THE LEFT OUTSIDES
How city life led to music of stunning pastoral beauty for this London duo.
LIKE ALL MASTER craftspeople, The Left Outsides have been honing their skills over an extended period of time. Using folk as their bind, the multi-instrumentalist married couple of Alison Cotton and Mark Nicholas have woven together strands of psychedelia, freakbeat and prog rock to fashion haunting and mystical music that’s evocative of bucolic surroundings, untouched woodland and ancient landmarks.
“It seeps into our music a lot,” says Nicholas, pondering the influence of the outdoors on their music. “I think that’s maybe a consequence of living in a city. We love living in London, but it’s great to get out.”
“I’ve lived in cities all of my life, but apart from maybe two songs, all of my songs have been about the countryside,” adds Cotton. “And Julian Cope’s book, The Modern Antiquarian, is with us every holiday.”
It may well be that The Left Outsides’ origins have also subconsciously fuelled this desire for the transcendent joys of the great outdoors. Formed after their respective bands ended – Cotton had been with the John Peel-endorsed Saloon, while Nicholas had graced an early line-up of psychedelicists Of Arrowe Hill and both had also played with folk rockers The Eighteenth Day Of May – the couple’s template was forged by circumstance.
“We were constrained about what we could do and the instruments we could play because we were living in a tiny flat,” recalls Nicholas. “But Alison plays acoustic instruments like the viola, so that was the starting point, and I played acoustic guitar, but we’ve always come at it in a weird, psychedelic way.”
Their fifth and current studio album, Are You Sure I Was There?, is their most fully realised to date. With Cotton playing violin and harmonium and Nicholas adding bass and drums to his guitar duties, their alternating vocals colour the album with a distinctive mood of dawn and dusk.
“This album is pretty much in the same vein as the previous albums where you have two sides to The Left Outsides,” says Nicholas. “You’ve got the more gentle folky thing and then you have more of the 60s, freakbeat, garage thing going on. That’s been a feature of all of our records and that’s what we, as individuals, have brought to it.”
“I think it’s that, but also we’re forced to go to other bands’ gigs separately because of childcare, so we’re both listening to different things,” considers Cotton.“Mark’s more likely to be found in [rock bar] Black Heart in Camden and I’ll go to [avant-garde venue] Café OTO in Dalston. I think those influences come together as well but, out of necessity, we’ve ended up listening to different things.”
And what of the future? “It’d be great to have an expanded line-up for live work,” says Nicholas. “We put out our live album, A Place To Hide, last year and it bookends what we do as a duo. That gives the songs a different kind of shade, but we don’t want to stand still. We like to keep moving.” JM
“WE DON’T WANT TO STAND STILL. WE LIKE TO KEEP MOVING.”