Not keen to be seen as "an antique keyboard player' Style Council's Mick Talbot tells us of life beyond the Rhodes piano and the Hammond organ. All ears: Tony Bacon.

MICK TALBOT sat in the canteen at Nomis rehearsal studios in west London. Next door the Style Council equipment was being plugged in for another day's rehearsing for their first 1987 tour.

Mick was keen to stress his instrumental contributions to Style Council records. "With our set-up now, on record I play just about all the keyboards. Instrumentally, the new album is just me, Paul and Steve. Some bass guitar parts were done by Paul, a few of them we got Camille Hind to do. Two or three songs have got horns on, so we got in a section, and there's real strings on a couple of things. Most of the singing was just Dee and Paul. So it's fairly internal, but we tried to keep quite a live feel to it.

"When we play live, I tend to play organ and piano parts, so I'm still associated with those instruments. It's like people think I don't play synths."

Does that annoy him, I prodded, gently? "No, but I'm a little bit annoyed that the organ's sort of associated with the Sixties or the Fifties. I always say this, it's my own little fight for it — the electric organ's been around for as long as the electric guitar, they're more or less about the same age. And yet the electric guitar has never really been thought of as from one era, so I don't know why the organ should be thought of like that. I know I'm getting on, but I don't like anyone to think that I'm an antique keyboard player. I do play more or less everything that's on our records, apart from a few single synth lines that Paul does, cos he plays keyboards a bit."

Nonetheless, if you go along to the current Style Council tour you'll see Mick as just one of three keyboard players on-stage: the others are Dashell Ray ("she's playing effecty type keyboards on an Ensoniq and a Juno, plus a bit of flute and sax... a general odd-job person") and Terry Devine King ("we're using him mainly for the string and brass colourings when we play tracks from the new album... he's been down the studio taking samples off the master tapes to his Akai sampler").

And if you were to itemise Mick's 1987 stage set-up, you'd still tend towards the conclusion that here is a man happy to dwell on past triumphs from the wonderful history of electric keyboards. "Yeah," he laughed, echoing around the empty early morning Nomis canteen, "as far as the keyboards I'm gonna use on this tour, I think it might be a giant leap backwards."

The line-up he tinkled at the Nomis rehearsals we saw centred on a Rhodes piano and a Hammond organ — there was a Kawai grand, too, but Mick complained that electric grands seem to wear out after a while. He hoped to get in one of the new Roland digital piano modules and try it out with a mother keyboard ("it's supposed to have a Bosendorfer sample, a Steinway, and a harpsichord"). The group weren't just routining the material at Nomis — an important part of their work there was to try out different keyboards and get the right combination of instruments and sounds.

I put the inevitable question to Mick — wouldn't he be better off with sampled piano and organ sounds on one main keyboard, rather than lugging around big mechanical instruments that admittedly sound great and look different to the normal modern slimline instruments, but could easily go wrong on tour? "I think you can get a fairly good Rhodes sound on a DX7, but that's become..." he looked around the Nomis canteen, searching for a polite description, "common. It seems to occur on everyone's records, you can swap samples with people, it's more or less got to the stage where everyone's got the same thing."

What can you get on the real Rhodes that you don't get on a DX, I asked? "I don't know — probably a load of dirt. It's like a distortion that the instrument's got itself, that kind of 'clunk'. I mean technically it probably throws the soundman into convulsions, the idea of it, the mains hum or something.

"There was this sample we got off somebody for a DX7, it was called Wonderkeys, supposedly somebody's idea of a Stevie Wonder sound. Our engineer said oh yeah, I just wanna change it very slightly, clean it up a bit, you know. So when he'd done his cleaning up it didn't sound like it at all! And it was supposed to be Stevie Wonder's Rhodes sound. Well, it wasn't that much like it anyway — but it's funny, whatever you do technically to make a sound 'better' can mean you actually lose a lot of that sound's real character, you know?"

Mick's had his trusty Hammond A100 organ for some six years. The older Hammonds are called the C3 and the B3 models — what's the difference between them all, I wondered? "The difference is basically what furniture they put around them," explained Mick, implying that their sound is much the same. His A100 had self-contained speakers at one time, for example, distinguishing it from the similar C3. The B3 was bassier, thought Mick, and less solid in the leg area than a C3. But it all gets a bit confusing, he reckoned: "A lot of them have been modified anyway, sort of built into Hammond tanks for the road."

