With their debut album, Performance, dropping this week on Double Denim, August is looking set to be a very big month for Liverpudlian five-piece Outfit. We caught up with three members of the group – brothers Andrew and Nick Hunt, and Thomas Gorton – for a chat about their recent involvement with Electronic Voice Phenomena, their desire to produce a timeless record with Performance and how the hyper-speed modern world in which we live can be damaging for listening habits.
PlanetNotion: You’ve recently got involved with Electronic Voice Phenomena. How did that collaboration come about?
Andrew Hunt: Nathan who’s the producer of the show used to work with lots of different literary events around Liverpool. I met him because I worked as a technician part of the time and so I’d worked with him on quite a professional basis a few times.
Nick Hunt: Tom, you’ve done some writing for him haven’t you?
Thomas Gorton: Yeah, I’ve done some writing for Mercy, some poetry for their bi-annual podcast. I’d known him through writing, really.
AH: It came round to having this tour that they were organising and we’d just got to know him quite well so we had a lot of shared interests; Nick and I DJ’ed at one of their events last year at Café OTO with this weird DVD DJ set where we just used the soundtracks from films without people being able to see what was playing.
NH: It wasn’t even the soundtrack; we just played an episode of Yes Minister that’s all about arts funding. We just put that through a load of guitar effects.
AH: A really, really odd DJ set.
NH: I remember thinking this is the most Shoreditch thing I’ve ever done.
PN: The piece that you did for EVP was based around the concept of hidden messages in music, particularly the Judas Priest court case. What was it about this that appealed to you as musicians?
AH: Well, if you’re a band that’s being asked to look at EVP, we thought it would be good to do something that’s band-related rather than more poetic things.
NH: Electronic Voice Phenomena is all about hidden messages.
AH: Having been into metal bands as kids, it made sense for us to look for hidden messages in the music. It was quite an amusing and clichéd way of looking at it. The story itself, though, that’s told in a documentary we watched about it, is absolutely heartbreaking. It’s very touching and incredibly sad, so it did provide quite a good backdrop for writing a piece of music.
TG: There was a lot of emotional content in the story of the kid who survived, who was left disfigured for the rest of his life from the shotgun wound, and his mum’s involvement – especially within the documentary where you get a real sense of the broken family.
AH: And the denial that she had nothing to do with her son’s unhappiness. Her way of constructing this court case was saying that the music was to blame.
NH: That needs so much complicity with courts, and lawyers being prepared to take that case on: it’s this big cultural deceit that people have been failed by the society they’re in, or at least not helped. And that then you should look for some surface bogeyman to blame rather than any sort of introspective consideration of where that comes from. It’s a really shallow way of looking at human emotions, to say, ‘well, it can’t have been from anything internal because I have no respect for the idea of the interior life, so it must have been something else. Since they’re really depressed and the only thing they did in their lives was hang out together and listen to metal, then it’s got to be the metal.’
TG: Music, especially metal if you look at someone like Marilyn Manson being held responsible for school shootings, has always been something that people will try to blame things on it and see it as the devil; a catalyst for disaster.
AH: We’ve grown up with those things, but the music’s such a support network when you’re young and feeling alienated. That subculture – the nerdy, dark kids – was such a supportive one.
PN: It’s a way of finding some self-esteem.
NH: Exactly. It’s such a definitive identity that you can be a part of.
PN: It must have got quite heavy engrossing yourself to such an extent within that subject matter?
AH: Well, it got a lot more emotional the more we read about it. Looking into the case more certainly made us more cautious about making too declarative a statement about what had happened because that’s intrusive.
TG: I found that emotionally throughout playing the piece, especially on the last night of performing it, we began to engage so much more with the content as it went on.
PN: Moving on to Performance, which is out this week, what can you tell us about the record sonically?
NH: It’s a psychedelic record.
AH: It brings together a lot of our musical influences in a more concise way than we’ve ever done before. It’s certainly got an optimism to it; I think it’s starting to let a little more light into our sound compared to what we’ve done in the past. It’s certainly got a 70s psych thing going on. There were a couple of albums that were really important influences when we were making it: we were listening to Another Green World by Brian Eno and Sowiesoso by Cluster. They both helped to inform the sound world we were working in, not necessarily the songwriting but the vibe, the composition and the mix.
