The last weekend of this month sees the launch of a new two-day festival in Liverpool, Outer Waves. Taking place in the city’s North Docks around the Invisible Wind Factory and the Make creative hub, the inaugural lineup features a mixture of Merseyside’s underground outliers, and invitees from beyond.

Several established tQ favourites feature, including the band behind our favourite album of 2024 and local favourites Ex-Easter Island Head, who join long standing pysch rock heroes Gong as headliners. Elsewhere, there’s the legendary Charles Hayward with his Abstract Concrete project, the mighty freestyle noise outfit Sly And The Family Drone, the transcendent drone of Smote and the boundary-pushing sound and performance art of Aja Ireland.

Elsewhere, there’s plenty of representation for the new generation – Ex Agent, the band behind tQ’s latest subscriber-exclusive release, are on the lineup, as are industrial crew Mandy, Indiana, and Manchester experimentalists Hyperdawn. Beyond the weekend itself, Outer Waves also seeks a long-term legacy in a part of the city that has been buffeted by redevelopment over recent years. According to Outer Waves, the event “will continue to foster artistic growth through year-round programming, artist commissions, and local partnerships,” in the coming months. For more details, tickets, and the full line-up, click here.

Meanwhile a Lesser Version, purveyors of fractured and emotive DIY indie rock, are among several Outer Waves acts drawn from the local scene. Having started out as the solo project of Liam Evans, since evolving into a four-piece band with the addition of Alex Griffin, Nick Jones

And Adam Craddock, the group’s forthcoming third LP (as yet untitled with a release date TBC) will be the first to feature all four musicians, and caps off a period of significant acceleration; the band were also recently named as finalists in Green Man festival’s ‘Rising’ competition, one of five artists in contention for a slot at the Welsh festival this summer.

To find out more about the project, from its beginnings in a Beatles gift shop to the cusp of wider acclaim, via perforated eardrums, variety shows and the changing face of the Merseyside scene, tQ caught up with Evans over email.

a Lesser Version came to be when I started recording The Album Excess in 2020. I was desperate to start making and releasing albums after sitting on songs for what felt like a very long time, and this first group of songs had mostly been conjured up across a period prior to meeting the rest of the band. I met Alex (guitar) working in a Beatles gift shop in Liverpool, and we’d spend large parts of our day hiding in the stockroom and listening to different records to escape hearing the same 27 songs all day – we’re both big fans of The Beatles, but hearing the 1 album on repeat every day meant that any chance to escape the shop to share new music was welcomed. 

Eventually we started meeting up outside of work and writing some other bits of the album together, and after we released the first single, ‘Sylvia’, we were offered a gig at the [now-defunct Merseyside music magazine] Bido Lito! social at [Birkenhead venue] Future Yard. We met Nick (drums) through some other friends as we needed to pull a band together pretty swiftly, and he ended up joining us a few weeks before the gig. We’ve had a couple of lineup changes since that time, but I’d known Adam since we were in university together and played in various other projects with him before, so he joined on keys before moving to bass in the current iteration of the live band.

I’d made a conscious decision at some point that all of my creative energy going forwards was going to be channeled into and labelled as ‘a Lesser Version’. At that time, I wasn’t exactly sure what it might be – I knew a band would be a part of it, and that I wanted to release albums, but I also didn’t want to limit it to just that, or to feel restricted by staying in a band format forever. So I feel like a Lesser Version began life as a vehicle for making everything I wanted to make, whether that was music, art, photography, or whatever – and it still is that, but now that this group of people has formed as a close-knit band, I also recognise that a Lesser Version has taken on a new life of its own in that sense. So a Lesser Version, the band, is part of a wider vision of a Lesser Version – if that makes sense.

This is the first album that we’ve all played on the recordings for, and so it feels unique in that sense, and I suppose it’s why I think of the band as having taken on a life of its own beyond the initial idea behind a Lesser Version. The first two albums are largely me playing and recording every instrument, with Alex jumping in here or there with some extra sections and guitar parts. This time around it’s been a much more collaborative process, from the writing to the recording of each song. We’re still recording it mostly ourselves, with a little bit of help from our friend Ollie who has been engineering drum sessions for us, but I suppose that compared to the previous two albums it’s special to us in that it almost feels like a debut album for this group of people.

It definitely does feel like things are ramping up somewhat, but we don’t feel like we’re doing much differently. If anything it feels like it’s happening on the back of one of our longest periods of inactivity, as I suffered a double perforation in my eardrum towards the end of last year and was out of action for about three months with complete unilateral deafness when it was at its worst. 

We had just released the singles from the third album though, from August to October last year, fairly shortly after [second LP] She Was Wounded, I Was Terrified! came out in July 2024, but we didn’t play together for quite some time until we put together a show in March. It meant that things have been slightly delayed when it comes to pulling together the third album, but we’ve been busy since then and we’re already starting to make plans for making the fourth album or EP or whatever it is that we might do once the third album is completely finished up and shared with the world.

I was pretty ill towards the end of September which I’d put down to a hectic schedule of writing, recording, and playing shows across the summer without much of a break. I tried to power through it out of sheer stubbornness but I didn’t give myself a chance to recover properly, and that initial bout of illness transformed into a sinus infection which eventually took over my entire ear/nose/throat and led to my eardrum giving out completely. 

