Mick MacNeil

Michael Joseph MacNeil (born 20 July 1958) is a Scottish songwriter and keyboardist. He is best known as a former member of the group Simple Minds.

Early life One of seven siblings, MacNeil grew up in a musical family listening to traditional Scottish folk music, and was trained as a folk music accordionist from seven to sixteen. At 16, he formed a band called the Barnets with his drum-playing brother, playing cover songs at local cabaret clubs, weddings and social clubs and once appearing on the television programme Junior Showtime.

Career MacNeil joined Simple Minds as their keyboard player in spring 1978. At this point, he had only recently discovered pop music and was unaware of contemporary new wave bands Magazine and Ultravox, to which his keyboard playing would be compared. Exhausted by the relentless touring schedules MacNeil left the band at the end of the decade. and XSM (with Forbes and original Simple Minds drummer Brian McGee). In 2016 he accepted an Ivor Novello Award for Simple Minds "Outstanding Song Collection".

MacNeil released a solo album called People, Places, Things on his own record label, Mix Records, in 1997.

Equipment

During the early years of Simple Minds (the first four albums, between 1978 and 1982), MacNeil used a Farfisa organ and a "tiny wee Korg, two oscillators on it... It was a stupid sound, but it had lots of good noises on it." He added a Roland Jupiter-4 programmable polyphonic synthesiser in the early 1980s, which featured heavily on the Sons and Fascination and Sister Feelings Call albums.

In 1986, MacNeil's stage equipment included a Yamaha CP-70 piano (used as his master keyboard via MIDI), a Yamaha DX7, an Emulator II, an Oberheim OB-8, a Roland Jupiter-8 and an unspecified Kurzweil keyboard using an Apple Macintosh for program saving. He was also using an Elka accordion with MIDI capacity.