I Got Greeped
Eighteen oysters with Geordie Greep, the Black Midi frontman turned lounge lizard
The first thing people ask when you tell them you’ve interviewed Geordie Greep—besides, “who???”—tends to be: Is the Black Midi guy as crazy as he seems?
You can understand why they might wonder this. The 25-year-old Londonite’s singing voice sounds like an old-timey detective speaking in an unplaceable accent somewhere between Irish sheep-herder and Katharine Hepburn. On his recent solo debut The New Sound, Greep writes from the perspective of a musty-but-cocky barfly who cannot stop talking about cum and pussy to anyone he can pay to listen.
Greep’s music is inspired by all sorts of divisive and historically “bad taste” styles—headache-inducing prog, jazz fusion, schmaltzy crooners, novelty songs, Frank Zappa—that seem like they wouldn’t go together but weirdly do, in Greep’s hands at least. There are random details that add to the Greepiverse’s lore, like his mother working as a salsa dancer and him growing up above the club, or his deep commitment to wearing old-man suits and his madman antics on social media. He announced the dissolution of his love-em-or-hate-em group this past summer in a comment on an Instagram Live that surprised even his ex-bandmates: “Black midi was an interesting band that is now indefinitely over.”
The answer, I am a little sad to report, is that Greep is not a cartoon character of a man. He is quite affable and normal-seeming when I come upon him, one September afternoon, sitting at Manhattan’s Grand Central Oyster Bar. A short king with a halo of golden hair flopping outward, he wears a striped button-up, a dirty denim jacket, white jeans, black trainers, and an orange Rough Trade tote most certainly given to him by his label. “The metric of a good bar is if it feels like you’re in someone’s house,” he says, appreciating the wood paneling.
Though he expresses a fondness for drinking his way through America, all he’s interested in today are oysters. It’s kind of funny how enthusiastic Greep is about going to town on them, only to order four of a single variety from Maine. I round it out with seven more pairs from all around the East Coast, which we eat in tandem.
The old-school environment is fitting for the topics at hand: gambling tricks, sleazy characters, boxing matches, Frank Sinatra. The subtext for that kind of conversation is the overwhelming grossness of Greep’s male narrators on The New Sound. To put it in the language of current indie rock: If MJ Lenderman’s characters are mostly earnest, self-aware guys who are trying to improve as humans despite whatever flaws, Greep’s creeps are pathetic, vile, and often too delusional to admit it on the surface, despite knowing it deep down. The mild revulsion induced by these lonely anti-heroes doesn’t preclude the music from expressing other overwhelming emotions, though.
One of my favorite songs of the year is Greep’s “As If Waltz,” because—and I can’t believe I’m even saying this—it’s oddly romantic. Across nearly eight minutes, an anonymous John falls deeply in love with a woman you soon learn is a sex worker, running through hyper-specific stages of their relationship like warming his hands on her breasts and not having sex afterwards, or paying off cops to protect her. This fantasy happens in the context of a single hour—you get the sense that’s all he can afford, but the memory will last him for years. “Don’t act as if you came,” Greep coos tenderly, then rides off into the sunset on the wings of a two-minute, face-melting guitar solo.
Greep also delivers the glammy and novelistic lead single, “Holy Holy,” from the perspective of a man in a bar talking at a woman he’s hired for sex. He tells her he’s internationally beloved—a god to Jihadis, even—while at the same time making requests like, “I want you to look at me as if I’m attractive. I want you to ask the waiter if I really am who I say I am.” Another one of Geordie’s boys, from the Latin-jazz standout “Terra,” makes a world-famous museum of suffering with himself as the star, only to commit suicide when he’s left without the distraction of others. In the outro, he suggests digging up his grave to “trepan yourself a flute” from his bones, and continuing the congo line of despair. How could anyone take this stuff seriously as a form of autobiography or model for living?
“It’s tricky with music,” begins Greep. “It’s not like a book or a movie where it’s a character. In Taxi Driver, no one says, ‘Oh, Robert De Niro shot that guy.’ You’re hearing someone’s voice and seeing their face, and that can be powerful and slightly scary.” He trails off, but what we’re talking about is inhabiting perspectives other than one’s own, and actively making listeners uncomfortable—a practice that feels increasingly rare. “All of my favorite music, as you listen to it, you have a physical reaction,” he explains. “I want to have that: You’re listening to this album and enjoying yourself, and then—what’s that? You find it funny, you find it horrific, and you feel sorry for these people—all three, the whole time.”
We are living through unfathomably rotten and misogynistic times—my fondness for this type of music, while making me uncomfortable, is, I think, a testament to how effective Greep’s absurdity is in forming these caricatures. But the tragic machismo of The New Sound and the new (quite retro) sound itself are not for everyone. That seems by design. “I don’t like forced subtleties—art that you can tell is a bit quaint,” says Greep. “A lot of music that’s the most rated these days has that quality, like it’s stoic and extremely tasteful.”
Black Midi were surely never accused of quaintness. But having gone solo, he no longer feels like his big, bizarre swings, whether musical or lyrical, need to be tempered and reconciled within the context of a group project. “It feels like less of a fluke, like there’s less insecurity, basically,” he says of making music now. “If you really commit to something and think about it and go the whole way, people follow along. Yes, it’s so extreme, but what have you got to lose?”
