Geordie Greep: “The best music is when you can feel the risk of it”

What guides your creative process?

Geordie Greep: Good question, even though it’s very general. People don’t actually think about it, but you should because the reason you make music kind of boils down to it, that kind of has an effect on whether the music is any good or not. The main reason why you’re doing it, shouldn’t be that you want to do it, because it’s cool and you want to entertain people, but because you have to do it. Because it has to exist. There’s no other option. There needs to be an urgency to it. Which is a cheesy answer, but I think it’s true. You have to take it seriously. It’s the best thing in the world.

And why is that?

It’s the most mysterious and most simple art form. There’s no kind of way to ease yourself in, you’re just in there straight away. Whereas, someone can say, I like this movie because I can relate to the character, or I like this painting because it depicts something that’s similar to my life or whatever. People can say stuff like that to get into other art forms. But to get into music? You can’t just say if you like the sound of something, it’s not like you can relate to it. You just have to like the sound of it. And what’s that about? That’s kind of alien. But also music is maybe the most popular thing in the world, so it’s not an esoteric thing. So you could say it’s the best thing! It’s the thing you love. But why should you create it then? It’s just an urgent feeling. Why do you go to sleep or wake up or have a meal or meet people? Why don’t you just live life alone? That’s how I feel about music.

What does the album’s title The New Sound mean to you?

It’s kind of a silly title. Kind of tongue and cheek, a little bit, I guess you could say. But there is a deeper meaning. How many times has there ever been a new sound? Completely new from scratch? I don’t think the songs on this album are completely new or different or never been heard before, but ultimately it’s more that it’s a new sound for me. Even before I’d made all the songs, I was calling the album ‘A new sound’. I was like, this is going to be THE new sound. We have to get it done. I also really like these old school albums like ‘The Magnificent Ray Charles’, or ‘The Genius of Charlie Christian’ and stuff like that. Kind of those cheesy old school album titles.

When did you know that you needed to go solo?

I always had half an eye on that. All alone in my mind, kind of from the beginning I was thinking this is fun being in a band, but it’s not quite what I fully want out of music. Ultimately, I was enjoying it and I had a good time, but it was just the tip of the iceberg of what I wanted to accomplish musically. And as the band went on, I wanted to discover more of that iceberg. It was probably necessary to make an album by myself, where I could explore the limits of what I wanted to create. Working in a group is all about compromise. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And in many cases that makes the music a lot better, because it’s been vetted.

But there are some cases where it is advantageous to just do it by yourself and to have complete control and to have a complete lack of self-consciousness about any kind of theme or style or mood that you want to explore. I suspect that with most of these songs, if I was in a band they’d say, you can’t do that. It’s too silly or it’s too cheesy or it’s too whatever, or too crazy or I don’t know! The reason these songs work is that there is a huge degree of risk, and even when you’re listening to it, you can say, if this comes together it would be kind of a miracle. But those are the risks worth taking. And the best music is made when, even as a listener, you can feel the risk of it and you can feel how it’s barely held together.

You went to São Paulo in Brazil to do two improvised sessions over there with Fernando Dotta’s label Balaclava Records. How did it go?

Oh, it was great. I mean, it was not so much improvised as impromptu, right? So it was set up kind of impulsively. But I had sent the musicians the songs in advance and the records and everything. So they knew the music. But it was still very risky, because you’re meeting up with musicians that you’ve never met before in a country that you’ve never been to, where they speak a language you don’t speak, and you’re paying them. You’re committing to pay them before you’ve even heard them play. There was a lot of trepidation beforehand and anxiety of how well it would go. When I sent them these songs, they were really into it. So then by the time we got there to the session and stuff, we sat down and we played through one of the songs and straight away it was, oh, this is going to be easy! It was brilliant. And we did four songs on the album “Holy, Holy”, “Through a War”, “Terror” and “X”.

Do you feel like you’ve achieved the sound you set out to find?

