The dissolution became official back in May, with a bombshell post announcing an indefinite hiatus (until “the stars align and the planet needs us”) at the end of the trio’s current world tour – at the time of writing (and talking) there are just two gigs left, with the penultimate date at Hong Kong’s Freespace Jazz Festival on October 6. Bittersweet much? “It’s kind of a relief at this point that we’re at the end of the tour,” admits the keyboardist, who goes by the more mundane Dan Leavers when not on duty.

So why did The Comet is Coming break up?

For fans, it’s heartbreaking. Sounding like nothing quite on earth, The Comet is Coming are – or were, if you’re reading this after October 20 – a larger-than-life, otherworldly super-trio. An explosive chain reaction of Danalogue’s psychedelic synth fissions, Betamax’s primal club rhythms and King Shabaka’s stratosphere-soaring, spiritual exorcisms and machine-gun sax attacks.

But many more observant listeners might have seen the writing on the wall when the horn player born Shabaka Hutchings announced, on January 1, his intention to give up his instrument at the end of the year, roughly six months after calling time on his other world-touring musical behemoth Sons of Kemet. (He’ll bow out in true majesty, performing John Coltrane’s genre-defining masterpiece A Love Supreme in London on December 7.)

Did Leavers get a heads up? None whatsoever. “Yeah, well, that’s the nature of social media and constructing a narrative around yourself,” he muses.

It might sound like his hand was forced and the decision to disband made for him. Not so. “I had already kind of decided I wasn’t gonna make a another Comet album,” he adds. “But I haven’t done a social media post about that.”

More on that later, but first …

“Bottled lightening”: how The Comet is Coming was born

In an ironic twist, despite often serving as the band’s toastmaker and talisman – the optic tip of “the triangle” in their sci-fi-aping iconography, as Leavers puts it – Hutchings was the last to join, the least involved and the least invested in The Comet is Coming. As old Brighton school mates, Leavers and the drummer otherwise known as Max Hallett had been playing together for years as the psychedelic duo Soccer96 when they invited “mutual fan” Hutchings to appear as a featured guest on a one-off, completely spontaneous session.

“It just kind of exploded immediately the minute we started recording,” remembers Leavers, a decade on from the cosmic day that would alter all three men’s universes. The secret was recording everything direct to analogue tape, limited to just three hours per day, for three consecutive days – a self-imposed restriction that lent a fiery intensity to the proceedings. “Bottled lightning, I like to call it – you just kind of capture the excitement and energy of playing something for one of the first times,” says Leavers.

By the end of the second day, they had already decided to form a band, with their trippy moniker taken from a track name on an old BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack LP lying around the studio. “And actually in hindsight, that was one of the best things we could have done, because now we had this fresh sound, and we managed to find a name – The Comet is Coming, which really gave us a platform for our imaginations,” he adds.

From the offset, it was clear who was in the driving seat. “I remember looking up at Shabz [Hutchings] afterwards and he said, ‘Uh, you know, I’m doing Sons of Kemet …’ So yeah, in a sense, most of the kind of leadership has come from either myself, or Max for certain things,” he says.

Each busy with their own projects, the recordings sat on Leavers’ laptop for two years as he used stolen moments to chip away at them – splicing, dicing and spicing up the nine raw hours of sound into around an hour of releasable music. “You take a half-hour piece of just free expression, and then try and kind of bake it and distil it down into something that’s actually listenable – like four-and-a-half minutes you can put on a record or even, heaven forbid, release as a single,” he adds.

This interstellar “bottled lightning” finally shot into the mundane plane of public consciousness in late 2015 with the Prophecy EP, the rest of the session making up the career-defining debut LP. Fuelled by the band’s frenzied live shows, the response to Channel the Spirits was ecstatic – a core text at the heart of the slowly-gathering “UK jazz” snowball. “I think [our debut] was probably ahead of its time, it really helped shine a light on obscure music. That was why we called ourselves the ambassadors of the obscure,” adds Leavers.

