A touch of 50s Jazz and a lot of 80s production. Matt Bianco are doing weird things with a traditional style...

I'll always remember my first meeting with Matt. It was about the time of the Profiterole Affair. Thanks to Matt the infamous Sticky Guzzler was already behind bars, but there was still a lot of bad lager floating around. I was there when he put the Consumer Brothers in the cold meat section, firing almost instinctively from the hip through his jacket pocket. And there was something about the way he leant over the bar and casually asked for the phone. I thought he'd be calling the department, but no, he was calling his tailor. Ordering a new suit!

Readers, I jest. In actual fact Matt Bianco is the fictitious character invented by Mark Reilly, Danny White and Basia Trzetrzelewska, who not only gives his name to the trio but also personifies their attitude to music and style. Their music, if you are not already familiar with it, is a blend of Jazz, Latin and sixties' spy film music, mixed with panache into something approaching perfect Pop. And with it, the band have not only made significant inroads into the Pop charts, but have also been mandated on the dance floors by a notable, if unexpected success in the Disco charts.

Prior to Matt, Mark and Danny were the songwriting wing of Blue Rondo A La Turk, a combo of fake Jazzers noted more for their suits than for their sounds. Basia, a polish emigrée whom Danny knew from a previous band, was already lending her talents to collaborate on songwriting so that when, disaffected by Blue Rondo's progress, Danny and Mark left, the group was in effect already formed. In the first instance they were a quartet, although Kito, the percussionist from Blue Rondo who made up their number has since disappeared. But that's another story,

A sunny Monday morning in Soho was the time and place of my meeting with the sharp dressed but self-effacing men from Matt Bianco, singer Mark, and piano player Danny. They may be partial to fantasy, but they are under no illusions about being budding Jazz musicians.

Mark: "Our music is just Bop, with influences from what we listen to which is Jazz and Latin music. For singers I like King Pleasure and Eddie Jefferson. I like Brazilian samba, and from Cuba, Salsa and Afro-Cuban music."

Danny: "I like piano players like Al Haig, Bud Powell and Count Basie. Then on the Latin side, I like Jobim. The thing about Jobim — and Count Basie — is that they can use so few notes to such effect. Generally. I like all sorts of players, Django Reinhardt, Charlie Parker. I learnt to play the piano through listening to them and trying to work out what they were playing."

Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed and Sneakin' Out The Back Door, the first Matt Bianco singles were produced by Peter Collins, but with their album, Whose Side Are You On? they took on the production work themselves.

Danny: "We don't see writing the song and recording it as two separate things, they both merge into the same thing. We started off with Peter Collins producing us because the record company wanted us to have a producer and we thought it would take the pressure off at first. And so, while he did the A sides, we did the B sides. And then we found that because the songs we presented to him in demo form were already quite complete there wasn't that much that he could add to them, apart from making them sound good."

Mark: "Ideally, a producer isn't someone who just goes in and acts like an engineer, but someone who also arranges and helps generally with the song. We didn't need that."

Danny: "If we demo a song, it's just chords with someone singing over it. We try to present the song in the best possible form, and doing that there's going to be lots of little ideas going on, so the production is already there."

Mark: "But at the same time it was good doing the first three singles with Peter because we did learn a bit..."

Danny: "Yeah. We learnt all the studio talk like 'nail that turkey', 'go for it', 'cans' and all that! Usually we try to get as much done as possible before we go into the studio, because whatever stage you're at when you go in, you are always going to add more. So if you go in with most of it there it's going to be even better. It's not always like that though. On Matt's Mood, for example, we went into the studio with just a bass line and did all the rest while we were there. It can get a bit stale if you just work everything out beforehand."

At present they are using Marquee Studios in Dean Street, mainly because they work well with house engineer Phil Harding. The band intend to play live in May, and for this, and for recording, they tend to have a somewhat traditional approach. They are not intimidated by the digital prowess of the likes of Trevor Horn or the titanic sounds they wield.

Danny: "We hardly use any sampling or anything like that, and there is no sequencing. Nearly everything is played, we sort of believe in that. I think you can get more from 'live' sources because the sort of effects that Trevor Horn uses, the orchestral stabs for instance, once they've been used once people just say 'Oh, orchestral stabs, just like Trevor Horn.'"

Putting everything through a maze of electronic processing, whilst being the accepted mainstream method of production in the eighties, nevertheless does tend to bring everything onto one level.

Mark: "Yeah, that's right. I don't like that sort of sound. I like something that's got more character about it, something with a bit of atmosphere. I find these lavish productions quite sterile.

"On Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed the offbeat rhythm is actually half speed piano, played an octave below"

"We're not ardent purists, though, we have the policy of whatever sounds good, it doesn't matter how we get it. If it's electronic we'll use it."

Danny: "On Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed the off beat rhythm is actually half speed piano, played an octave below. Because it's right hand only it's actually impossible to play any other way. But in any case, the effect is quite good, it doesn't sound like a piano, it sounds like a banjo or something. We were quite chuffed when we did that."

