If you played AC/DC to a hardcore Chuck Berry fan back in the day, they’d mistake it for noise”: Black Midi’s Geordie Greep on Angus Young

Black Midi are tough to pin down. Their avant-garde approach to rock is a whirlwind, melding math rock breakdowns with sharp injections of post-punk and jazz. When listening to one of the band’s records, it’s often quite a dizzying experience.

Considering the group’s lofty, experimental soundscaping, you’d assume the lads take a lot of influence from equally as quirky acts. However, frontman Geordie Greep has recently insisted that AC/DC have had a great influence on the band’s sound.

• READ MORE: Gene Simmons thought AC/DC “might be a gay band” the first time he saw them in 1977

“You might read this, listen to my band and think I’m talking gibberish, but there is definitely an influence!” he laughs in an interview with Total Guitar.

Greep is aware the influence isn’t obvious on the surface of Black Midi’s sound. But the impact is certainly there. “One thing that’s very prevalent in some of the best music is people taking influence from other things and imitating it in their own way,” he explains.

The guitarist takes a moment to reflect on other artists who have been inspired by those before them. As he puts it, influence is often diluted and transformed into something new. The original spark of inspiration isn’t always clear. “If you played AC/DC to a hardcore Chuck Berry fan back in the day, they wouldn’t have liked it, mistaking it for noise,” he says. “Sure, Angus is trying to play like Chuck Berry and old blues guitarists like that, but he doesn’t sound like them. It became his own thing.”

The same goes for Hendrix. “He was playing his own version of the blues,” Greep insists. “But it didn’t come across like that at all, it sounded like something new.”

There’s a slew of artists who have taken an artist’s sound and totally transformed it into their own thing. Taylor Swift for example sites Paul McCartney as her biggest inspiration. Elsewhere, DJ Zedd is known to mix a killer EDM dancefloor track, but takes inspiration from a wide range of genres, voicing his love for classical music as well as death metal.