A Chat with Outside Now (07.07.23)

Drawing together the broad talents and influences of their musicians, Outside Now is an almost undefinable fivesome from Manchester. We speak with rhythm guitarist Clayton James about Outside Now’s album Dream House, What music means to him, future plans and more.

OSR: Rather cliché but how did Outside Now form? What drew you all together to create music?

James: I (rhythm guitar and main songwriter) met Danny Gage (drums) when I was invited to join a math-rock band by a mutual friend back in 2015. That band was going absolutely nowhere, but I think we both recognised each other’s talent and that vital musical rapport; so, we’ve been playing together ever since in multiple primordial iterations of, what is now, Outside Now. When the Covid lockdown came into effect one of these previous incarnations had a half-finished EP, but we were losing motivation and struggling with creative differences, so I decided to jettison everything and everyone except Dan and just start over. I was determined to just make what I had always envisioned without compromise. Outside Now really started then.

I met George Richards (lead guitar) through our original singer/my ex-girlfriend. Peter Hartley (bass) responded to a Gumtree ad around summer 2021. He said he was impressed by the bizarre sound and wanted in. Aisha Toussaint (singer) sauntered into my life through the open mic scene in central Manchester.

I had the rough outline for the album and was trying to put a band together in tandem. It can be interpreted as nothing short of divine providence that all of the right people just drifted together. I already had this relatively well-defined proof of concept that I would send to prospective people, and I was pretty clear that we wouldn’t just be doing two-chord vamps; that it’s heady stuff, hanging over the precipice of pretentiousness. So, like moths to flames, it drew in people who also wanted to make outlandish, uncompromising music.

OSR: What does music mean to you?

James: Music is very strange. It’s just vibrations, and for some reason, the entire human race can deftly perceive the mathematical ratios between two or more vibrations. Though what emotions certain intervals invoke changes across cultures, we ascribe, near-universally, immeasurable meaning to these vibrations. Even to describe music in this kind of dry, hyper-rational terms would hopefully strike most people as terribly unromantic. Missing the point.

To me, it is the most transcendent form of artistic expression. Many of our other forms, seem to me, more grounded in the corporeal and the earthly. I’m thinking like cinema or dance or sculpture. Things have form, they have colours and shapes and measurements. Music, by comparison, is formless, existing purely as a function of time. It’s incredibly abstract and yet feels so profound and moving and personal. It is no great mystery to me why the ancient Greeks believed in the harmony of the seven spheres. Great music can’t help but impose transcendence in people’s lives, even in those people who think we’re all just lines and graphs and clumps of dead matter spiralling around a cold and ambivalent universe. It is an honour to dedicate my life to what small service I can offer to these divine forces.

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OSR: What can you tell us about your debut album Dream House? Is there a backstory or theme to it?

James: The name Outside Now is taken from the 1979 Frank Zappa album Joe’s Garage, one of my favourite albums, and Zappa is obviously a huge influence on the music. He had this idea of, what he called, “conceptual continuity” where everything he did should be taken as part of one grand piece of work that was his entire artistic output. In that vein, I’ve had this idea gestating for years regarding each album being titled something-house, with every album having its own motifs, vibes and blending of styles. It provides a loose frame for us to decorate with songs and imply these overarching themes musically and lyrically. In the end, I want to have constructed this entire, uncanny street in the memory palace. You are outside now, on the street, with each album beckoning you inside.

So, I decided to start with ‘Dream House’ as I had just written ‘I Keep Falling’, which is about falling asleep on the train home from work; and that jarring, falling feeling when you suddenly bolt up. I thought, at the time, I’ll use this as the centrepiece to build the rest of the album around. I also felt it was a good place to start as, in my mind, all art is dreams fundamentally. It starts in the mind and we’re just extracting our dreams onto canvas or tape or whatever your medium is. So, we start the series with dreams as the proof of concept, then we can move on from there.

There are musical motifs sprinkled throughout the whole thing but that I’ll leave for the music nerds to exhaustively excavate. Lyrically, and this is where you ask me to explain the hyper-modernist, autobiographical fever dream, there’s a lot going on. It’s pretty dark. We start in the realm of the fantastical, with ‘Follow The Slope Down’ being quite an oblique reference to things like Alice in Wonderland, Dante’s Inferno or anything where the main character descends into the otherworld. Until we hit the ‘Nadir’. We’re still in this haze of dreamy imagery, but maybe it’s occurred to you by now that we seem to keep pining or longing for something, something we’ve already lost, something unattainable.

I’ve said I think this album is primarily about failure. Even the title ‘Dream House’ is me kind of mocking myself and everyone else. Your dream house is something you’ll never afford, something that is becoming ever increasingly a pipe dream. I like playing with juxtaposition, even so far as opening an album you’d think would be about the night, with birds chirping and the title referring to the sun rising. The album quickly slides from cartoonish, nightmarish imagery into the very real and mundane as exemplified in things like ‘Another Day’. Your waking life is the nightmare. We’re all sleepwalking in a post-modern malaise of unreality. Whether you’re asleep on the train or glued to your phone. Night, day. What’s the difference? ‘Overlooked, Overseen’ is juxtaposition again, lyrically the densest song, probably my favourite, and the most savage. I slip in dealings with my own frustrations as a musician, but mostly it’s about our atomisation. Feeling utterly alone despite us all being, on paper, more “connected” than ever. They’re always watching and listening for their own nefarious reasons, but you can’t tease anyone out of the hole in your hand.

