Peter Cox and Richard Drummie are Go West. Behind them are Gary Stevenson and Dave West who produce the records and play the electronic instruments. Behind them is Roland.

We talked to Gary and Dave in the tiny West London studio where they've been for the largest part of the last year, putting together their chart art.

"We've been written about as an instant success," said Gary. "But like a lot of 'instant successes' we've been trying to make it for years. The two lads, Peter and Richard, have been slogging around with their tapes and their songs for about six years now, and I suppose we've been trying for about the same amount of time.

"Dave and I started off in a band in North London which petered out, as these things do, leaving just us two working alone. We came across the band which is now Go West and started working with them and things just took off."

But Gary isn't from the average hit producer mould — in fact, his experience of instruments has been from the other side of the counter.

"I started off selling gear at ABC Music," he confessed, "And Dave was an assistant there, too. That's how I managed to find out all about the latest gear, and that might be why I'm still a bit of a fanatic when it comes to equipment. I still keep a very close eye on what's coming out and if my band manager let me I'd buy all the newest gadgets as soon as they arrived in the shops.

"I think it's very important to be really up-to-date with the electronics and the newest innovations because every time a new device comes out you'll find sounds and effects from it that make your productions sound that little bit different, just a bit fresher and more interesting than the next one.

"And I love gear. I really like getting new things and playing around with them. I'm like a kid on Christmas morning when I get a new toy... I can't wait to plug it in and fiddle with it, find out what it can do."

"The Jupiter is so fantastically versatile... I've had it for two years and still haven't reached its limits"

Casting a swift glance around the miniscule control room of the high-tech twenty four track studio, a large proportion of the gear seems to be Roland. Why?

"I suppose because they bring out the best gear first," he pondered. "I just can't keep up with the flow of new stuff, much as I'd like to. Their new digital reverb is going to be brilliant, I've heard. And the MIDI units, the interface boxes and so on, make life so much easier and make it so much faster to get the right sounds when you're plugging keyboards together and working with a lot of different synths.

"Mind you, that's not to say the old stuff isn't any good — if you look in the effects rack you'll see a Dimension-D which I use a hell of a lot. The one there belongs to the studio, but I've got one of my own as well. There's nothing which can match that effect, and that must be a good few years old by now.

"I suppose one of the great things I learnt from working behind the counter of a music shop is to separate the hype from the facts. Some brands have great advertising, great prices, and a great image — but when you take off the flash packaging and finally get to play the thing it sounds awful. I know Roland wouldn't come out with anything that was less than good. And I know that they wouldn't push something into the market that they weren't completely satisfied with. Occasionally I've had a bit of gear that's needed repairing or servicing and Roland have always been able to come up with the goods quickly and efficiently. After all, you can't afford stuff that's going to go wrong or take ages to sort out when you're paying for a professional studio and top-class musicians."

One of these musicians — in fact, most of them, considering that he plays or programmes the major proportion of Gary's synthesized smashes — is Dave West. He's a confirmed Roland man, despite the fact that Go West's success has meant that he could play any piece of super-high-tech computerised gear his heart desired.

"I've been through loads of keyboards," he said, "and there's only one that I've never got bored with or reached the limits of its sounds. That's my Jupiter, the JP-8.

"When you're paying for a top class studio, you can't afford stuff that's going to go wrong"

"There's just so much that you can use it for. I mean, I had one synth, which I bought thinking it would be able to give me loads of really good sounds. I sold it again within a matter of weeks. It was good for about five or six things, and that was it. Terribly limited. But the Jupiter is fantastically versatile, I've had it for about two years and I still haven't reached the limits of its capabilities.

"One thing I do a lot is listen to records that have particularly good synth sounds on them, anything at all, and try to get as close as I can with the JP-8. You can get a very good copy of virtually anything quite quickly, but you always find that once you've achieved that you can go on from there and usually end up with something miles better that's completely your own. Once you've got the hang of it, the Jupiter's really easy to programme but the more you know, the more you can get out of it.

