Miki Berenyi Trio - Tripla Talk!
By John A. Wilcox



It was 33 years ago that I first talked to Miki Berenyi. We (along with the late, great Chris Acland) were discussing the new Lush album Spooky. Time certainly flies! Here in 2025 Miki and Miki Berenyi Trio bandmates Moose & Oliver are here to discuss MB3's debut album Tripla. It's a wonderful album full of great music, a totally new feel, and plenty of sonic surprises! Join us as we dive in together!



PS: How did Piroshka come to transition to the Miki Berenyi Trio?

Miki: Me, Moose and Ollie first played together for Piroshka’s Love Drips and Gathers dates (Ollie standing in for Mick Conroy who had moved to the US) and then, when I started doing live events for my memoir Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, the three of us would play a handful of Lush songs to accompany the interview.

It’s an odd thing, ‘covering’ your own songs! But rather than try to slavishly mimic the original versions, we stripped them back and made them our own, replacing backing-vocal parts with keyboards and Moose coming up with his own guitar lines; tinkering with the bass to match Ollie’s style and playing around with electronica for the backing tracks to stand in for a drummer.

By the following spring, we were being asked to extend the set for the book talks – to make a whole night of it – and even being offered standalone shows for the band. I wasn’t comfortable going out as a ‘Lush covers’ band, so at that point we threw in some Piroshka songs and started writing new material to flesh out the set. Big I Am and Vertigo came first, then Hurricane… I’m looking at some of our set lists from that period and by Nov 2023, I see Ubique is down as ‘Marimba’ (we are a band of working titles!).

By summer 2024, we already had about 40 gigs under our belt – the whole album was in the set and we were switching different Lush/Piroshka songs in and out, as the fancy took us. So really, the evolution was pretty organic. And although the initial impetus was making the most of my book events, we were having such a great time playing live shows that MB3 developed a life of its own.

PS: How does the musical identity & approach differ from Piroshka?

Miki: In Feb 2023, we played our first ‘non-book’ gig – a co-headliner with Aircooled, which is Ollie’s other band, formed with Justin Welch, who was the drummer in Piroshka (it’s all very incestuous!). We were at that stage a band with no name, and Ollie and Moose came up with Miki Berenyi Trio.

It was a practical decision – these days you have to signal your ‘brand’, and a band name that doesn’t spell out the obvious is a hindrance. But I tend to shorten it to ‘MB3’ because I find it a bit cringe having my name there, implying star billing, and anyway it’s a misnomer – all three of us write songs, no one is overseer and it’s a very democratic setup! A song will originate from one person, and then everyone can pile in with ideas for arrangements and flourishes. In this respect, it’s not a huge departure from Piroshka, where we all sparked off each other to collaborate on the music.

But – ironically, since we use backing tracks worked up on computers and in the studio – the genesis of MB3 was playing live. With Piroshka, we rehearsed, recorded and only toured the songs after the album was complete. We were a six-piece band live, carrying a sound engineer and a merch seller, which was difficult to coordinate and expensive to run. So with MB3, I really wanted things to be more nimble.

Ollie has his own studio setup, and this makes everything so much easier (and cheaper!) with creating backing tracks and recording songs. Moose and I have a little rehearsal room in our garden – too small for Piroshka, but ideal for the Trio – so everything is ready to go and there’s none of the faff and expense of having to book a commercial space, move the gear and fiddle about with an unfamiliar PA when we want to play together.

PS: What was the thinking behind not using a drummer in the band?

Miki: Practicality. As things stand, we hire a car for gigs and it takes about 20 minutes to load in/out all the gear. There’s no crew – we set up our gear, Ollie and Moose do the driving, I’m on the merch stall… it’s very self-sufficient! If we had a drummer, our costs would more than double. And we simply don’t get paid enough for shows to afford it.

