Geordie Greep on life after Black Midi

When Geordie Greep suggested that Rolling Stone UK meet him at a central London casino for our interview, it came with no explanation. The singer, guitarist and former member of Black Midi has been to this particular establishment a few times, he says as we enter, but never before on a Monday lunchtime. Once, he saw a woman win a million pounds and completely break down. “The casino manager came over and said, ‘Just calm down, don’t make a scene’,” he remembers. “‘We’re getting you a car to pick you up and get you out safely’.”

Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum, as Greep explains in the same particularly unique style that pepper his lyrics. “All the women working on the tables here have such long fingernails. After you’ve lost, it makes such a horrible noise when they drag the chips across the table and into a hole. It’s like they’re falling into hell.”

Though there was no immediate context for our meeting place, it starts to make more sense when listening to Greep’s varied, absurd and astounding debut solo album, The New Sound, which arrives this Friday (October 4). The characters that inhabit these songs could easily be seen haunting establishments such as this, and their stories – told with vivid and often grotesque language by Greep – are ones of faded glamour, delusional bravado and dreams that will never be achieved.

“They think they’re coming across as if they’re in control, and that we’re not noticing,” the singer says of his subjects over a drink on the casino’s upper level, peering down with interest between questions to check on the fortunes of the handful of gamblers below.

“I wanted to create this consistent world – one of nightclubs and alleyways and downtown nights,” he says of The New Sound, with his protagonists desperate for love and powered by perversion. “I would have disembowelled myself just to hold your hand,” Greep sings on ‘Through a War’, one of countless grim but intriguing turns of phrase across the album. According to the singer, he wanted to try and make The New Sound an album of love songs, but in hands as untraditional and innovative as his, they inevitably became something altogether creepier, fouler and more interesting.

Greep first emerged as the frontman of Black Midi, the crazed rock band catapulted immediately to the status of Britain’s most exciting new band even before releasing debut single ‘bmbmbm’ in 2019. Three albums of equally brilliant but berserk music – 2019 debut Schlagenheim and follow-ups Cavalcade and Hellfire – followed, with the band gaining a fiercely loyal cult following and leading to sell-out gigs in China, Mongolia and beyond, as well as a Mercury Prize nomination.

Earlier this year, during a late-night Instagram Live, Greep revealed out of the blue that the band were “no more,” with bassist Cameron Picton reacting on social media and saying: “We’d agreed not to say anything about ‘breaking up’ so I was as blindsided as everyone else last night but maybe in a different way. I guess sometimes all you can say is lol.”

Speaking of the band’s legacy, Greep says: “[We] never put out anything that was a compromise. There was often this journalistic line around Black Midi that it was ‘frustrating’ music. ‘Why can’t they just play a song with a chorus?’ It would always be like, ‘Oh, this album’s good, but it’s very frustrating. It’s not doing what I wanted to do.’ I think that’s pretty good, because you get to set the bar pretty low in terms of compromising to what’s expected, or playing the game. Most artists and most musicians that get really good reviews, you already know what it’s going to sound like before you even listen. It was good to have that precedent set of not playing the rules.”

For Greep, the end of Black Midi was down to “quite a lot of factors,” but he pinpoints “not getting that much done creatively” and financial worries. “It felt at a certain point that the music was uncompromising, but wasn’t sure why it was uncompromising and what it was like fighting against or being in opposition to. It lost a bit of focus in my estimation. It felt like we were on a different page, each member of the band.”

Because of this, Greep says he felt the quality of the band’s live show go down in their last year of touring. “No one was to blame, it just happened. I don’t want to con anybody and put on a show that’s not the best it can be. There was less on the line and less excitement to it.”

There’s far more on the line with The New Sound, Greep believes. On it, he works with a cast of strangers and dips into all corners of the musical landscape to create an album that is dazzling in its variety and unwavering in its boldness.

The New Sound initially started out as an idea for a band between Greep and collaborator Seth ‘Shank’ Evans. After the pair agreed to write songs and then meet to arrange an album, Greep returned with 10 or 11, and Evans with only a couple. “We didn’t want to force it, and we will probably do something like that one day, but I decided to just make this my album,” he recalls. “I knew that I wanted to do my own album at some point, so why would I do this whole thing where I’m going to say, ‘Alright, I don’t want to be in a band anymore’, make this big song and dance out of it and then just start another quasi-band.”

Evans remains a key contributor to The New Sound though, singing lead on one of its standout tracks, Motorbike. After Greep fleshed out his demo recordings into complex songs at an advanced stage, he looked to find the perfect musicians to execute the vision. It was during a few days off in São Paulo on a Black Midi tour that he decided to ring up his only contact in Brazil and ask if any musicians they knew were around and wanted to have a stab at a recording session.

Over half the recordings that appear on the album came from these free-flowing and creatively open sessions, with Greep sending over chord charts and Soundcloud links to his demos, but allowing the musicians present – many of whom couldn’t speak English – to imbue the songs with their own style and desires. It reminded Greep of his earliest days playing music, at local churches in London.

When at secondary school, Greep was approached by an older boy at school who suggested he come and play in the church band. “It’s quite crazy music, the modern gospel stuff,” he says. “There’s a lot to say about the environment, but everyone can play. Everyone played everything and would just learn a song in five minutes. It’s still the most musically impressive thing I’ve ever seen, and it prepared me for this way of looking at music: come with the right attitude and we can get things going.”

This idea and philosophy is borne out on an album that travels to a truly impressive amount of places sonically. While opener ‘Blues’ was a song initially meant for Black Midi and is instantly recognisable as one, from there Greep goes towards old-school American crooning (‘Through a War’), Latin-influenced Brazilian sounds (‘Terra’), yacht rock (‘Holy, Holy’) and beyond.

“If you listen to the songs on this album, they have this feeling of, ‘This is a risk. If you do this tune slightly wrong, they could be the worst songs ever made’,” Greep says. “That’s exciting! That’s cool! I think it’s boring to just a song and know you can pull off. All my favourite music is where you can hear that the musicians or the artist being unsure themselves but ultimately has a confidence that it’s good. It’s simultaneously: ‘Is this good?’ ‘Is this shit?’ It can’t get comfortable, and it can’t get complacent. I wanted to have a situation where it could all fall apart at any moment.”

In this spirit, Greep suggests we have a flutter before heading out into the lunchtime sunshine. He seems perfectly at ease pointing out little quirks of the running of a casino as we lose the majority of our buy-in in lightning-fast time. On his advice, we change tables and head to roulette to gamble our last tenner, and as with his fearless new solo era and somewhat outrageous debut album, the risk pays off. We end up leaving shortly after, splitting enough winnings to brighten up any Monday. “Not bad, not bad,” Greep smiles as he skips out onto the street.