Fashion victims

There is something inexplicably exciting about pop’s notion of a ‘scene’: young musicians of similar outlooks drawn together by a common aim to transform music, referring to the past to create something of the present. But enough of Fleetwood Mac and the British blues boom. Instead, to fashionable Dalston, where a young quartet called Black Midi played to an uncomfortably full room in a converted cinema.

There has been a great deal of fuss about Black Midi, the most extreme representatives yet from the scene that formed around the Windmill pub in Brixton and whose other members include Shame (excitable and anthemic, owing a debt to Echo and the Bunnymen and Killing Joke), Goat Girl (offbeat but unexpectedly melodic) and HMLTD (insanely colourful, already signed and already dropped by Sony). Where the other groups deal in what are, recognisably, pop songs, however skewed, Black Midi fancy themselves as something rather more profound.