But rather than see this as a lack, we’ve embraced the limitations. My son (who is a drummer himself) commented on one of the backing tracks I was putting together, saying that no actual drummer would be able to physically play what I’d programmed. My thinking is, if we can’t have a live drummer, then we may as well go the whole hog with the backing tracks and make them as ‘unreal’ as possible.



PS: The keyboards and percussion on the album are creating incredible atmospheres. What were the main keyboards used? Also - was the percussion a drum machine, programming, or both?

Oliver: There’s a real mix of things going on here. Once you know you’re using a backing track for drums, you realize that you no longer have to stick with what’s humanly possible to play. The drums are all programmed (except for a little wooden egg shaker that’s live on most tracks) and are a mix of drum machines and sample libraries.

I’m a complete sucker for the Roland CR78 (should I mention In The Air Tonight or do we go with Heart of Glass?!), and it makes it onto a few of the songs. But there are others, like the Seeburg Select-a-rhythm (I don’t have a real one) and some Logic loops, too. The ‘real-sounding’ drums are mostly Native Instruments 70s kit and Sonic Couture’s Moonkits, and there’s a fair bit of synth filtering of them and they’re often doing things than no drummer would actually play.

  The synths vary a lot, too. Sometimes they’re Miki’s Logic loops, but I rely heavily on an arsenal of vintage synth emulations, mostly from Arturia’s V Collection. My eurorack suitcase modular was used for filtering drums and occasionally even guitars, but my main synth toolkit was the Behringer Poly D MiniMoog clone.  It just did everything required of it quickly, effortlessly and better than anything else. It’s my ‘Swiss Army knife’ synth on this record. Mind you, pretty much everything went through a 501 Chorus Echo at some point, too – vocals, synths, guitars, drums. I think the bass may have escaped it.

PS: Let's get into a few of the songs & start with 8th Deadly Sin. It seems to be environmental in nature. What's the message & the inspiration?

Moose: The spur for writing any song about the single most pressing issue that should be occupying the mind of every individual on this Earth is that THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST PRESSING ISSUE THAT WE FACE.

Don’t know why I bothered, really. Keep drilling, keep driving, keep flying. Eat all the meat you want – burn, baby, burn. Let’s just get it over with because we are so, so fucked.

And why are we so fucked? Because the efforts of individuals are futile without responsible governance and appropriate legislative action, and these bodies are fully occupied with choking on corporate cock.

Miki: Wikipedia has this to say about Cassandra, who was endowed with the gift of prophesy by Apollo: When Cassandra refused Apollo's romantic advances, he placed a curse on her, ensuring that nobody would believe her warnings. Cassandra was left with the knowledge of future events but could neither alter these events nor convince others of the validity of her predictions.

Oliver: Musically, this seemed more sketchy than Moose’s other songs, but we spent a bit of studio time listening to some choice dance music cuts and using them as inspiration for the backing on this. That intro is a Prophet 6, and I know we filtered the drums through a Moog filter bank. There’s a Juno in there, too – we really went for the dance music elements on this.



PS: I love the entire album, but Ubique currently resonates the strongest with me. Tell me how it came to be, please.

Oliver: Some of my contributions have been reworking old songs that had never found a home, but Ubique was written specifically for Miki to write lyrics for. The beginnings of this song were in the same conversation that spurred Miki to come up with Gango.  We were in a hotel bar on tour with Gang of Four and were talking about how their songs often start in a disjointed way that only come together once the final part of the jigsaw slots in. Subsequently, I came up with a marimba riff that starts on beat two – fairly vanilla compared to the time signature mind-melt that is Gango. But they really do come from the same place.

Musically, it came out of my daughter sparking a reintroduction to Cocteau Twins and the song wrote itself very quickly from the opening chord progression – one of those where you think: “Why have I never played these chords in this order before?”. I knew it was going to suit Miki and Moose really well and, sure enough, it all came together in a very neat, satisfying way once they added their parts.

PS: The bass/percussion/keys behind Manu have a strong atmosphere that oddly enough reminded me of Sade's No Ordinary Love. A nice surprise to find such a sensuous groove here. Fill me in on what I need to know about the song.

