Page 317 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

Tim Perry, who as the booker for the Windmill put on Black Midi’s first gigs, points out that you also have
to be very good to keep up with musicians of Simpson’s calibre. “We had an all-ages show the other day,”
Perry says. “The music teacher came down and he was going, ‘Yeah, Black Midi, all the kids are into them .
. .’ Hopefully they will learn to play as well as Black Midi too, because you can’t jam like that unless you
are very good indeed.”

Typical of the new breed of noisy virtuosos are Black Country, New Road. This London-based seven-piece
put saxophone and gypsy jazz-style violin over post-punk rhythms and simple guitar parts, while the singer
Isaac Wood intones spoken vignettes in slightly hysterical tones. “I am invincible in these sunglasses . . .
there are so many road men on this street and you cannot tell that I’m scared,” from last year’s Sunglasses, is
one memorable line. Then there’s the charmingly named Jockstrap, who combine smoky, chanteuse-style
singing with dubstep backing. Both bands feature Georgia Ellery, a violinist from Penzance in Cornwall
who studied at the Guildhall, like three other members of Black Country, New Road and her partner in
Jockstrap.

“I was a classical violinist from the age of five onward,” says Ellery, 22, between rehearsals for a live score
of the Bafta-nominated Cornish film Bait, which she is performing with the Cornish-Welsh singer Gwenno
Saunders at the British Film Institute in London. “I was in the Cornish Youth Orchestra and doing Suzuki
method, which I hated because you are with one of your parents in rehearsals four times a week, but it also
meant I got to grade eight aged 11. I was always the one at the back of the class, my violin drooping down,
so when I told my teachers at Penzance College I wanted to study at a conservatoire the response was,
‘Really?’ I wanted a classical music education, but I always knew I didn’t want to be in an orchestra.”

Ellery says she is surprised that more classical musicians don’t want to break out, not least because being in
a band is bloody good fun. “My world exploded when I went to the Guildhall,” she says. “Until I met Lewis
[Evans, the Black Country, New Road saxophonist] I had never heard of post-punk. And with violin you get
your intonation through your left ear and the vibrations in your chest, but when you play in a band you can’t
hear or feel any of that. Add the melting pot of influences you get when you form a band with six other
people, and the whole experience blew my mind.”

Georgia Ellery, of Black Country, New Road and Jockstrap, in the Bafta-nominated Cornish film Bait

At the Green Man Festival last year in Wales I saw Hutchings play intense, improvisational jazz with his
band Sons of Kemet in the afternoon, then do a late-night set of cosmic rave with the Comet Is Coming a