Exclusive Shindig! Qobuz playlist #22: Painting Colours With The… Mellotron
We’re very excited to be media partners with the truly unique online streaming platform and download store Qobuz. This month, the 22nd of our monthly bespoke playlists, which take in all manner of genres and sub-genres, scenes and beyond, then and now, looks at the role of the Mellotron in ’60s and ’70s music
Play here or use the scrollable frame with track list below. You can sign up for a free trial today. Plans start from £10.83 per month. For more on Qobuz read our interview with MD Dan Mackta here
In 1949, the American inventor Harry Chamberlin patented a self-named electro-mechanical keyboard instrument. In essence it was a rudimentary proto-sampler. Each key triggered a tape of an instrument, which would play when the key was pressed. The impact this basic technology would later have on the music of the ’60s and ’70s would be remarkable, but Chamberlin was strictly a big band guy who detested the emerging rock ’n’ roll music. An early adopter of cosmic sounds he was not. Skip forward to 1962, after business partner, ex window cleaner Bill Franson, had disappeared from America, rebranded the instrument under his own name and did “business” the UK. Hence the arrival of the Mellotron, manufactured by Streetly Electronics in Birmingham. After much legal discussion, Harry Chamberlin entered the picture and made a settlement for the instrument to be made and sold in the UK under its new name the Mellotron. America production would continue under the Chamberlin moniker.
For anyone interested to see how this quirky instrument was marketed, even in 1965, should head to YouTube and search for a British Pathè newsreel titled ‘The Mellotron: A Keyboard with the Power of an Orchestra’. It’s hilarious. This pioneering, but already unreliable beast of an instrument, or “a computer” as it was called here, was marketed as an early foray into the type of entertainment system that would follow a decade later: the electronic home organ. A great emphasis was made on how you did not have to be a musician to make orchestral music.
In the same year, jazz and blues musician Graham Bond utilised the instrument in a somewhat straight blues song, ‘Baby Can It Be True’ from The Graham Bond Organization’s second album A Bond Between Us, released that December. On this, the mk1 model was used for orchestral backing, creating a somewhat ghostly, but fairly accurate representation. As the ’60s reached its middle the whiff of psychedelia was already in the air. The Beatles ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, recorded in the November and December of 1966, and released in February 1967, may have been the definite signifier of the Mellotron becoming the de facto psychedelic instrument, but Manfred Mann beat them to it with ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr Jones’, which was released in late October 1966. The sprightly pop song echoed Ray Davies suburban realism, with the Mann’s mk2 ‘tron doing exactly what many psych-pop records that followed would do, making use of the integral flute setting.
This playlist follows songs that employed the Mellotron from the mid-60s into the mid-70s. I have primarily chosen shorter pieces that loosely fit within the “pop framework” rather than solely experimental pieces, mirrored by the “Painting Colours With…” subtitle. Whilst the flute and reed settings supply tone and hue to numerous pieces, more daring musicians, especially as time went on, did more and more with this fantastic box of tricks. That it was notoriously unreliable, just consider all of those moving parts, and practically impossible to use in the live setting, it still peppered so many imaginative recordings made across the psychedelic and progressive eras, appearing on everything from bubblegum pop singles to deep cuts on funk and soul albums. All areas are covered on this epic 110 track playlist, from Bond’s 1965 debut to Illusion and Harry Nilssons’ very different approaches in 1977. Tintern Abbey, Art, and Bill Fay are all here, as are Hearts & Flowers, The Steve Miller Band, Leigh Stephens, and Dragonwyck. While Britain and American are the most represented, we also offer European diversions from Los Brincos, St Giles System, Le Orme and various others.
With 1977 as the cut off for this instalment, there’s more than enough scope to cover all of the great records that made further use of the instrument across the synth-pop era onwards. The Mellotron is still made to this day, as the M4000D, whilst digital samples and software versions are even more popular. Digital samples of an instrument built on the principals of analogue tape samples, with all of the hiss and flutter that go with it, however, does seem something of a misnomer, so let’s enjoy the real deal here. Ten hours’ worth.
With thanks to Andy Morten
Jon ‘Mojo’’ Mills / Shindig! Magazine
