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.
[6] In 2003 and 2018 respectively, MacNeil contributed with accordion backing tracks to Simple Minds songs "Dirty Old Town" and their cover version of "Brothers in Arms" on the album Reimagines the Eighties.
[3] He also contributed keyboards and programming to a reformed Visage on their final studio album Demons to Diamonds (2015).
[citation needed] 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...
"[2] 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.