Description
Beyond Words is the first instrumental album in 23 years from Mike Lindup, pianist, composer, vocalist and founding member of Level 42. Recorded on a 1928 Steinway grand piano that Lindup played decades earlier, the album brings together original compositions and a remarkable story of survival, restoration and rediscovery.
The instrument, known as The Soldier's Steinway, was purchased by George Morfee following his service in the Second World War. With his demobilisation payment, George bought a Steinway Model O, built in 1928 when pianos were still extensively made by hand.
For many years, the piano stood in the Morfee family home in Kincardine, Scotland. Mike was a friend of George's daughter Ann, whom he had met at Chetham's School of Music, and during visits he would often sit at the Steinway to revisit his classical repertoire. The album sleeve features a photograph of Mike playing the piano in 1999, 27 years before he returned to record Beyond Words.
At 96, George decided to spend his life savings restoring the instrument. His daughters Ann and Su entrusted the work to Steinway-trained master piano technician Peter Salisbury. In 2017, with the restoration nearly complete, a fire engulfed the Northolt warehouse where the piano was being worked on
The Steinway survived, but smoke and water damage meant the work had to start again. Peter generously volunteered his spare time, spending a further seven years on its restoration, including work undertaken by specialist craftspeople in Kalisz, Poland.
In spring 2026, while clearing the home of his late mother, Nadia Cattouse, Mike found an old photograph of himself with Ann Lovatt, nee Morfee, taken around 35 years earlier. He sent it to her, and Ann invited him to visit the Hertfordshire studio she shares with her husband, musician Mike Lovatt, and try her father's newly restored piano.
Reunited with the instrument after so many years, Mike found the resonance, dynamic range and character he had been seeking for his new compositions. A piano he had known for decades became the inspiration for his first instrumental album since 2003's Conversations with Silence.
The discovery also connects the record to Mike's musical upbringing. His mother, Nadia Cattouse, was a pioneering Belizean-born Black folk singer, actress and activist and a significant figure in Britain's 1960s folk revival. Her contribution to British music is recognised in the V&A's exhibition The Music is Black: A British Story. His father, David Lindup, was a composer and arranger. Both encouraged Mike to play and create from an early age.
After studying at Chetham's and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Mike found international success as a founding member, keyboardist and vocalist of Level 42. His playing and songwriting helped shape the band's distinctive blend of jazz, funk, soul and pop, heard on hits including Lessons in Love, Something About You and Running in the Family.
Throughout his career, the piano has remained central to Mike's musical life. Since childhood, he has used it to explore ideas, improvisations and feelings that are difficult to put into words. On Beyond Words, those ideas take shape through music inspired by people, places and memories.
Much of that inspiration comes from the Scottish landscape Mike calls home. Changing seasons, a loch reflecting the stars, clouds above the hills and the shift from stillness to storm all appear in the compositions. The music reflects not only the landscape but the memories and emotions it brings to mind.
On pieces including The Hills, They Speak, Yellow Field, Purple Sky, Arc Over Paris, Distant Bells and Still Places I Feel You, Mike draws on his classical foundations, melodic sensibility and improvisational approach to explore memory, belonging and the natural world.
Recorded in June 2026 at Little Wolf Studios, the album captures The Soldier's Steinway following its long restoration. Engineered and mixed by Adam Goldsmith and mastered by Peter Beckmann, the recordings bring out the piano's resonance, warmth and dynamic range. The artwork features Mike's own landscape photography alongside the 1999 photograph of him at the instrument.
A piano bought by a ret