And organ samples are pretty convincing these days, surely? "Yeah, I'd be happy with that, but carrying on with my Hammond is a sort of labour of love. It's a luxury I suppose. You can tell a slight difference between the real thing and a sample, probably more so in a studio. If you genuinely want a Hammond organ sound in the studio then I think you should hire one in or use the one that's sitting gathering dust in the corner.

"I think live you can get away with using a substitute. Ten years ago I would have been really pleased if those Korg organs had been around, the CX3 or the BX3. They're really good. When I had a battered old estate and I was driving round the pubs, I could have done with that! That would have been brilliant."



Back when he was but a tiny Talbot, Mick started playing on the old piano at home that his grandparents would bash every Christmas. He took piano lessons — he wasn't made to go to them, he stressed, he wanted to do them. So they did actually make an impact. He got to Grade 5 in his piano exams, but gradually "things like football" began to take preference for the 12-year-old.

"The other big learning thing was of course playing along with records," he remembered. "It was like this great shaft of light coming down from heaven to learn that you can play along with Little Richard, and it's only three chords, you know? And then any record out of that sort of era I really liked, Chuck Berry even, good things to improvise to even if there isn't a piano player on it.

"I had quite a phobia about synthesisers when I first started playing. I didn't really like groups like Yes, and I associated synths with those sorts of groups. Which was stupid, because I was quite a soul music fan, and the things Stevie Wonder did with synthesisers were quite innovative really, but just used in a different way. Mind you, he had someone programming them for him, didn't he?"

Wonder's Moog programmers were Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff on the ground-breaking 1972 LPs "Music Of My Mind" and "Talking Book". Mick continued: "Stevie Wonder took a lot of chances. He did borrow from people, but he was a big enough name to do it. Synth bass lines, for example. The first place I heard that was on a Stevie Wonder record, but apparently he got it off that Funkadelic bloke, Bernie Worrell, the one who's working with the Pretenders now."

I wondered whether Mick felt that he's continued to learn musically, given that he never had any more formal lessons after his pre-teen piano thrashes? "After I stopped those lessons I started getting a few books," he said, mentioning that these were mostly of sheet music for 'standards', tunes so revered that some kinds of musicians are meant to know them by heart. "Like George Gershwin tunes and Cole Porter tunes, they have these brilliant chords. It's no wonder that a lot of jazz musicians use them as things to improvise on. Harmonically, they're brilliant. I think you can learn a lot off them even if you don't like that sort of music — but I do. And I got a few books by a jazz piano player [probably George Shearing] who uses the hands really close together, 'locked hands' they call the technique, and I learnt some great chords in that way."

Mick mentioned an example of how more adventurous chords can help pop song composers. He once saw a film documentary about soul singer Al Green (best known for his early 1970s hit, 'Let's Stay Together'). In it, Green's long-standing producer and collaborator Willie Mitchell said that one of the ideas they adopted in the writing of many of their songs was to use jazz chords in a pop song framework. "And that's a good idea, you know," said Mick. "I think that gives you a lot of scope for improvising — it gives the vocalist a lot more room to move around."

In the Style Council, Mick said, they often have "some funny conversations" about chords, mainly due to the fact that each member usually has a different name for new chords that come up. Mick's admirable solution is to simplify the argument, and get on with the music.

"I mean, rather than get into fifteenths, seventeenths, thirteenths, and all that, it's nicer just to say: F major seven over a G root. And a lot of guitarists come out with great chords — sometimes Paul will play a thing and he'll go what's this? And so I say well, play one string at a time and I'll see what it is. Then we don't know what to call it, so we'll just agree between us on a name for it.

"There's been virtuoso people who don't know what they're playing, but they're actually playing brilliant things, and then someone in a book analyses it," Mick concluded, as anxious roadies hovered at the canteen doorway, keen for Mick's attendance next door. "Sax players have told me that if you see a Charlie Parker solo transcribed it looks horrible because you've got so many hemidemisemiquavers. But all he was thinking of was ..." and here Mick made a very convincing Charlie Parker noise. "You can over-intellectualise those things, I s'pose."