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With their last album, 1994's Bizarre Fruit, only dropping out of the Top 40 in November, it hardly seems as if M People have been away at all. But the band have had a long break from recording, and they've made the most of it. They return this month not only under new management and on a different label, but with a new album that moves into uncharted territory.

Fresco's variety and lush instrumentation is intended to put paid to the notion that M People are about club anthems and little else.

Vocalist Heather Small has worked hard to vary her vocal approach, and while the music includes the expected Saturday night stormers like Fantasy Island there is more. The reggae-tinged Lonely, three tracks with ex-Smith Johnny Marr on guitar, and a bizarre drum & bass cover of Roxy Music's Avalon, recorded with The Prodigy's engineer Neil McClennan, all point to a band which has moved forward.

Founder Mike Pickering, the former Hacienda DJ, says the record's range stems from the fact that they had a year to work on it. "We took a long time doing the first album, Northern Soul, but we weren't completely sure of what our focus was with it. Elegant Slumming was done more quickly, and Bizarre Fruit we wrote, recorded and produced in about three months ­ it made us quite ill, in fact. We just obeyed deadlines," he explains.

Given their phenomenal success, culminating in 1993's Mercury Music Prize victory, this time round they were allowed to work at a more relaxed pace. BMG development director Kevin Dawson says, "It's actually been pretty seamless ­ they're not a band that sit around. They've been given the luxury of recording at their own pace but they're strict on themselves, they know exactly what they do best, so the label's had no concern that the band would come back with a triple concept album. Their best music comes out of them working in the way they have been."

Heather Small's pregnancy led to much much of the album being recorded in an unusual way. She laid down vocals for eight of the album's 12 tracks last autumn the way it suited her, in band member Paul Heard's London home studio. "They're familiar surroundings and I can work at my leisure without worrying about taking too much time in an expensive studio. At the same time, I'm always aware that if I don't get a master vocal done today, I'll have to do it tomorrow, and that spurs me on to complete it," she says.

Armed with Small's vocals and rough orchestration for the songs, the rest of the group completed the tracks in New York's Chun King studios ­ from where they relayed progress to Small via regular telephone calls ­ and London's Strongroom during February and March. Within five weeks of giving birth, Small was back in action and recording the remaining songs.

The innovative content of Fresco is heralded by a change of M People's status within BMG. This album will be the first to emerge as an M People/BMG release rather than a Deconstruction one. "Deconstruction's a great dance label but we always felt we had to do 120 bpm dance tracks, and that wasn't the way we were going," Pickering explains. "We were more or less independent of everyone anyway. We've always had independent press, promoters and pluggers."

The band, their management and BMG also see the change as marking a new concentration on developing an international fan base. M People's manager Steve Barnett left last year to work for Epic in the US, and in early summer of this year they found a new team in the shape of Lindsay Scott and Roger Davies, who stressed their concern about getting the band their dues abroad from the outset.

However, there should be no worries that the band's focus will slip from the UK domestic market. With Fresco, M People are out to give their old fans a whole new angle on their established sound, as well as providing their critics with plenty of food for thought.

BY PETER LYLE

Reference: http://www.dotmusic.co.uk/MWtalentmpeople97.html