Matt Berry

Two can be seen on the back cover of Music for Insomniacs Part IV, while one is visible in this photo used for the back cover of Music for Insomniacs.

Mentioned in this December 2020 Sound on Sound interview.

Further remote instruction from Oldfield came when the multi‑instrumentalist appeared on Blue Peter in 1979, in a section filmed showing him multi‑layering, on 24‑track tape, his version of the show’s theme tune. “To then see him on Blue Peter,” Berry says, “where you actually saw him build it track‑by‑track, I had more of an understanding.”

Berry’s sole instrument at the time was a domestic Hammond organ, which his parents had bought him. To emulate Oldfield, he bought a Tascam 424 Portastudio and began layering up his own recordings, using the Hammond’s basic beatbox and feeding its various flute, strings and oboe sounds through cheap guitar effects pedals.

“They weren’t even Boss,” Berry points out. “They were Orion, and I had a stereo delay and a flanger. By that point I was obsessed with Oxygène by Jean‑Michel Jarre — mainly that string sound that I know now is a phased string sound. I thought that was an expensive keyboard that could make that sound. I didn’t realise it was a string synthesizer that was effected by a cheap guitar pedal. If I’d have found that out a lot earlier, my search would’ve been complete at age 14 or whatever.

Pictured in this December 2020 Sound on Sound interview.

For electric pianos and organs, Matt Berry favours his Orange and Fender guitar amps. He is also an avid pedal collector; the Small Stone Phase on the upper tier of his pedalboard was a gift from Jean‑Michel Jarre, who used it on his seminal Oxygène album.