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Staying on the theme of juxtaposition: with ‘I Keep Falling’ and songs like ‘Another Day’, I like to take something really mundane, like riding the train home from working my dreadfully dull office job, and turn it into this resplendent musical epic.

‘Last Orders’ is kind of tacked on at the end. The album proper ends with ‘Recklessly Enchanted’, which is mainly ‘Wheeling Empire Bright’ being played in reverse, followed by a very soft, low guitar part playing ‘Dream House’ in reverse. I had envisioned ‘ Last Orders’ as the “I want” song from a musical, like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, but here I want to drink myself to oblivion because I’ve lost everything and what’s the point? ‘Nowhere over the rainbow’.

I didn’t come up with the title ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’, that bit of wordplay came from one of my best friends. This is from when we were in a band together when were like sixteen. He gave all our songs these oh-so-clever titles like ‘It’s Not Revolution It’s Just a Turn on The Wheel’. He just offhandedly mentioned ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ to me once and it stuck with me. Then, when I wrote the actual song, nearly a decade ago now, I was reading the Aeneid at the time and the lyrics were inspired by the part of the story where Dido took her own life after Aeneas departs. My friend was a huge Dylan fanboy and I think I’ve forever internalised the same penchant for meandering, referential, over-intellectualised lyrics.

But honestly, I just needed to start this journey somewhere and besides ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ and ‘Last Orders’ which I had written back in 2014-2015, everything else is just stuff I was kicking around at the time. It’s hard to describe the actual process of it coming together without going into granular detail about the influences and ideas behind each piece. These things tend to just fall out of the sky while you’re in a trance. I just happen to have an amazing network of people around me, so you take these skeletal ideas and have a dozen or so exceptional musical minds all working towards creating something lavish and grand.

OSR: What do you hope people take from your music?

James: I just hope, at some point, there’s some tragic fourteen-year-old out there that is moved to the same degree by our work as I was when I first listened to Close to The Edge or Dark Side of The Moon or something like that. Growing up in a culture that largely teaches us to sneer and collectively rolls our eyes that approaches everything with this detached irony; that deconstructs everything and replaces it with nothing is living in a wasteland of meaning. It’s a small contribution, but we’re trying to make something unapologetically sincere that speaks to our current condition. It’s dark and melancholic sure, what other choice do we have? I’m only speaking on my behalf, but Dream House is a microcosm of an entire generation of people who have been discarded; who are thought about as mere economic units, as lines on graphs. Past and future eroded. Completely lost. Overlooked, overseen. People with no good place. I hope people can resonate with that. That means neither they or I have to feel quite so alone. I hope it moves people, either as escapism or as a commentary on our stark reality.

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OSR: What makes Outside Now unique as a group?

James: We’re not overly concerned with compromising our vision for the sake of popularity. We’re not abandoning musical ideas because they’re not marketable, because they don’t appeal to the broad plurality. We presume a level of intelligence and openness to the new and novel in our audience. We’re five people from very different musical backgrounds and, in writing music, I try to write music that we can all vibe with. So, you have this mishmash of disparate elements. Don’t get me wrong,  this is the age of the virtuoso, you can find examples of people performing the most extraordinary musical feats, devising the most diabolical, insane music. We’re not doing anything particularly impressive by comparison. We have progressive sensibilities but that doesn’t remove the fact that you were just writing a 30s-style jazz standard, or a 90s grunge anthem, or something that, on its own, could fit comfortably anywhere in the last fifty years. We are children of the post-modern era. I think it’s inevitable that we produce something with a loose sense of temporality. Something uncanny, haunted by nostalgia. While paradoxically being from nowhere. Something splintered and fractured. No sense of place or time or purpose.

But it’s easy, you have a math rock drummer, a contemporary, jazz-obsessed bassist, a vocalist who loves Beyonce with a background in singing choral music, a versatile soloist who looks up to people like Jeff Beck and Steve Howe, and a rhythm guitarist with jazz sensibilities trying to cram all those inspirations and more into complex but accessible pop music. People have told us that our music is hard to define in terms of genre, which is the best compliment anyone could give us. The idea of sticking to a genre is drab and stultifying. Surely we can move past such crude notions.

OSR: Looking at your discography, I see you’ve collaborated with various artists including the lead writer from Sylvette on Dream House. What do you think are the benefits and drawbacks of collaboration?