Moose: It’s been a revelation being in a band using a programmed backing track for live shows. You’re given carte blanche to experiment with how you want the song to feel and sound. Manu was a bunch of chords, lyrics and melodies I worked on over a simple conga pattern on a loop. We built it from there. Miki’s voice puts a recognisable stamp on all Tripla’s songs, giving the album a coherent sound, which allows a lot of experimentation in other areas.

Oliver: Manu came to us from Moose almost fully formed.  I remember thinking, instantly, “Oh this is The Isley Brothers!”, and the bassline was almost improvised in one take. If anything, I wish I’d spent more time with it as live it’s found its feet and is, I think, better. But this studio version has a real, band-in-a-room vibe about it. I love playing this song.

Moose and I subsequently spent time together in my studio finessing some more dance-like synth parts and we added those “blaxploitation” parts over the outro on an old Korg Delta. I remember Miki Whatsapping me as she was listening to it telling me she was “strutting” on Oxford Street!

Miki: Manu was the last song written for the album, so we only played it at gigs a couple of times before finishing up the recording. Now that it’s more embedded in the set, it actually sounds a lot more shoegazey – especially the long end section! But I like the purer funkiness of this, which is such an unusual vibe for me to be involved with!



PS: Finally - Big I Am. Very interesting lyric. Who wrote it & what's behind it?

Miki: Big I Am was the first proper MB3 song, and it’s been in our set for over two years. The song originated from Ollie – in fact, his backing track was in a desktop folder of song ideas for the next Piroshka album. I wrote the vocal melody and harmonies, Moose added light/shade with guitar embellishments and it developed into its current form over a period, getting tweaked and added to the more we played it live.

I’m baffled by the popularity of Andrew Tate: an almost 40-year-old man bullying an entire generation of young men and boys by calling them losers and cucks unless they aspire to his empty values – accumulating trinkets, spending mind-sapping hours honing his physical appearance and prostituting women.

The big lie of this claim that men have been disenfranchised by female influence is that it fails to address the many gains that men have enjoyed. I doubt whether most of this tribe would last five minutes down a mine or in a war – or any stereotypically macho scenario they seem to feel nostalgia for. These were not easy environments, and didn’t lend themselves to lathering yourself with grooming products, sculpturing your six-pack with excessive gym sessions or spending most of the day admiring yourself in floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

Coercing vulnerable girls into sex and dominating them with the threat of violence is not an achievement, and it’s the premise of the damaged and insecure to frame everything – love, happiness, intimacy, self-worth etc – as a zero-sum, win/lose competition. It’s a desperately sad and fragile way to live your life.

PS: Will MB3 be touring the US?

Miki: We played the US last year, but with a sightly rejigged line-up. Moose hates flying but gave the band his blessing to ahead without him, so Ollie switched to guitar and Mick Conroy joined us on bass. We had a brilliant time – the shows were great, and it was a thrill to be on tour with Budgie and Lol Tolhurst.

But it’s an absolute ball-ache planning a North American tour –I was in debt to the tune of £40K and had sleepless nights stressing over being reimbursed. I can’t begin to tell you how much red tape is involved – it’s absolutely crushing.

Due to a mixture of FoMo and cajoling, Moose has agreed to come this time, so we’ve got a tour scheduled for October. We’re buzzing that we’ll be able to play as the proper band – touring the full album. But this may be the last time we ever get Moose on a plane and I’m not sure I can keep revisiting the stress of the costs and preparatory workload involved!

PS: Any plans for a 2nd book?

Miki: Writing is very isolating and I struggle to spend that much time alone with my thoughts, so right now, I’m really enjoying the collaborative nature of being in a band. Then again, the admin involved in running MB3 can be overwhelming, and it is physically demanding to play gigs, so I may weary of it at some point and decide to have another crack at writing! It’s nice to know that it’s an option.

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Photos by Abbey Raymonde & Darren Ferguson.



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