Part 1 of Interview with Micko Westmoreland (Micko & The Mellotronics)

Meeting Micko Westmoreland: Part 1 Doing A Proper Job

It’s been a fascinating couple of weeks at SpideWriter.com Towers, what with a Hollywood actor hitting town with his band, Norwich’s first Zero BPM drone festival featuring various bits of electronica tech and the Embers choir, then having to get out to La Securité’s gig at Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom on Wednesday.   Then to top it all, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting up with Micko Westmoreland, of Micko & The Mellotronics to talk about the launch of his third album, Trinity, which is available as a CD and all streaming formats from 12^th June 2026.

Micko & The Mellotronics first came to my attention with the single ‘Proper Job’ earlier this year. It struck a chord with me, following my recent visit to the Play Produce Promote youth project in Great Yarmouth, and given the crisis in youth employment, the defenestration of entry level work by A.I., and the obligation of older workers to hang onto jobs until they reach a higher retirement age, it seemed to me that songwriter and band leader, Micko, would be an interesting person to interview - and so it proved.

The interview was held online.  Micko is based in the heart of one of north London’s musical hotspots, where he is in walking distance to numerous great venues.  Although some are no longer with us, there are still enough venues in easy reach to make it an attractive stop on the Northern Line.  The area includes 0₂ Kentish Town, The Dome and more smaller venues, like Aces & Eights, where Micko & Mellotronics are playing on 17th July 2026.  Tickets for the gig are available here.

 

We talked for 90 minutes and as we did it became clear that Micko has rubbed shoulders with some really interesting characters, not least Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes and Chris Kimsey.  Between the three of them you have a man who was a fountain of ideas, (Stanshall), a craftsman (Innes) and a music studio magician (Kimsey).  Not only has Micko rubbed shoulders with these gentlemen, clearly a lot of what they knew and shared has rubbed off on him too, as he gets deeper into song writing, recording and playing with his band The Mellotronics.

 

The appended name The Mellotronics for his band is a nod to 60s bands, and a wave to his electronica experiments and bedroom studio recordings (as he describes them under the name The Bowling Green or simply Bowling Green) and acceptance that his personal musical growth has been stimulated by the collaborative creative effort coming from having a band.  It is intriguing to observe a lone ranger, as Micko was, with his musical interests seemingly satisfied by what technology enables a solo musical mind to produce, having new vistas opened to him through playing in a group.  Of course, Micko may have found being a band leader frustrating and challenging in some ways, but he has a perpetually curious mind.  His face lights up when he talks about the sheer joy of working as part of a creative collective.  We say bands 'play' music and as every teacher and parent knows, play is the earliest form and probably the best way of learning.

Parents and parenting keep cropping up in our conversation, probably because life happens and life comes from parents.  The title of Micko’s song Proper Job comes from his father's somewhat severe attitude to work and employment. He was in a parenting generation whose lot it was to have children during the post-punk, indie, dance, rave musical waves.  As the C20th headed toward a close, family structures became more fluid and youth culture grew independently of parental values, as did growing individual freedoms to express sexuality.  The chain that marriage was, that tied women and men together in a co-dependency upon shared wealth and property was loosened too. Family is important to Micko and ideas about family life appear throughout the album, so I asked Micko if there is a thread running through the album, linking these twelve songs.

Trinity. Album cover Gerry Barker

When Micko talked about a creative arc to Trinity, it became clear that he was not talking about a concept album.  What he was referring to was the creative process. The songs came from his bag of writing that he'd been working on for a while.  Some were more complete than others, some songs brand new, because he needed more tracks to be able to release a traditional length of album.  Micko took an expansive approach to the project, before working on the track order to make it sensible to the listener as a whole.  The prospect of a concept album is too rigid for Micko, he wants to be able to stretch himself musically, not squeeze himself into a grid.  Micko has great respect for freedom of expression, openness to ideas and respect for his audience, who he hopes will take what he has offered them and make it their own, on their terms.  As an artist his job is to stimulate thinking in his audience, not preach to them.

 

At one point I asked Micko whether his family background was particularly religious.  He had used words and phrases that suggested a strong paternal grip on the family home, the album is called Trinity, he used the word preach, he talks about once having been religious in his writing practise.  The answer is apparently not, the words he uses have been used to give emphasise to his points, the religiosity being language-based not belief-based.  The musician declared himself a firm believer in choice, “…a universal right.” he declared. I didn't pick up this as a discussion point, but it is an idea that was embedded in New Labour policies and Conservative austerity. It developed from free market competition theory, without recognising that choice is necessarily limited by circumstances and resources.  Do we really have a choice, when a family member needs our care, for example?  And choices starkly diminish when fuel bills soar  and people reach the heating or eating decision point.

 

Micko certainly would understand this. He comes across as a sensitive and reflective character, an artist who loves to hear how people interpret his songs. “Some people say that the words don’t matter in a song, but they do to me!” He leant into the camera with feeling to make his point. Sensitive and reflective, yes, but a man with character too.

Micko explained that in telling stories through his songs, he  leaves out pieces of the jigsaw, to allow listeners to complete the picture in a way that adds meaning to them.  When writing songs Micko likes to start with a full page, “Some talk about starting from a blank page, but for me it's the other way around.”  He uses what poets would know as an erasure method, or a sculptor would recognise as chipping off the bits of stone that don’t look like they belong to the envisaged statue.  For Micko it is a matter of throwing everything that an idea provokes at the page and then start chiselling. 

 

“I was religious about getting words in the right place, but I would end up writing songs twice.  Marrying words with the music inevitably meant reworking the words into something else that I had already finely chiselled.  Now I take a looser approach, getting the song into some kind of shape, then, by using the mentality of my bedroom studio electronica days, I am used to adding things in, or taking them out.”

 

Playing with a band has required Micko to think about how best that might work given his essentially solo approach to electronica.  He likes to work up ideas alone to begin with before the band come in an add their ideas.  Then the studio adds another dimension,

 

“There’s a lot more electronica going on than people realise.  Brian Eno and Kraftwerk consider the studio an instrument in its own right.  This is the first album when I have worked with a producer, Jon Klein (of Siouxsie & The Banshees fame) and an executive producer in Chris Kimsey, who has fifty years in the business and worked on so many projects with so many top people, (including the famous Jagger - Richards combo).  He is always working.  Chris is a very open guy.  He worked with me on this album at all levels.  He would leave me voice notes, or speak to me three times a week, giving me highly detailed notes on what I should do with the mix and, of course, I followed those to the letter.

We returned to the nature of the relationship with the band in all this:

 

When I released my first album of songs, after a career producing electronica and then writing soundtracks, I was asked ‘Where’s the band to go with them?’

 

The Mellotronics playing on the latest album are Paul Cuddiford, (lead guitar and E-bow), Budge McGraw (bass) and Jan Noble(drums) provide the rhythm section, with a majestic string arrangement for the track When I’m Dead provided by Arnulf Lindnerand on the last track Terry Edwards contributes some marvellous trumpet work.

 

Having considered the creative process that lies behind Trinity in this article, the second half of this interview, will look with Micko at the twelve songs and where they came from for the 12th June release. Micko also explains how Sooty got to play a hand in the album.  

~

Spencer Ide

29th May, 2026