James: I honestly don’t think there are any drawbacks from our experience. We will continue to work with Pip from Sylvette and their orchestral friends in all of our endeavours. That goes for Max Cooper who is the wonderfully eclectic musician who provided the gongs, sitars, music boxes, bongos, bells, etc. It goes for Charlie Powell who played the keys on ‘I Keep Falling’. James Hamilton who provided the flugelhorn on ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’. Andy Hawkins at The Nave studio who mixes and edits our final products and generally provides wisdom and guidance. Anthony Wilkinson, an exceptional soloist, who performed the solo on ‘Another Day’. All of these people are an integral part of the sound we’ve created. Incorporating these elements live as a fixture of the band, or not as it were, is entirely down to a lack of resources, not imagination. I don’t tell anyone what to play outside of the broadest instructions. As I said, all the right people just happened to fall out of the sky. I want the band to be seen as more of a loose collective with core members. I wouldn’t approach anyone for collaboration if I didn’t already believe it would fit together perfectly.

People are busy, and sometimes you get things later than you would hope; but that’s a far better experience than I’ve had with other previous bands where everyone, including myself, is completely strung out on drugs and alcohol, just wants an excuse to party and nothing of any substance gets done. We’re all relatively sober professionals here.

OSR: A few random questions: what is the best and worst piece of advice you have received?

James: Easily the worst advice I ever received is don’t record a song you can’t perform live. My uncle said this to me and I couldn’t disagree more. The performability of any given piece is a matter of resources. If I had my way we’d have an orchestra, pianist, backing singers, a dazzling visual display, instruments sprawled out all over the stage. We’d be doing Roger Waters, minus all his cringy boomerisms. We don’t perform ‘I Keep Falling’ live simply because it sounds a bit empty with just five people. That doesn’t mean we can’t do it in the future at some point. I am not concerned in the slightest whether any given piece we record is “performable”. We may record songs and never perform them as long as we live. There’s a false equivalence being drawn here between watching a band live and listening to a recorded piece of music. We have a setlist that is crafted for performance by the five of us, where we are, now.

Best advice? Probably that you should just be happy with being about 80% satisfied with your work and move on. A discipline that is hard to manifest. Everyone is a perfectionist and here we’re trying to take these temples we construct in our head and translate them into actuality. I said me and Dan have been playing together now for maybe seven years, and it’s taken us this long to release anything. I think that’s mainly due to never being satisfied, being overly pedantic, and constantly wanting to rework things. Dream House is our first release and is, undoubtedly, a little rough around the edges, as you’d expect, but you take those lessons and move on. You’ll never get anything exactly as you want it, and trying to will only bring on stagnation and frustration. That advice is the reason I’m talking to you now.

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OSR: If you could rid the world of disease, what would it be?

James: I’d rather not be drawn into a discussion on the efficacy of positive or negative eugenics in this magazine article about a quaint little band from up North. I am at peace and oneness with the world, including the toenail fungus, conjoined twins and the malignant tumours the size of grapefruits. I’d say dementia at a push. Forgetting yourself; your loved ones having to watch you deteriorate into a ghost; for someone to have their own mother look back at them like a stranger is a sadness I can scarcely fathom.

OSR: What is your favourite day of the week?

James: Thursday. The coming weekend is nothing but potential, it hasn’t yet been pissed up the wall. Friday will be easy and, in Eccles, Thursday means jam night.

OSR: What can we expect from Outside Now in the future??

James: Oodles. Our next release will be a cover of ‘The Thrill is Gone’, the jazz standard, not the B.B. King song. That should be ready within the next couple of months. I’d originally intended on putting it on the album; but decided I wanted ‘Bridget, It’s Too Far to Jump’ to really stand out, and it otherwise disrupted the ordering and pacing. Our second album Light House is well underway and we should be ready to start the release process by winter/spring. Dream House was really a rough proof of concept, Light House will be us having heavily refined our process. It doesn’t deviate massively from the style and tone set by Dream House, we’ll be collaborating with more or less the same people, but it does have its own motifs and secrets to pick through, and I think it’s already shaping up to be a step well above the first album sonically and in terms of the writing.

We’re currently preparing for a Tiny Desk-esque recording of a thirty-minute live set that I imagine we’ll do in the next couple of months. Give people an idea of what we sound like live.

The biggest thing for me right now, while we finish Light House, is writing what will be the third album. Aisha has been getting me into Olivia Dean and George has been getting me into The Police and Sting’s solo stuff. As much as I try to bring the best out of every member of the band, they also bring the best out in me, and right now they’re taking my writing in some very interesting directions. So, the third album will be the first time we’ll have written the majority of it in the rehearsal room while refining our live set. It’ll be a much jazzier, poppier affair while retaining the operatic, grand scope and that melancholic whimsy that is infused into, not just ours, but a lot of British music.

OSR: Do you have a message for our readers?

James: All I’d ask is for anyone with a broad palate to give us a try. If you’re into jazz, dream-pop, shoegaze, grunge, post-punk (what an awful term), 60s psychedelia, 70s prog, and space rock, we’ve got something for you. We were really testing the waters here to see what works. I’d ask that if you like our music you support us in these endeavours but, as of now, there’s no way to do that monetarily, so please just follow us on this adventure and support us if and when that becomes an option.

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Many thanks to Clayton James for speaking with us! For more from Outside Now, check out their Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.

This artist was discovered via Musosoup #sustainablecurator