Outfit

Tom and Chris from Liverpool unclassifiables Outfit spent the early part of their friendship dressed as H.R. Giger’s Alien, running around a science museum terrifying the visitors. Various members of the fivepiece band lived in a house with 23 people that regularly hosted their early gigs, watched by hundreds of fans. Both of these nuggets of information have been variously pulled apart and discounted by bloggers and magazines alike, but Tom is adamant that everything’s true.

“I won’t lie, we were amazing aliens,” he says, deadly serious. “We were really shit-hot at that job, the best there. Kids would be crying and would have to be led out, so it was quite harrowing… I wouldn’t lie to you.” So it’s true, then, and the bloggers are all wrong (the idiots) – but that means there could be a ton of information out there about the band that simply isn’t true. “The strangest thing we’ve heard about ourselves is that none of that stuff is true. We’ve also had a few reviews recently where they talk about songs we haven’t played. But the house always gets mentioned.” Now, we’re envisaging some sort of terrifying commune with cheap, nasty drugs and lots of scrapping, but it sounds more utopian than that: “The song ‘Two Islands’ was written specifically about that house, and about the idea of social saturation. Living with a large group of musicians looking to push themselves… I guess we took it for granted. That house was very well-known in Liverpool.”

If there’s one thing that all the coverage of Outfit seems to mention, it’s the idea of mystery. Despite admitting an admiration for the way bands like
WU LYF have managed to cultivate a huge following by deliberately using mystery and sketchiness when it comes to cold, hard facts, Outfit aren’t
mysterious – not in the slightest. The press has mistaken mystery for nothing more than a lack of information. “There’s so much information about bands that people just don’t need. We wanted to be quite militant about what we gave people, because we just wanted to give people interesting stuff. It’s not a deliberate thing that we’re into, creating this impenetrable wall of mystery around our band. It’s like that horrible old ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’ thing.” Perhaps too much has already been made of the supposed mystery of Outfit, and not enough about their songs, which are uniformly charming. There’s an EP in the works now, and there will be an album in the second half of the year. Basically, they’re in it for the long haul (“I want to sign records in Japan…”). This is pop, wrenched out of its bindings and subverted. It’s impish, dark and insidious – but not so much that you won’t love every second of it.