What Geordie Greep did next – how the ex-Black Midi guitarist went solo with The New Sound
It’s days out from Geordie Greep’s 25th birthday and the Walthamstow born-and-raised, ex-Black Midi frontman and guitarist is anticipating a new life chapter, personally and professionally. The ‘ex’ part still feels shocking – it was only back in August, that Greep took to Instagram to reveal: “Black Midi was an interesting band that’s indefinitely over.”
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While the mic drop moment shocked the music world – and it appeared even the rest of the band, who had not expected a public announcement – the band’s management soon confirmed Greep’s news, saying that the band members were each pursuing solo projects. In Greep’s case, that solo pathway has led to debut album The New Sound.
But while the shock of their end might have seemed sudden outside, for Greep tells us that the end of Black Midi, “wasn’t really emotional because it was a long time coming. So many things changed, and so many things didn’t pan out how I expected, so it was like, ‘well, it was never gonna last forever.’”
“It’s not a sad thing,” he insist. “It’s happy, and it’s all good. Bands don’t always go on indefinitely. Some of the greatest bands only put out a few albums before ending, so it’s weird that we expect bands to go on forever.”
With My Friends
It was back in 2017 that Greep joined fellow art school friends Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, Cameron Picton, and Morgan Simpson to form the improv-driven, dramatic funk-punk band that became Black Midi. They were just teenagers at the time, and Greep is barely into his mid 20s as we speak. With three critically lauded albums and a Mercury Prize nomination under his belt already, it’s fair to wonder: what comes next?
Eclecticism, unsurprisingly, is the order of the day. As well you’d expect from a musician and songwriter equally as enamoured with Black Sabbath as he is with Igor Stravinsky, church gospel music, Miles Davis and Argentine tango.
But despite this being a solo record, he was far from alone, having recruited over thirty session musicians to record in Brazil, where local musicians laid down their work over two days, and later in London, overdubs and production brought the album to fruition.
“I wanted to do music under my own name, or find a way to diversify how I was doing music,” he explains. “I don’t like this idea that the only way you can do music is under these specific circumstances or with these particular people. I wanted to be a bit more free with how I approach music in terms of working with different people and doing music under my own name, or in different bands, or for commission, whatever it is. So, I always had half an eye on doing my own album basically, as soon as possible. In the last year, it was just a good little window. It was like, the band is kind of not at its most fruitful, or it’s not going so well, so let’s start recording, and let’s get things going.”
Radio Dada
There’s a melancholy nostalgia that hangs over The New Sound, and Greep’s deep croon delivers wonky narratives and witty one-liners with the hint of a suppressed laugh. As ever, he is enjoying the absurdity in human existence while never skewering anyone or anything with violent intent.
“I really loved the experience of making this album,” Greep says. “Every decision you make, if it’s terrible or if it’s good, it’s my fault. Each track had a different flavour due to the different musicians with different contributions. Making The New Sound took about nine months from last September to March or April this year, but it wasn’t all at once. There were two sessions here or there every few months with a total of about 11 days total in the recording studio.”
The first track he laid down was Blues, and rather than setting the tone for a single theme or sound, Greep gave his collaborators space to show off their skills, adding Latin rhythms, post-punk grizzly, distorted guitar, and tight, melodic percussion.
Geordie’s pedals. Image: Paul Jones
“What really set the tone was when we recorded in Brazil in December. It was the place and the local session guys there that changed everything,” he says.
As for assembling such a skilled collection of musicians for a whirlwind session, Greep explains that it was the result of fortuitous timing and a well-connected friend in Brazil.
“It was lucky,” confirms Greep. “Originally, the plan was to do a session in London with a big, slick approach. We wanted a hi-fi, Michael Jackson-style sound with experienced session musicians. Then I remembered Black Midi were touring Brazil in December and I knew we’d have days off, so I called up Fernando Dotta who runs a record label [Balaclava Records in São Paulo] in Brazil and he sorted out the musicians and booked the studio. I brought in chord charts and sheet music, but they’d had a few days with the music and they didn’t need. It. They got all the tracks in one take.”
Geordie’s Jazz Swing strings. Image: Paul Jones
Marketplace Of Ideas
The album was produced by long-time friend and Black Midi touring musician Seth ‘Shank’ Evans. The two had initially planned to make an album together, but Greep came in with a wealth of songs that justified two respective solo albums.
“We were initially talking about it being like a duo, but the way it panned out was that I had more songs together, and the record of 10 songs was shaping up to be 8 songs of mine. So, we decided to start with my album, produced by him, then we’d do his album.”
He adds, “We’re really good friends, we’d hang out the whole time when Black Midi were touring. Neither of us are the best musicians in the world, but we both have the same ideas about music and the same approach to music. We have this reverence for atmosphere and mood, when music sounds as if it is infinite. That sounds a bit hippie, but if you love music, you know what I mean. It was a natural fit. He understands sound too, and he can communicate with the engineers on that technical level.”
On the grizzled, hard-driving Motorbike, Evans delivers the sardonic, bleakly humorous lyrics.
“Seth had the initial idea for the chords, the intro and the feel of that song, but once we played it, I felt like it was a Mad Max, ‘riding a motorbike in a desert’ feel, so we went back and forth with the lyrics, and after a few iterations it’s a mix and match of all of our ideas. The last section, the instrumental, was a crazy King Crimson thing.”
Geordie and his 70s Gibson Les Paul Recording model. Image: Paul Jones
Direct Line
The guitars on Motorbike were recorded direct in, as most of the tracks were.
“There was a lot of that in this album, to get the distortion in a way that was cleaner and more impactful. I was using a Gibson SG [a Custom Shop model from 2000, he later clarifies] mostly, and I was using that guitar the most for live shows.”
Elsewhere, Greep introduced an eclectic cast of weird stuff – a Fret King Elise, a 70s Gibson Les Paul Recording model, a white Anniversary Fender Strat with a bridge humbucker, and an Eastman orchestra-sized acoustic – the latter of which Greep is certainly taken with.
“Eastman is a guitar company from China… so they’re cheaper than they should be for a world class guitar,” he enthuses. “It’s quite tight, bright, and there’s none of that boomy sound like you can get from big guitars.”
Another prominent flavour on the album is Greep’s K Yairi nylon-string – an instrument that’s been a constant companion for years.
“It’s great for getting those Latin sounds,” he says. “I was coming up with a lot of the songs on that. If something sounds good on that guitar, then it sounds really good on another guitar. You have to work for it to sound good.”
Geordie’s pedal steel guitar. Image: Paul Jones
On The Magician, Greep adds a custom made pedal steel guitar that proved to be trickier to master than he’d assumed.
“I only got it from a friend this year when he realised it was going to be epic. He didn’t master it, because it’s really difficult, so I bought it off him and realised it’s so tricky – I was naïve to think I could master it in no time!”
Greep’s approach to guitar has always been quite unique, and a Rough Trade staffer thinks that it’s his prestigious use of a very weird pedal – a Boss Bass EQ from the 1980s – that gives it that unusual flavour.
“For some reason, the pedals they had from back then have a really different sound to the ones you get now,” he agrees. “You can basically use them as a distortion pedal because the way they boost the frequency just isn’t clean. You can get something quite extreme. I’ve been using it for years.”
As for translating an album packed with Brazilian session musicians to international touring stages, Greep sounds relaxed about the prospect.
“It’s a bit like jazz music. It’s all about playing with different people and learning new things, so I want to keep that going beyond the studio by having different bands in different territories, from the UK to the US, from Asia to Europe. You can play these songs in a lot of different ways.”
The New Sound is out 4 October 2024 on Rough Trade.
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