Trust in the Lifeforce: The Comet explodes

As the apparent leader of three distinct but equally potent outfits, no one figure was more central to the UK jazz explosion/revival narrative than Hutchings, and eventually the sax hero was tapped with a multi-album deal for both Sons of Kemet and his Shabaka and the Ancestors project from the iconic Impulse! label. As Leavers tells it, Comet was an afterthought swept up in the bidding war: “I think they just were talking to Shabaka already, and they heard about The Comet is Coming, and they’re like what? There’s another group? – all a bit incredulous.”

There was little choice but to follow suit. “Shabaka had brokered this killer deal with one of the coolest labels in the world and me and Max had a decision to make – we either sign to a different label, or get on board,” he remembers. “If you try and fight a juggernaut like Universal Music – which is the Impulse! holding, one of the biggest guns in the world – you’re gonna get steamrollered. So we thought we better just get with the programme and make sure we’re part of the whole machine.”

The deal undoubtedly led to more exposure, especially in the US – today Comet clock more Spotify and YouTube plays than all Hutchings’ other projects – and with it more pressure. When they signed, the band had already taped a further four days back at London’s Total Refreshment Centre that would yield both the second album, Trust in the Lifeforce … and a half-hour companion EP Afterlife. It was left to Leavers to work his mixing magic – and wave a very sharpened blade.

“I felt an incredible pressure to make the best album I could possibly make,” says Leavers. “I was having sleepless nights, knowing that it was gonna be on a major American label, I just really wanted to make an absolutely seminal work.”

In the end, 15 tracks would be released across the sibling titles with a dozen more mixed but left on the cutting board. “I have this kind of tortured artist approach. When I’m making the album, I just want it to be so good and so true to itself … I want people to listen to it and just, you know, go into another world.”

The swansong: The Comet burns out

With a bigger budget to play with, the trio upgraded to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios to record what would became their swansong, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam. Despite being recorded amid the reflective solitude of the pandemic, it’s a markedly harder, more electronic album that leans further into the band’s clubbier instincts, further still away from anything you might ever call jazz.

“We’d all been at home going out of our minds, in our little worlds and our houses, going through such an introspective period,” remembers Leavers. “We definitely brought with us this different vibe. It wasn’t a party-party kind of time, but I think that actually led to us making quite a party record, in a way, because we were all dreaming about being back on stage – playing and people dancing – we were almost imagining, let’s bring that live energy back into our lives. We’re craving it, you know.”

Despite that, it was soon after the band finally got back on the road in September 2022, that Leavers says he decided it was time to take a break – long before Hutchings’ New Year’s Day bombshell. “The two lads were kind of like, ‘Oh, what should we do for the next album?’ And I just wasn’t particularly feeling it, making another album,” he says. “It’s hard to describe, but there’s a creative wanderlust, which just was activated intuitively – a creative desire to make art, outside of the constructs you’ve built for yourself. An artist might just change medium – go from painting to sculpture or something … I’m trying really hard not to sound like I’m in Spinal Tap and failing a little bit.”

As Leavers tells it, the split is amicable but much-needed. He paints a familiar picture of the travails of touring, while speaking equally excitedly about the projects he has ahead. He’s working on “an odyssey of nerdy synth records”. He’s recorded a 25-track video game soundtrack for C-Smash VRS, a VR PlayStation 5 game set in space (“I mean, they came to the right guy,” he laughs). The one-off, jam-band supergroup Flock recently recorded a second album in Pembrokeshire, Wales (rather than free jams inspired by text scores, this time they prepared “abstract graphics scores for each other”). He’s unsure about the fate of Soccer96, but remains a member of post-punk group Snapped Ankles.

Oh, and he also shot, directed and edited an “old-school Super 8” music video for Alabaster Deplume’s “Mrs Calamari” – us mentioning this served as a reminder that he really must fire an email back to Chicago’s International Anthem, arguably the hippest improvised music label on the planet.

Enough, then, to keep Leavers busy indefinitely. But that doesn’t have to mean The Comet is Gone for good. “Well, you know, this is the thing – comets are in an orbit,” he muses. “Some are deep orbit, some are elliptical, some are circular, you know, it’s like, who knows what?”