It can't be denied, that behind the dance floor success of songs like Matt Bianco and Half A Minute, 'machines' are lurking somewhere.

Danny: "We try to keep electronics to a minimum usually. Sometimes the effect of electronic percussion can suit a track."

Mark: "We usually use a Linn bass drum, and then put at least four tracks of live percussion over it, like we did on Half A Minute, and use Moog for the bass lines. We like to record the percussion in the live room, that sounds really good. And sometimes we use gated reverb on the bongos to get that really old fashioned Pearl and Dean sort of sound."

Danny: We're not bogged down by what the music should sound like. In the studio anything goes really; if it works it works. We're working on the new album at the moment, but it's difficult to say how it will come out until we've actually finished it. I'm not making a conscious effort to say 'This album's going to be different.'"

Mark: "I always try to go against the sound of the moment because half the songs in the chart are all the same; the same set-up just with a different singer."

The cool which the boys exude extends towards instruments as well as technology; they are not musicians' musicians.

Mark: Sometimes I play rhythm guitar when we play live, but I don't record. I did have a Gibson but Kito, who used to be our percussionist, took it to Brazil where he was going to sell it for me... unfortunately he never came back. He left me his old acoustic guitar with a hole in the back. And I've also got an old black Japanese guitar which was given to me by a friend of my dad's who owns a second hand shop. The day after Billy Fury died this bloke came into the shop and told him it was Billy Fury's guitar. Yeah, I've got a fine collection of instruments, what with that and the GEM..."

The GEM refers to the well rough organ heard on Half A Minute.

Danny: "It's called a GEM Transistor and it cost £15 pounds from a jumble sale. It cost £150 pounds to mend when it blew up. It's supposed to sound cheap, tacky. I've also got a Fender Rhodes which we haven't used at all yet. The Rhodes has got a bit of a dated sound but I've grown to like it, and I'm going to start using it again. The DX7 hasn't got a bad Rhodes sound, but you just can't get away from DX7s now; you find them everywhere, on every Funk song, on TV adverts. You hear it and go, "Oh, that's a piano 10..." or whatever. The new Yamaha digital pianos are all right but I'd rather use a real piano. At Marquee they've got a Yamaha electric grand which doesn't play very well now, but I usually like Yamahas because they're quite bright and I like to have a good old hammer."

A lot of Face readers may be under the impression that Sade, Everything But The Girl and Working Week collectively comprise something called The Great British Jazz Revival. A lot of quite normal people are unaware of this, possibly because no record company has yet been able to turn this romance into reality.

Danny: "We do tend to get grouped in with Sade and Working Week etc..."

Mark: "But we don't think for one minute that we're a Jazz band; we're just influenced by the feel of it. EBTG and Working Week haven't really done anything with the style. They took what was there already and did the same thing again. They've got nothing to say really, so instead of listening to them I could put on something that's the same thing but a hundred times better. I can't see the point of them doing it really. Well, obviously they enjoy doing it, but for me I wouldn't do it because it's only doing what other people have already done much better."

Whereas your stuff uses elements of dance and Pop to create a new approach.

Danny: "Yeah, the dance element is quite important."

Mark: "But it's not all Poppy. Some of the earlier stuff was Poppy but we're tending to move away from that now."

Danny: "I mean things like Half A Minute aren't really Poppy. When we recorded that we had no intention of it being a single, we just wanted a really nice album track, and we recorded it for that purpose. As a result it sounds, I don't know — genuine, and people liked it. The DJs picked upon it and it was played in the clubs, and it was released because of that."

What I find refreshing about Matt Bianco's music is the way they have created such infectiously dancy music without recourse to the inevitable explosions of snare on the back beat etc. And although they use phrases and styles that were hackneyed before I was born, there is enough musicality there to make it convincing. Other people have picked up on the freshness of the music. The Breakout Crew, a New York rapping group, have covered Matt's Mood. I also told Mark and Danny about another weird version/mix of Matt's Mood which I had heard in a Kensington clothes shop (Okay, it was the market, but I didn't want them to think I was a hippy or something.)

Danny: "We hear all sorts of things like that. Mark's mum told us that some brass band had done a version of Get Out Of Your Lazy Bed. And they did another version of that on the Mike Yarwood show once, with dancers. I never saw it but apparently it was terrible."

Mark: "We're number three in the Record Mirror disco charts with Matt's Mood and Half A Minute..."

Danny: "We're really pleased about that because we're up there in the Soul charts along with Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan — us little white boys. We didn't expect it at all, it came right out of the blue..."

Hmm... out of the blue? It was like the time Matt propositioned me. I'd always been vaguely jealous of his success with women; the girls in his Lotus Elan were like a permanent fitting, only the faces were always different. I might have known he was running away from something. It was in a dark corridor of the department. Matt brushed so close to me that I could smell the aftershave that had been especially created for him by Yves.

"I'm sorry Matt," I said, "what would I tell the wife, she knows I'm too lazy to work late at the office..."