Definitely. It was the first time where I felt the songs just got better and better and better and better for me, all the way from writing the song to recording, and hearing the songs in the studio. Usually, um, it’s the case where you come up with a song and you’re really excited about it and really ambitious. And you can hear in your head like a dream version. And it sounds so perfect and there’s no flaws. And then you play through it and you learn it, and by the time you get to recording it, it often seems like something’s been lost, some kind of spark or some kind of magic mojo. It was the attention to detail and the discipline with the session musicians the whole time. They were so professional in always saying, “oh, when I play this chord, do you want it like this or that? Or when I do this thing, how do you want that? Do you like this vibe? How do you want that”?

How much did you end up improvising?

There were lots of little things that were all very choreographed ahead of time, and then when we recorded it, which was only five or ten minutes later after arranging the small stuff, it was like, oh yeah, that all sounds right. It’s alright playing rough around the edges. If you’re doing kind of ‘simple’ songs. But if you’re doing more ambitious, more complicated songs like we were doing with Black Midi, and there’s a lot of things that are not necessarily crystal clear or exactly well choreographed, that’s when you start to notice it and it can be detrimental to the album.

For some songs it feels like they’re being played for the first time. For those songs specifically, how much was improvised?

That’s the trick, isn’t it? The musicians were virtuosos. But in order to take on the album, they were playing the songs only for the third or fourth time, maybe sometimes even the first time. But they were following the songs strictly, so they were concentrating really hard on getting it right. But it was only the first or second time they played it, so there would obviously be some inconsistencies and stuff. Um, oftentimes when you’ve played a song 50 times, 100 times, and then you go to record it, there’s such a degree of autopilot that it ends up becoming way more sloppy than when you first played it when you were really concentrating. So yeah, it’s a combination of all of those things of being experienced players, but new to the music.

Your lyrics do often sound quite feminist. Is that intentional?

If it comes across like that, that’s really nice, because I am very big into that classic principle of ‘show, don’t tell’. So many musicians or artists preach these grand statements of “we want to make music that embodies this principle or that principle, and it hits you over the head”, but I think the music says: “this is the morality”, but it doesn’t actually say anything interesting about a subject or have any kind of genuine feeling to it. So with this album, I wanted to present these scenarios, characters, situations and environments and more just let it speak for itself.

Because it’s a bizarre world we’re in, right? Especially with all these extreme kinds of things that are so normalised. Um, the internet, Twitter and all these crazy people influencing lots of young boys and all this stuff. With these strange and bizarre dodgy guys, you have to appreciate that there’s still a human being there, right? So I didn’t want to ever make it into a complete parody. It’s more just “this is very pathetic. This is funny. But it’s also really sad, right?” With every song, I was trying to strike this balance constantly of ‘you’re feeling sorry for this person’. And also thinking, “oh my God, what is going on here?” But trying not to make it at all preachy.

“The Magician” is quite a sad song, why is that?

Oh, yeah. Well at a point with this song, it’s a bit more abstract, and a summation of many of the songs on the album with less of a defined story and more of a rhetorical and poetic feel. With the album cover as well, I just found this picture and I thought, this sums up a lot of this desperation. It’s a stark, beautiful and powerful image, but it’s not offensive or nasty. It’s not mean spirited. It’s funny and dark. So it was a really good match.

How do you always define the boundaries in your music?

It’s all about how it feels. There’s no complete metric because I reckon with some of these songs, if I presented them to a band or to a group of people working together, there would probably be a few things where people think, “no, no, no, that’s too far or you can’t do this or I’m not sure about that”. People underestimate the audience. They are on your side and can read between the lines and know if your heart is in the right place or not. So I don’t know how to define the boundaries, but I think that’s alright.

Do you trust yourself?

Yeah, pretty much. Throughout the whole process of this album, there were so many things that could have gone wrong. The only main thing pulling it together was the trust that in the end it would be okay. For example, one thing people have said is there are quite a lot of different sounds and styles. How would you know that it’s going to fit together well as an album? How would it be cohesive? I’d say I don’t necessarily know for sure, but I just trusted that the voice and the lyrics would carry it through and make it pull together enough. If you’re doing music and if you’re serious about it, you have to have extreme self-confidence. Otherwise you won’t do anything, you know? But it’s tricky.