With three albums under their collective belt since Mikey Georgeson (David Devant & His Spirit Wife) & António Olaio (Repórter Estrábico) first met in 2024, it is high time for a Best Of The Middle People compilation.
Gathering tracks from Revenge Of The Killjoys, Dogmatists In Disguise, and even one from last year’s Christmas With The Middle People holiday album, Can You Feel The Moment: Best Of The Middle People also adds a trio of new songs to bring more ‘Art-Pop Joy’.
Introduced through a mutual friend when Olaio was performing in a play in London, the two soon exchanged drawings. Georgeson sending him one titled ‘Losing My Virginity to Time Itself’, which ‘sort of set the tone.’ “We are both visual artists,” Olaio explains, “both used to putting things together in weird ways. I then asked Mikey to play on a song for an album I was going to make, and we became a band. It was very quick. We do everything very quickly.” The duo’s first song, ‘Hello John’, was their way of saying hello to each other. “It’s not a very nice song,” Georgeson laughs. “It’s about two twin brothers that hate each other. But it did feel like a conversation through music. That ambiguity is quite middle. We navigate both good and bad.”
The Middle People are quick to point out that ‘middle’ is not the same as ‘average’. “There’s a joyful darkness. We are ambitious but in a generous, elegant, polite way.” For the band name, Georgeson was thinking of the children in The Midwich Cuckoos who take over your mind and control you. “Since neither António nor I is the leader, it’s the entity of the group itself that controls us. It makes all the decisions. Part of the ethos of The Middle People is that we don’t make decisions. We let what is happening occur. We’ve both collaborated on enough musical projects to know the best way to allow these to happen is through emergence. To really nurture rather than try to control.”
In the spirit of ‘letting things happen’, lead-off track and future single ‘Can You Feel The Moment?’ came about when Georgeson was messing about with an SH-101 and it started doing that arpeggio. “I was reading The Outsider by Colin Wilson at the time. I thought that song was going to be called ‘The Ultimate Yes’ but then Timothy Parkes sent me a joke text saying ‘can you feel the moment?’ and I started singing that instead. A lot of the time with the tracks, we’re trying not to make it too song-y. More Disco than Song. So that the moment of the track is all the way through, and Tim ended up being on the final song.” Olaio adding, “Anyways, it often feels like songs make themselves. Especially when you’re looking for rhymes.”
Second of the new tunes is ‘Fly (Poetry)’. Shoegaze space pop that seeks transcendence on the ground. Reversing the habit of poetry that strives for idealised abstraction, instead it grasps the really real of experience – “Buy yourself a new hat!”
‘Things Change’ is the big pop single, slightly off-kilter as is their wont. Here joined by David Devant & His Spirit Wife’s The Professor on drums, while the video shows off the fantastic make-up and visual sense of one of Olaio’s students. “She always comes to class painted differently so I invited her to be in the video. Using a double-sided mirror, we achieved the effect we were going for, which was to connect a boy and a girl but using only their eyes.” Georgeson elaborates, “It’s the coincidence of what you want and what emerges. If you are too fixated on what you want, you will miss the amazing things that can happen. So ‘Things Change’, there’s the coincidence of what you want and what happens. That is change.”
The video is sumptuous, both cinematic and televisual. Television having played a role in both their early careers as artists. David Devant & His Spirit Wife having been the house band on Edgar Wright’s 1996 comedy series, Asylum. Georgeson revealing, “We are both artists that got put through the mangle of being on telly and having to navigate how strange that was. The way that wasn’t necessarily aligned with how you felt about what you were doing. But at the same time it’s quite seductive, the televisual kaleidoscopic experience. Anyways we both enjoy the televisual realm of making living collage with digital media. Using ourselves as material, on stage or in performance.”
One might say that’s plasticity, and that is a word and concept The Middle People like very much. ‘Love Is Plasticity’ explores this idea of ‘living collage’ when someone gives a child a ‘genetics kit’ as a gift and she creates beings with it, playing in the biosynaptic realm. ‘Warmer In The Middle Of The Road’ channels Mark E. Smith as the narrator ponders whether the bright lights there might also imply a difference in temperature, while ‘Wrong Number’ has some fun with thwarted erotic phone calls as numbers are announced in the manner of points awarded in athletic competitions, all over a disco beat.
Both the first two albums were named after qualities The Middle People are not, “as kind of an attack on” both ‘killjoys’ and ‘dogmatists’. Though with ‘Dogmatists In Disguise’ there’s always the danger of having gone so far undercover you forget who you are. On ‘Dancing My Way to the Sky’ the group further indulge their EDM tendencies as Jesus Christ pulls the nails out of his hands so he can start dancing. Olaio: “Coimbra, Portugal, where I live, is a very baroque, Catholic city. I like playing with Baroqueness, there’s an abundance of aesthetic, but it’s also just a nice dance record.”
‘Half A Step From Heaven’ is taken from The Middle People Christmas album, Christmas With, and is perhaps their saddest song. Olaio explaining, “You can take shorter steps, but never half of one. So you never arrive at Heaven. But who knows, maybe that’s for the best. There could be a terrible surprise waiting for you there.” Rounding off the record is the psychedelic shoegaze of their third new number, God’s Planet. The place where God goes to rest. The music was written by Georgeson’s son Arthur and has Georgeson Senior posing the question “If God is there, does that mean our planet is godless? It’s got that sense of cosmic dread. God as a horror movie is actually quite appealing.”
Can You Feel The Moment: Best Of The Middle People will be released on all digital platforms on May 1, 2026, preceded by the single/video for ‘Things Change’ on March 24th and title track ‘Can You Feel The Moment?’ April 28th