“You can have proper, very complex chord progressions and sequences, and take the time to work things out a lot more. “Working alone, you could be much more ambitious with songs,” Greep adds. “With the first album, it felt like you could add sections on, sort of ad infinitum – it could just go on forever,” says Picton. They worked on songs alone and then, together, in sporadic rehearsal sessions, would shape and elevate those ideas. “It also kind of pushed us forward, going further down the rabbit hole.”
“With indefinite time off, we basically shifted the whole dynamic of how we were coming up with the music and the cuts,” Greep elaborates. For that reason, Cavalcade and Hellfire are blood brothers, a second act for the same spectacle with an entirely fresh, operatic flair. Even at this point, the band were cultivating a new direction, a new dynamic. The seeds were sown for their second record, Cavalcade, in the months preceding March 2020. The two years of lockdown, Greep tells me, “were the best two years for the band.” It afforded them the time to take care, to pay attention to detail and chip away at the marble for as long as they wished, which their frenzied momentum post- Schlagenheim and relentless global touring threatened to make into a luxury rarely afforded. Together, they form a musical swiss army knife that lets them tear apart the songs themselves, and maybe take down whoever’s listening, as well.īut when you strip a band like black midi from performance, from the live settings that served as the breeding ground for their sound, what do you have left? Hellfire. When you watch him perform, his face is caught in a freefall of euphoria, executing his parts at a faultless, ungodly speed. Perhaps it should come as a surprise that he tops the leader boards with every game we play, whether that be archery, drumming or combat aircraft - but really, it doesn’t.Īnd Simpson, their intimidatingly skilled drummer who won so many of their fans over, grins generously with the optimism of someone who never compromises on fun. His command over his instrument, however, is conducted with an almost surgical precision, pushing its capabilities to its furthest extremes, and somehow further still. Picton, the band’s bassist and sometimes-vocalist, is more reserved (as bassists are wont to be) and offers his perspective quietly, with a tendency to let his thoughts taper off before finishing them. Before the microphone, he lets his syllables trickle like molasses off a spoon, contorting words into uncanny shapes and blitzing them together into unlikely cocktails, all delivered with a kind of theatrical grandeur. But it’s his voice, with its unplaceable accent derived from both everywhere and nowhere, which leaves an impression. Greep, always sharply turned out in well-pressed shirts and trousers, carries a strangely aristocratic air of an avant-garde writer from a bygone era. A 2018 headline in NME asked, “What’s the deal with Black Midi: the “best band in London” nobody knows a thing about?” Any video, any performance – no matter how absurd the hour or location may have been – were like bones hungrily picked apart for any scrap of meat. Without a single track online, and only threadbare details of the band’s origins available, the legend of black midi was born from word-of-mouth and the strength of scarcity. “Best band in London” declared post-punk purveyors, Shame, demanding people make the pilgrimage to see this “disturbingly brilliant” and “mighty” new group. Seemingly out of nowhere, the trio emerged in 2018 already fully formed, lolloping out like gangly teenagers onto the stages of South London pubs, dives and sweatboxes, their faces hiding in the shadows of their cowboy hats. But black midi aren’t afraid to be cast adrift in the depths of their own imaginations – in fact, this is exactly the kind of pandemonium which they proudly design. It all feels sickeningly vivid, and with enough exposure, you start to no longer feel the VR headset that has put you there the anchor of logic keeping you tethered to the fact that it’s not real, just a game, becomes unmoored. They prefer to meet on a more disturbing frontier, and so there we are: myself, vocalist and guitarist Geordie Greep, bassist Cameron Picton and drummer, Morgan Simpson, standing back to back on the scorched earth, armed with an arsenal of semi-automatic rifles, emptying a shower of bullets into the onslaught of the mangled, walking dead. Reality, in all its greyscale predictability, leaves the band cold.
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