NH: We didn’t want to make something that sounded really shiny and brand new; we wanted it to sound lost in time, not like a retro thing: timeless.
TG: I think there’s far more light in terms of lyrical content – there’s more of a strident independence about it. Songs like ‘Want What’s Best’, ‘Nothing Big’ or ‘The Great Outdoors’ are far more optimistic and looking towards something, whereas perhaps previously we were slightly introspective.
AH: In terms of the process of doing it, we moved back to Liverpool from London and we moved into this empty block of flats that was perfect for us. It had this big room on the ground floor where we set up a studio and we were living right above it so we could use it at any time, day or night. We really did everything we could to give ourselves as much control as possible over the whole process, and the time in which to do it, which is another thing that we’ve always tried to do in the band. Perhaps we could have capitalised more on the early hype but only by knocking out a shitty album; we wanted to take our time on it.
PN: On that note, did the hype you received prior to the EP coming out, and the plaudits you gained after it, affect the way you approached the album?
AH: I don’t think so, really. I think what’s strange for us now is when you read things saying, ‘where the hell have these guys been?’ We released the EP in May and had finished the record by March, and we were playing a lot of gigs and festivals over the summer…
NH: Not to mention having lives…
TG: The idea that we should have released ‘Two Islands’ and then the EP, and then had an album ready in three months is crazy.
AH: It’s a crippling mindset. It’s damaging to bands.
TG: Yeah, because they’re just going to rush stuff out.
PN: I think that’s one of the sad things that the rise of the internet has done to the music industry, that everyone has to be so on it all the time.
AH: It’s like when you have people that post up 10 new tracks a day: that’s an incomprehensible rate of music to try to consume. You can’t put up 10 good tracks that you’re really into every day. That’s pretty much scouring for whatever’s been released that day. It’s a great way to discover new music but I would find that as a listener a really, really hard way to consume music: things need longer to gestate.
PN: Something that I’ve noticed a lot in the past when people have written about you as a band is your eclecticism in terms of influences. Has that got frustrating hearing that over and over? I mean surely we’re all fairly eclectic as people?
TG: Again, it comes back to the fact that very early on people want to decide who you are as a band and then they’re dissatisfied if those expectations aren’t met. We did ‘Two Islands’ and maybe we could have done an album with 10 ‘Two Islands’, but why would we? We wanted to experiment a bit more on the EP in terms of new sounds, textures and songwriting. At the core of our band is a very specific sound; I don’t think we sound like crossover material that’s gone before. It’s natural that as a band and as musicians, we’d want to experiment.
PN: I remember reading about the influence if dystopian literature and film on your music. What are your favourite fictional dystopias, whether on the page or on the screen?
NH: Mine’s a pretty boring one: 1984.
AH: Not to go with another big-hitter, but I quite like the comparison between Brave New World and 1984. There seems to be quite a cycling feeling where 1984 runs against this totalitarian surveillance society and there are times where that seems like that might be encroaching on us. I think the idea of Brave New World that says that authoritarianism won’t wear that kind of costume anymore, and it will come in and give you things and tell you that you need them. And that’s then set up to say, ‘these people are from outside. They want to take that away from you so you need to protect it,’ – I think that’s a lot more insidious. You can always say, ‘oh no, this is too Orwellian,’ and be looking out for the next Hitler, but the next Hitler won’t dress like Hitler or do 1984-type things. The next controlling people will do that sort of thing by getting you to want that control. I think that’s very true of our society at the moment. You look at the way that the anti-terrorist debate in America is structured: ‘These people hate America; they hate your freedom; they hate your way of life.’ That’s very obviously deceitful.
PN: Outside of the album coming out this month, and the shows around that. What are you most looking forward to for the rest of 2013?
NH: Seeing my girlfriend. She lives in New York. I’m quite looking forward to making some other music in my bedroom on my own.
TG: I’m really excited for people hearing the songs that we’ve had in our heads for over a year.
AH: I’ve got a renewed enthusiasm for the album following on from an initial slump after finishing it where you go, ‘ah, I’m bored now.’ I remember just how excited we all were when we first started working on the early versions of these songs. It’s like trying to get back to that place in your head where you imagine how exciting it would be hearing a song for the first time again. I really think it’s a beautiful record and people are going to love it.
- Alex Cull
Performance is available now on Double Denim. You can order it here.