, the feeling was hardly celebratory. “That show nearly killed me,” he admits today. ​“It was horrific. I ended up in hospital with respiratory issues after we played. After about two songs I started to feel faint, and then later I began blacking out between tracks. I&nb...