BLACK MIDI
Rough Trade’s hot properties have backed Damo Suzuki, admit a taste for Mahavishnu Orchestra, and unleash a live show that blows minds. Millwall fans look out!
When maverick former can vocalist Damo suzuki joined Black midi for their soundcheck at the Windmill in Brixton, there was no explicit signal that a baton was being passed on. “he didn’t really say ‘hi’ or anything,” drummer morgan simpson remembers of the night in 2018. “he just started doing his thing.”
the double challenge of first supporting suzuki and then being his backing ensemble is one for which no Youtube tutorial could prepare you. few young bands, though, have been better placed than Black midi to respond to suzuki’s minimal pre-gig directions – “When i jump and hit the ground, make a noise!” – with the optimum level of intuitive cacophony.
in the two years since bassist cameron Picton stepped up from occasional after-school jam participant to full-time member, ‘hit the ground making a noise’ is exactly what the quartet have done. at first, the spit and sawdust Windmill was pretty much the only place that would have them. But as word began to spread about a quartet of teenagers making music with the power to suggest a computer game-literate tony Williams lifetime one
minute and Open Up-era John Lydon fronting the Meat Puppets the next, Black Midi’s rolling residency at the Windmill began to generate a serious amount of forward velocity.
This momentum has already seen them release the most intense and invigorating debut album of 2019 – in the exquisitely designed but still thrillingly rough-round-the-edges form of Schlagenheim – and MOJO catches up with the band at Rough Trade’s west London office, on the brink of a summer and autumn touring schedule that would make Phileas Fogg blanche. At first, since the grand entrance of Jacques Tati mac-wearing de facto frontman Geordie Greep still awaits us. it’s just genial rhythmic powerhouse Simpson, Robocop T-shirted Picton and sardonic guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin. In a cramped meeting room, they shoot the breeze about signing with a label who, “although they were known for The Strokes and The Libertines, had put out a lot of interesting stuff before that.”
For those with memories stretching back beyond the dawn of this millennium, Rough Trade looks the perfect fit for Black Midi’s adventurous and challenging music, but it was the label’s willingness to keep their preconceptions to themselves that sealed the deal. “Geoff Travis and Jeannette Lee weren’t trying to play this game of telling us all the cool bands they knew that we reminded them of,” Picton remembers. “They were just interested in what we wanted to do and how they could help us.”
“They’re quite something, those boys,” Travis enthuses reciprocally over the phone later. “There’s so much joy in the way they play together. And the other thing about them is that they’re extraordinarily knowledgeable.”
It’s not your regular bunch of 20-year-olds who can – as Black Midi do – converse learnedly about the recording processes of Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way or Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone. When you see how the four of them respond and adapt to each other in live performance, following Greep’s lead but doing their own thing at the same time (the superb 26-minute ‘Live On KEXP’ session on YouTube is a perfect showcase for their savage fluency), it’s clear this knowledge isn’t learned by rote, but rather evidence of a ready ear for the language great musicians speak.
It also testifies to the previously unexplored benefits of classes in pop history at the BRIT School in Croydon, where all four of the band studied for B-TECs in music. New life blossoms in the most unexpected places, and on the evidence of some of its previous alumni, notably Adele and Jessie J, the BRIT School is the last place you’d expect to trace the lineage of the UK’s most exciting new band. The fact they germinated in an industry-sponsored talent greenhouse doesn’t define Black Midi any more than their Brixton Windmill residency or Simpson and Greep’s formative childhood musical experiences playing gospel in black-led churches (the former in Hertfordshire, the latter in Walthamstow). Yet their improvisational daring and well-honed technique – Simpson’s explosive yet nuanced drumming would’ve even passed muster with the demanding instructor from Whiplash – certainly testify to the value of unlimited rehearsal time, and the inspirational pedagogue everyone would want from this story duly makes an appearance when Simpson credits a teacher called Chris with “introducing me to the music of Swans and Can”.
“I understand people’s resistance to the fact that the BRIT School is funded by the record industry,” says Picton, “but it was basically just like a normal sixth-form experience, except all you studied was music.” Black Midi are not – as they shouldn’t be – immune to the odd schoolboy error. The ‘country covers set’ attempted on a rare early gigging foray was one such – “We were reading Hank Williams lyrics off our phones to a pub full of Millwall fans,” Kwasniewski-Kelvin remembers. “It was meant to be just for fun, but as it turned out it wasn’t that fun: it was awkward.”
At this point, mercurial guitarist and vocaliser Geordie Greep arrives, his trademark stylised rainwear duly buttoned up to the top in defiance of blazing summer heat. The Dickensianly-named Greep is physically slight, with a demeanour that suggests River Phoenix’s more bookish cousin, but his arrival makes an undeniable impact on the room. Not least because he sits at an unexpected angle to the table – 45 degrees instead of the more conventional 90. He doesn’t seem to be doing this for effect, just as an expression of the slight anxiety he feels about walking into an interview with his band which is already up and running.
“we were reading hank williams lyrics to a pub full of millwall fans. it was meant to be fun, but it turned out awkward.” matt kwasniewski-kelvin
Greep sits quietly without saying anything for a further 10 minutes or so, until a conversation about Black Midi’s recent trip to play a festival in Russia prompts a strikingly cogent intervention.
“Moscow in general was very interesting,” he notes, “because of the constant juxtaposition of the beautifully ornate and hideously garish. The best example was the metro stations: you go into the main hall and it’s beautiful with mosaics everywhere, but as soon as you get onto the escalators, the partitions are decorated with cheap laminate wood, the kind of stuff you’d find at a youth club, and these are right next to each other. That contrast repeats itself everywhere, so they’ll have this imitation marble on the floor and then orange and green wallpaper…”
Black Midi’s songs (Greep writes the bulk of them; Kwasniewski-Kelvin and Picton also contribute lyrics and vocals in a similar vein) take just this kind of vivid and specific snapshot – momentary sense impressions with a wider significance – and feed them through a musical mincer. The band’s 2018 debut single, BmBmBm, employed a recording of an ancient onscreen tantrum by Big Brother contestant Nikki Grahame – triggered through their guitar pick-ups, just as they’d heard Hendrix used to do with a transistor radio – as a counterpoint to a drawled Greep lyric about a feminine ideal. Near DT, MI – another Schlagenheim highlight – finds Picton calmly narrating a depiction of a poisoned Mid-west water supply amid a flash-flood of Supro Val Trol and Reverend Descent Baritone guitars.
The tech-head specifications of exactly which of producer Dan Carey’s Aladdin’s cave of instruments the band had borrowed on which track are one of the many pleasures of Schlagenheim’s sumptuous artwork. “That place was like a toyshop,” grins Morgan, of Carey’s south London studio, Mr Dan’s, although the fact that Black Midi laid down all the basic tracks for the album in five days, with just two weeks for overdubs, confirms they weren’t playing around.
“Carey’s studio really suited the way they play together,” says Domino’s David Donald (who signed the band to a publishing deal), “because there’s no glass”. One of Black Midi’s biggest achievements is to pass through the fusty hinterland of musical virtuosity with their innocence intact.
“I’ve no idea how successful this group can be,” adds Geoff Travis “but it’s going well so far.”