Imagine your worst nightmare.
Looking at a Hieronymus Bosch painting and recognising your own face jeering back.
Waking up on the set of David Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of The Naked Lunch.
Fighting for your life as a Ukrainian in Mariupol and unable to leave.
Living through a global pandemic where millions die year after year.
When Black Midi take the stage at The Rechabite to the sound of Men At Work’s Down Under, they let you into their own nightmare. They start with Speedway, almost a mission statement as the mosh pit surges forward.
Black Midi give the semblance of a standard R&B band with Gibson and Rickenbacker guitars, base and drums All the beautiful notes meld into the throbbing knob that is Welcome To Hell…
We did it all, we seen it all
And worse, much worse, son
The massacres of ages
Too many to recall
Limbs rendered birds by the speed they flew off
A soup nothingness that once was your best friend
The music pulses and seethes. The band is as frantic as the heaving dance floor .
Sugar/Tzu is a mix of tranquil and melodic arpeggios that lead into explosive riffs. Lead singer Geordie Greep mumbles incoherently while the interplay between Greep and Cameron Picton on guitars is full of ferocious creativity. A prizefight for the world title in 2163 called by a blind midget. In the end there is only one reigning, defending, and undefeated and undisputed champion of the world. And it is not the protagonists Sun Sugar or Sun Tzu but drummer Morgan ‘Hellfire’ Simpson. He is insanely good.
On Eat Men Eat the full nightmare opens up as the homophobic Captain mines stomach acid from his deliberately drugged crew and invited guests. This is The Naked Lunch with a bug shaped typewriter talking from an anus hidden under its wing.
Black Midi go at it like a possessed Martinelli typing left to right across the stage before the Mujahideen types back over the top in Arabic right to left. Back and forth they go, duelling typewriters layering the black music font until the stage is full of sound.
The song list is interrupted by a warped tribute to AC/ DC with Morgan uttering some guttural vocals. The cranked up vintage Marshall amplifier has Bon Scott in the house.
Hogwash And Balderdash is vaudeville calliope at its best. The band resembling headless runaway convict chickens on stage. In cardiology, torsades de pointes is a fatal arrhythmia rotating around multiple foci within the heart and characterised by extreme oscillatory changes. Black Midi live is musical torsades of such intensity that the band and the audience cannot live long in such a rhythm. The end comes with The Magician, a song that mixes chaos and beauty. Greep sings like a 1930’s crooner at a speakeasy. Seth “The Shank” Evans, who has been hammering the bass within an inch of its life all night, moves seamlessly to keys. Heady stuff indeed.
When Black Midi leave the stage it’s not over. They have rewired our brains to seek out nightmares of our own making.
Our sleep will never be the same again.
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