We are centred around the studio, well, living room full of equipment and keyboards would be a better description..we write at home, and often move out to bigger studios to do final mixes, mainly just to have an extra “pair of ears” run their influence over the music. DJ Danny has always used the tunes as elements in his DJ sets, but in the past few months we have started performing more as a “band”, using the DJ element alongside live vocals and playing the mixes live from Reason and, of course, Ableton which we are still getting our heads around. It’s a phenomenal live tool, but it does involve a lot of transferring of files from Reason into it!! Which takes a lot of time! In the past we were hindered in our desire to perform live by the weakest of excuses..our PC was soooo slow it could barely play a full mix at all, let alone stand up to the rigours of having to play in an environment with paying punters not expecting a crash! Our advice: Get a quad processor..just a joy now for us!!

We’ve never really collaborated with anyone as such. There’s an “ethic” in MWP which says that if you have anything at all to do with an MWP track, then you’re an official member of the band! So our mixer Flatrat, from PaddedCell Studios is a member of the band, and Griff, who mixed and co-produced our tunes “Miss U Bad” and “God’s Blues” is a member! And we all work together using the mediums of telephones and email, sending files and lyrics and vocal recordings down the line to one another. The tunes take months to write and record, because we work very slowly, waiting for each element to come through from each contributor. The great benefit of this method is that often what a tune starts off as, becomes fully transformed by the end, and that’s the part of writing that I really love. Often I’ll pass an idea down to Michaela and when I get that reply from her, I just know that whatever she’s created will be totally unexpected and original..it might not be anything even close to what I had originally envisioned for the tune, but because of her creative decisions, it’s stopped being just MY idea and become an MWP idea. That’s what I really love about our group, it’s always about the surprise, the shock of the new, the thrill of the influence of nostalgia.

I guess it’s fair to say we make pop music that leans heavily toward the genre of dance and electronica. But it’s really only Dan who brings a full House influence to the tunes. Michaela is much more pop-centric, classically trained and comes from a Musical Theatre sensibility, Paulette is a solid Rock chick with heavy leanings toward Chrissie Hynde, Stevie Nicks, Pat Benatar, Flatrat is from way back in the day of UK Garage and stomping, soulful House and Mikey comes from a background of Country, Rock, heavy doses of English 80’s Pop and loads of movie soundtrack albums. So you throw all that in the mix and you get what we do..I think it’s a pretty eclectic mix..very theatrical and dramatic in parts (like “Wire” or “God’s Blues”) but also happy to play in the backyard of Disco and Pop with tunes like “Miss U Bad” or “Timbuktu” or “Shout It”. I guess what keeps us all excited about the music we make is that we just simply don’t care about the genres as much as we care about the stories we’re trying to tell with the music. Our biggest hereoes would probably be Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode, New Order, BT, Underworld, Faithless, Kate Bush, Kylie, Dylan and The Band, Lee Perry and King Tubby, Prince, Jean-Michel Jarre and Massive Attack.

We’re currently organising some live gigs to play around London, which should be loads of fun and introduce us to even more people, and we’re recording a vast new swathe of tunes which have been waiting for nearly a year to be recorded, because our delightful chanteuse, Ms Betts, invested time and desires to have her first child. So there’s real backlog of material we are trying to finish off. And, as always, we’re hunting down Labels and distributors to help us get the songs and the MWP message out there!

I’m not sure what we’d regard as “success”. We’ve had far more interest in us in the last 6 months than in the previous 3/4 years. We have Labels getting in touch, promotors inviting us to appear at gigs, DJ’s wanting to remix our tunes, so we’re feeling the positive effects of not having ever thought of giving up our desire to make music. But we’re not even close yet to really achieving the “monstrosity” that MWP will become. It’s still just a bunch of friends making music on laptops in their living rooms. Which feels right, and is the best way for anyone to make music. Do it cause you love it. And we’ve all got a major crush on the special little lady we call..Musique!!

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