"I'm a multi-keyboard type really — I was brought up on Rick Wakeman and Genesis and all those people that used stacks and stacks of synthesizers — but if I had to choose one instrument to play for the rest of my life that would definitely be the JP-8. It's the only one I haven't got bored with yet."

So if Dave believes that the keyboard player ought to be surrounded by banks of gleaming keyboards, what else does he recommend to fill out the rack?

"I've also got a JX-8P. I like the touch sensitivity on that, it's good to be able to put more feeling into, say, a string part of a brass sound; it makes the track sound much more human and less mechanical. I've been using it without the PG-800 programmer unit, basically because I haven't bothered to get one. I find that if you know more or less what you're doing with synthesizers you can manage quite adequately with the incremental control on it.

"I MIDI it up to things quite a lot, sometimes with the JP-8 to thicken up a line and sometimes with another synth, something really digital and clanky-sounding, to add a bit of warmth. It's great for that."

"As for drum machines, the TR-909 is, I think, one of the best there is..."

MIDI, of course, is the big talking point for any musician at the moment and Dave is a firm advocate. After all, it's meant that he can get a sound from four synths which he would have had to play four time's before. And it's opened the way for the front-of-stage keyboards, the new breed of controller units that at last free the piano man from his electronic cage at the back of the stage set. He's been trying out the new Axis round-the-neck MIDI synth controller. It's popped up on a few TV appearances and it's also provided a few laughs in the studio.

"I gave Gary the shock of his life with the Axis," he chortled. "I had it plugged into one of the synths and hid in a cupboard — it scared the life out of him! I think he started to believe we had a poltergeist until I popped out and showed him the Axis..."

But MIDI is of course more than a great way to frighten your producer silly — despite Dave's hard-won grasp of playing technique, most of the synthesizer lines and almost all of the drums are sequenced from the three devices that sit in pride at the top of the multitrack desk; the MSQ-700 sequencer, TR-909 drum machine and SBX-80 interface box.

"It saves so much time and trouble being able to use those three," Dave affirmed. "Once I've put a line into the MSQ-700, it gives me freedom to try to the same line with loads of different synths and play about with the sounds. It saves having to play it again and again and again and frees me to do the more complex bits of programming.

"We start by putting SMPTE code down on to tape which the three devices then work from, so they're always in perfect time with the track. Then we try to get the best sound from the synths, running it back and forth until we're happy with the way it sounds. We use a lot of really expensive, very flash computer synths nowadays, and funnily enough for such pricey pieces of gear they often don't run from MIDI as well as the Roland stuff. So that's where the SBX-80 comes in. When you get a synth that's not tracking in time you can adjust the 'Offset' function on the SBX until it's in perfect time again. Then we make a note of the amount of offset that particular thing needs so next time we use it we can just dialup the right amount of offset to make it work exactly on the button.

"People have been making a big fuss about the Friendchip, the box that's supposed to be able to run anything from anything else and interface every device in the world. Weil, as far as I can see the SBX does everything that can do and it's much, much cheaper.

"As for the drum machine, well, the TR-909 is, I think, one of the best there is. We use it all the time, often to trigger samples off the AMS sampling/delay unit if we want a particularly spectacular or weird sound: When I first got it I thought it was difficult to programme, but now I can do it really easily. Like most things, it's easy once you get the hang of it."

One thing the two have got the hang of is making hit records. They're presently working on a Chicago band's material and they're confident they can repeat the Go West success story again. But however high they go, you can be sure that within a gold disc's throw there will be a Roland product. As we left the studio they were indulging in a heated discussion about acquiring another one.

"Have you heard about the Super Jupiter module?" enquired Gary. "It's all the guts of a touch-sensitive JP-8 in a little rack-mounted box. Maybe you could trigger that off the JX8P and get rid of your Jupiter..."

"Get rid of...?" quavered Dave. "I couldn't possibly. Now if you were to suggest getting one as well as the Jupiter..."