Watch Black Midi’s Geordie Greep Debut His New Band In London
Georgie Greep of Black Midi tweeted a mysterious message Thursday evening: “Playing a show at the windmill Brixton this Saturday – come down – new music, new group, new sound. It’ll be great.” Saturday at the Windmill, the Brixton venue that serves as home base for Black Midi and many of their peers, Greep followed through on that promise — mostly.
A new act billed as Geordie Greep And The Swing Boys burned through 53 minutes of new tunes Saturday night, and footage from the show indicates that it was indeed a great night. As for the “new sound” bit: The band trotted out an oft-shifting junkyard pile of ideas — jazzy, proggy, metallic, old-timey. Sometimes it was aggressively weird and unflinchingly inaccessible, other times extremely poppy in old-fashioned ways. Moments of absolute splendor were cut by flashes of mangled skronk and highly technical cheese. I dunno, sounds like Black Midi to me? One song was written and sung by cellist Felix Stephens, also of Ethan P. Flynn’s band, and it all ended with a cover of “Hello, Dolly!” OK, Geordie!
The YouTube user flopmidi filmed the Swing Boys’ full set and spent Easter uploading and timestamping it, so you can enjoy the full performance below.
Here are the timestamps affixed by the YouTube uploader:
0:00 – Walk on
0:46 – “It’s a wonderful day”
0:57 – Untitled 1 (“You’re all grown up, you have your own stole, your own opera gloves”)
6:35 – Lumps
9:58 – “The first show of this new confederacy”
10:13 – Untitled 2 (“It’s not open to the public”)
15:20 – Band introductions
21:03 – “Up next is a song by Felix”
21:13 – Untitled 3 (Felix’s song)
25:46 – “Everybody sing bravo!”
26:17 – Untitled 4 (“…the streets sound like music, and music is just noise”)
31:32 – Untitled 5 (“Two mice commit hari-kari in the corner of my room”)
35:39 – “Where’s Shank! Where’s Shanko!”
36:10 – Untitled 6 (Shank’s song)
40:56 – Shank guitar moment
41:55 – Shank keyboard moment
42:31 – “Ah…. ok!”
42:47 – Untitled 7 (“…take you out to get married, to make you mine”)
50:39 – “We’re the swing boys!”
51:03 – Hello Dolly
53:00 – Second band introduction and goodbye
Those don’t seem to be song titles, just quotes from the lyrics. Greep promises that there will be “many more” shows from this group.