“I started out as a piano player.”

Which is true enough, but Steve Winwood is leaving out the part that by age 14 he and his organ chops were the focal point of the Spencer Davis Group – the pop band which he helped take to the top of the U.K. charts by late 1965. As a founding member of Traffic years later, his sound would branch out to include electronics by the early Seventies.

“The first thing that drew me to synthesizers was anything that had a keyboard where the sound was controllable was better than what I’d been using. In the early and mid-Sixties it was the Hammond organ. The Moog, of course, was completely different. The oscillator actually has a voice, (that can be) either like a saxophone or a lead guitar.”

Fast forward to 1980 and Winwood has decided that he has acquired all the tools he needs to put together his second solo completely on his own.

“(‘Arc of a Diver’) was all done here in my studio in Gloucestershire. By the late Seventies, Punk Rock had come along and it was completely against everything I’d stood for. I didn’t really know what to do but I realized technology was moving along. Making records was more like making a movie where you could integrate different parts at different times.”

He adopted that approach when it came to recording “While You See A Chance” - the album’s opening track and lead single.

“The first thing I did was I created 15-foot long loop of a tambourine. Then the next thing I put down was piano. But all the bass and the lead lines…and there were some French horn sounds I did that were all Minimoog.”

Although he’s used a number of other Moogs since that time, he still maintains a pair of original Model D’s in his archive of instruments.

“The sound of the oscillators were so rich and so strong, that nothing else could really compete with it. It was like the synthesizer version of the Hammond organ…nothing could really copy the Hammond organ properly. And I still don’t think anything could really copy the sound of the Moog oscillators.”