Another aspect of Greep’s work that sets him apart from other players, especially guitarists as nimble-fingered and prog-informed as he is, is his voice. He’s pulling from classic jazz and pop singers that other musicians his age seem perfectly content to ignore, crooners from the ’40s who used technical advances in live and studio sound to access new emotional registers in their singing.
“If you think of Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra—with every generation, there’s a change in the technique,” Greep explains. “The previous generation was singing in a concert hall without a microphone. [Sinatra’s generation] didn’t need to do that because they had microphones, but they still had incredible technique. You can hear and feel every word like the singer’s talking to you. It doesn’t sound like a song a lot of the time—it doesn't even sound like a melody. And there’s some songs where it’s cheesy, but the way they deliver a certain line, you suddenly really believe it.”
Now that we’re in Rat Pack territory, it seems like a good time to detour toward the topic of gambling. Greep recalls going to a bizarre casino on tour in Reno and says he’s got a foolproof method for winning at roulette. “It’s the only thing in the casino which is in your favor, it’s just really boring,” he says. “You have 36 numbers, which are split up into three categories—like 1 to 12, 13 to 24, 25 to 36—and the idea basically is you bet £5 on the lower third, £5 on the top third, and put like a pound on zero, because if it lands on zero, it’s like 36 times return on the payout. It’s about 66 percent likely it’s either the lower third or the top third, and you’ll get 15 quid and you’ve spent 11. You just have to do it for ages.” After making say, 50 to 200 quid, Greep and his pals will hit the blackjack table and swiftly lose their winnings. “It’s all gone in a matter of minutes. I love blackjack but it’s the stupidest game.”
Speaking of dumb fun, I’d also heard that Greep was a big boxing fan: not surprising, considering he started Black Midi’s “Sugar/Tzu” with the sound of an announcer beginning a match with “Let’s get ready to rumble!” What is it about the brutal sport that he likes? “In boxing, if you make one mistake, you’re gonna have to pay for it,” Greep says. “It’s not like in football, where someone can play shit in one game and they still win because their team was good. There are no flukes in boxing, really—you don’t get to the top without being the best.”
Greep’s recording and performing style these days suggests he likes testing himself. For one, he considers himself a better musician after spending the early pandemic practicing a lot. His reasons for working outside of Black Midi become fairly obvious as we discuss the way he made The New Sound. Greep expresses a strong desire to cultivate backing bands on at least two different continents, like the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett in the 1970s. He got a taste for dropping in with pros far from home when he was in São Paulo, Brazil on tour and worked on the album with local musicians; they were ready to record after just 30 minutes with the sheet music for his songs.
His current situation seems almost like a dare to himself: Greep hasn’t even met his backing band for his New York residency, which starts three days after our interview. He found some “proper musicians”—jazz school guys around his age—on Instagram, and they were down to play the shows. “It’s gonna be great,” he says. “If all else fails and it’s not rehearsed enough, at least the novelty bit is still cool. But I have to say, the standard of musicianship these days among kids playing jazz is insane. Have you seen Domi and JD Beck?” he asks, referencing the zoomer wunderkinds who stun with their absurdly virtuosic takes on jazz standards and MF Doom instrumentals alike.
“Someone was saying that jazz was saved by the internet,” he continues. “Because it’s tricky music, it’s a very YouTube-able thing. It's very like, Wow, look at how this guy plays this tune so fast.” Greep’s place in that particular pantheon is perhaps obscured by the fact that Black Midi began while its members were still teenagers studying at the BRIT School, the famed London performing-arts college. And despite his perpetual mischievousness, the guy just seems like an old soul—who else is making records in 2024 that are reminiscent not of Steely Dan’s greatest hits, but of freaky Donald Fagen solo records from the ’80s?
There are 18 oyster shells flipped over on ice, and we’ve each attempted bites of the stale bread in the basket on the table. When I excuse myself to use the bathroom toward the end of lunch, Greep also rises, shakes my hand, and wanders off to find his publicist in some faraway part of this amusement-park of a seafood restaurant. The table is cleared and reset.
There’s just the matter of the bill, and an older-gentlemen waiter who doesn’t seem to like us or know what’s going on. It’s immediately tense upon my return, even after we explain that the check is being paid by someone in the adjoining room. Greep and I wait by the cramped entrance with the waiter watching us from about three feet away. He definitely thinks we are about to dine and dash, which we note to each other quietly, so as to not offend the guy more. It almost feels like we are doing something wrong, and I find myself thinking that Greep would make a solid co-conspirator were we trying to cause trouble.
After that briefly harrowing experience is over and we begin to say our goodbyes, the conversation turns back to Greep’s New York shows and his first meeting with his band tomorrow. With an impish grin, he invites me to attend the first night of the residency. If it’s a car wreck, he suggests, it’ll be an entertaining one at least.
The following Tuesday, at Union Pool in Brooklyn, Greep makes it known this is the group’s first live performance together. There’s a hurried air before they start, until the singer realizes his guitar isn’t plugged in to the amp. After an impressively loud and chaotic opening rendition of his “Blues,” Greep suggests, in a comical understatement, that it was “worth the kerfuffle” for the audience. He introduces the members of the band three times throughout the night and says things like, “not bad, man” or “it’s a good start” afterwards. Every time, he seems as amused as he is surprised that this impromptu crew sounds so tight. However you might feel about Greep’s disgusting and frequently beautiful songs, you can’t say he didn’t commit to the bit.
