Midi Midis interview with Matt Dyson

“We get all of our stuff from E-bay and people from Twitter. Our Amstrad C64 came with six games and a light pen .So the first six months were really unproductive as we just played Batman.”

I am not talking to S Club Juniors, nor a child protégé remembering a long lost dotcom empire. No, Artrocker is sat opposite Marcus Fairley, one half of Midi Midis, cutting through the static to find out what marks this band of 8-bit garage rock mavericks out from electro geeks. And how they’ve managed to wrench so many glorious art rock melodies out of a backfiring guitar and a spectrum, whilst others are left helplessly searching for hooks like amputee Abu Hamza.

“To me midi sound is like the blues of electro. These bleeps are essentially the beginnings of synths sound. When computers were made in the 50s they still bleeped and it was so simplistic and stripped back, cold sounding. The idea is to have the guitars and vocals recorded in analogue and have a very warm sound. I just wanted to be soulful like Marvin Gaye. Ironically it probably doesn’t make any difference, it’s just a boyish dream.”

It has also proved so successful that the band are currently being shot through with six thousands volts of support from the likes of XFM’s Eddy Temple Morris and Tom Bellamy, of once pioneering and now veterans of bastard noise, The Cooper Temple Clause.

So what are they going to do with their bright idea?

“We are going to release the next single ‘There Is Far Too Much Going On Upstairs To Be Truly Comfortable With Myself’. We actually wrote it when we first started, but left some our best stuff deliberately for when we got better. Finally, when my ex girlfriend Sarah (from the Good Natured) left me and I was in a complete state of confusion, for some reason it just came together. I was even playing an Amstrad live in the studio.”

And if they can contain this on the album, surely global domination is on in the cards?

“ Obviously we want to be the biggest band in the world but then you hit America and it is a bit of a head fuck. So we have to say we want to be the biggest band in Europe”.

Now if there was ever an opening for ex-child-pop-stars turned roadies…

‘There is far too much going on upstairs to be truly comfortable with myself’ is out on April 5th