Geordie Greep reveals reason behind Black Midi split
In an exclusive interview with Far Out, former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep has explained the reasonings for the band parting ways.
News of Black Midi’s indefinite hiatus was broken this summer by Greep, who nonchalantly shared the revelation while live on Instagram. During their tenure, the experimental London group released three records with their final outing, Hellfire, arriving in 2022. However, they continued to tour until the end of 2023.
In August, Greep typed to those watching his live stream, “Black Midi was an interesting band that’s now indefinitely over.”
Soon afterwards, the singer’s claims were backed up by bassist and occasional vocalist Cameron Picton, who took to Twitter/X “I’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,” he wrote on the platform in a now-deleted post.
Greep has already moved on and forged a solo career. His debut album, The New Sound, arrived on October 4th, and he is set to begin the UK leg of his first headline tour at The Fleece in Bristol on October 22nd. Other notable dates on the jaunt include visits to Leeds, Nottingham, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.
Now, speaking to Far Out, Greep explained that Black Midi had made the decision to part ways around a year before he made the news official. He revealed that they had a meeting where it was agreed that it was “probably the end” of their journey.
Reflecting on his unconventional method of communicating their split, Greep said: “It was probably the wrong thing to do, but in this moment, I thought, ‘Who cares? It’s finished,’ just because I felt bad, I didn’t wanna string all these guys along, give anyone false hope or be weird about it. It’s just clean.”
However, Greep maintains it was the right decision to inform their fans, stating: “It’s better just to say because, yeah, the reality is that it’s probably going to be a long time before there’s any other gigs or whatever, who knows. Mainly just for the fact that it just wasn’t going anywhere for a long time.”
The moment Greep knew Black Midi was over
Greep also confessed that he knew “the days were numbered” for Black Midi when he started to seek more creative control. Nevertheless, there’s no bitterness on his behalf, noting, “If you think when you’re 15-16, and then you get to 25, your friends do all change. It’s not like a conscious thing. It’s not even that deep or anything, it just happens.”
The English musician is comfortable with the impact Black Midi made during their tenure and expressed his pride at the group bowing down before the quality of their art was diluted. “It’s better than churning out whatever, and every time you put out a bad album, your ranking goes down. You don’t want to do that,” he told Far Out.
In a four-star review of The New Sound, Far Out wrote of Greep’s debut solo offering: “With half of the tracks recorded in Brazil and the others in London, Greep not only follows his established path further on his solo debut, with his distinctive sound remaining but also evolves it by blending it with the heat-soaked and dynamic rhythms of the sprawling South American nation he captured some of it in.”
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