The Hospital Club Sessions: Outfit Interview

- Photographer: Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

Sitting in front of a barrel full of our favourite childhood sweets, Outfit are in an excitable mood. The five piece have just wrapped up filming tracks for The Hospital Club Sessions – a series of groundbreaking videos filmed using 360 degree camera angles, allowing the viewer to select the camera and stance from which they wish to view the sessions. Celebrating with Refreshers and Wham! bars, the band chat enthusiastically about the videos that they’ve just created. “We’ve done a few sessions recently, but that one was so slick – totally pro! We brought the dangly lights ourselves, we made those over the weekend,” says vocalist Andy Hunt, as we join him and bandmate Tom Gorton to find out what the band have been up to recently.

Watch Outfit play ‘Dashing In Passing’ as part of The Hospital Sessions here.

We’ve heard there’s been a move from your previous residence of Liverpool to the bright lights of the Big Smoke…

Andy: There has been a move, and to be honest, it’s quite reflective in the songs . Certainly two of them, ‘Humbolts’ and ‘Everything All The Time’ are about having to get used to a new environment and the fears that go with that. A feeling of ambition, balanced against nerves and being worried about what life is going to do, so the move’s been really important in defining the mood of the EP. And it was made under quite difficult circumstances. We’d just moved so we all had to get jobs and stuff, so we were busy all the time and we were trying to write and record songs, so it was quite stressful in a way. I think the EP is quite tense and neurotic sounding, and I think that very much reflects the state of mind.

Tom: But quite exciting as well, there’s a lot of energy in the EP.

Andy: Yeah, I like to think there’s an optimism in the stuff we do, even if it’s downcast. Light at the end of the tunnel. The EP feels very much like the culmination of the last 6 months being down in London.

Having previously all lived in the notorious Lodge in Liverpool, how has the band dynamic changed now that you’re dealing with a new city? Do you still all live and work together?

A: We nearly all live together! Tom lives away… He has his independence!

T: I live five minutes down the road. But Andy misses me.

A: We used to be best friends. Until we moved to London.

T: We’re going to get back together, we’ll all live together again eventually but yeah… Andy calls me. A lot.

A: We’re mostly all together though so the atmosphere has remained, and we work on music a lot together. We still live in each others pockets, but at the Lodge, there were more ‘pockets’ to dilute. It was amazing there because we were surrounded by people doing similar things, it was inspiring and we could have parties and stuff. I think I’ll look back on it as being one of the most exciting times of my life. It was a definite phase of our existence.

Photographer: Sara Amroussi-Gilissen

As musicians, what kind of inspiration have you been able to take from such a big change?

T: I think there’s a reflection of us moving from somewhere that we know very well, where the pace of life is much different, it’s much slower in Liverpool and I guess we knew every street and everywhere there was to go. Then we came down here and I think the impact as musicians has been reflected in the EP, and I guess when we’re more settled here and doing our album, it might be slightly different. I don’t think it’s necessarily made us better musicians or anything like that, but in terms of the art of the output, there’s been a really impact.

A: I think we’ve all felt quite stretched to our full limits down in London, so I definitely think we’re also trying to do that musically. Whether or not we’d be doing that in Liverpool… it definitely feels like an important change.

And the band’s work ethic, has that remained the same?

A: We tend to write a lot… They don’t always reach the end of the line, so we have a lot of scraps lying about. Sometimes we’ll revisit, or we’ll have an old song and rearrange it, we recycle things lot. Because we’ve all played in lots of different bands and made music on our own, so we do a lot of looking back through files.

T: We all make music independently as well and I guess we write things with the intention of them eventually being for Outfit, but a lot of it’s just for fun as well, just messing around with different styles. It’s good, it’s exciting.

A: We’ve got a lot of fragments of songs. We’re trying to stock pile songs at the moment. We’ll take this many and put them on the album, then the rest can just sit around for the next one! Maybe we’ll get to three albums in and have no creativity left so we’ll have to go back and recycle all of our ideas.

T: Isn’t that what Oasis did?

A: I model most of what I do on what Oasis did.

Speaking of the album, is there a date pencilled in yet – and what’s the next year looking like for Outfit?

T: Early 2013 we hope, for the album.

A: The way I see it, the project we’re going to do now is the album. That’s going to take up every fibre of our being I imagine. I think it’ll be very consuming, I already feel very distracted by it now.

A: We were in a band before this and we had an album recorded but it never really… I think we just lost the impetus to do anything with it.

T: Well we were thinking about doing other things and got distracted.

A: We’re very easily distracted, but we’re very interested and I think we’re often drawn to doing different things. But this is the good thing about Outfit, I feel like Outfit is a much more concentrated effort. It feels much easier to focus on making something that is Outfit as opposed to different bands we’ve played in where anything goes.