Fortunately I’m completely recovered now, but at the time I was terrified and facing up to the idea of surgery and long-term damage to my hearing. I wouldn’t say my approach to making music has changed, but I’m more wary than ever now of protecting my ears as best as possible.

LE: When we look back to our very first show for Bido Lito!, those pink pages were a huge part of the music scene in the city for me personally growing up – it was something I could always refer to, and it covered a lot of the things I was particularly interested in and more. They were also the first people to write about our first single, as well as offering us our first gig.

We’ve lost a lot of venues already during our short time as a band, and even now we’re preparing to say goodbye to our favourite venue in the world, Quarry. Fortunately they’re moving on to pastures new, but it can often feel as though the scene is being chased around the city and forced to discover new places to thrive. We’ve also recently lost The Bakery at its current premises, and the closure of Melodic Distraction is another fairly recent loss that still lingers in the memory.

We’re all big, big fans of Future Yard over the water in Birkenhead, another place where creativity is constantly bubbling away with talented people coming and going on a daily basis, and so we’re lucky to have had that as a space close to the city in which a lot of our activity over the years has been centred.

Part of Future Yard’s vision is to put Birkenhead on the map. Is there a sense of growing integration between the musical communities on each side of the river, or is there still a divide?

Liam: My first visit to Future Yard was pretty much one of my first ever trips to Birkenhead, and so in that sense I think there is definitely a growing integration as I’m there almost every day now.

The river still poses a mental barrier to some people as much as it is a physical one, but I think that more and more artists are seeing the growth of the creative community on the other side of the water and looking to become involved with everything that’s happening at Future Yard, and quickly realising that it’s often easier to get to from Liverpool City Centre compared to some other spaces on the fringe of the city.

The Wirral has always produced some of the finest artists from this corner of the world, and now Birkenhead has one of the best venues in the country situated there to support them and the wider region.

What are your relationships like with others on the Liverpool DIY circuit?

Liam: We are lucky enough to be surrounded by a wondrously large pool of talented people in Liverpool, all of whom we count as friends and collaborators. We share a studio space with Klof, a collective that does all sorts of weird and wonderful things in the city, as well as bands like Hunky Dory, Gladness, and Astles that we’re big fans of.

We’ve put on and attended many shows at Quarry with intheroom, a promotions company run by our friend Aidan who are responsible for bringing some of the best new bands in the country to Liverpool – since they started out in the past year we’ve been able to see the likes of Kiran Leonard, Sunglasz Vendor, lobby, Pys Melyn, and so many more thanks to them.

At Quarry we’ve hosted a Lesser Variety Show with our friends My Heads and DAMWMSSNI, inviting other artists across various mediums to perform with us. We usually have our friend Sebastian paint each act at the Variety Show, and we’ve had dance, comedy, performance art, and all sorts of other acts come along to join in.

Looking at the music scene more specifically though, the likes of Elijah Right?, All Maudra, Coughin’ Vicars, Liminal Project, Those Holy, Hooton Tennis Club, Louie Miles, and By The Sea are examples of bands or projects that aren’t linked by genre but are hugely important to the scene in the wider region and that we know in one way or another, and we’re eternally grateful for that.

Tell me more about the variety shows at Quarry – where does the desire to integrate other forms of art come from?

LE: We feel just as much a part of the wider creative community on Merseyside as much as we are part of the music scene, and so it made perfect sense to try to platform all of the things we were involved in across different art forms.

If we aren’t spending time at traditional gigs you’ll usually find us at comedy nights, independent film screenings, or exhibitions and so on, and hosting a variety show gave us a chance to showcase all of the other cool things that we love all at once.

It’s also a credit to Quarry that they trusted us to make an event like this work – that level of support from an independent space is invaluable, and something that has allowed so many artists to flourish in Liverpool recently.

How about your performance at Outer Waves? What can we expect from yourselves, and the festival more widely?

Liam: We’re incredibly excited for Outer Waves – a festival of this size in the city that genuinely champions experimentalism and boundary-pushing music can only be a good thing, in our opinion.

Some of my earliest memories of festivals in the city are of discovering bands like Mazes and Islet amongst headliners Goat at Liverpool Psych Fest, or seeing Swans play at Sound City alongside Fat White Family, Thurston Moore, and The Flaming Lips. 

Times have changed though, and although there is still an appetite for these sorts of events there has been a hole in the calendar that Outer Waves is filling, and we hope that it continues to grow year on year going forwards. The programming this year is already massively compelling, and I have no doubt that the team behind it can make it one of the highlights of the year.

As well as bringing acts like Mandy, Indiana and Gong to the city, they’re championing a huge amount of our favourite artists in the region, and so we’re thrilled to see so many acts who call Merseyside home playing on a lineup of this scale.

For our performance, we’re looking forward to trying out some new material in front of friends and celebrating after our Green Man Rising show in Cardiff earlier in the week. Mostly though, we’re excited to inevitably discover a new favourite artist and see some mind-blowing performances in a part of the city that means a lot to each of us!

a Lesser Version perform at Liverpool’s Outer Waves festival this weekend (24 and 25 May). For remaining tickets, the fill lineup, and further information, click here.