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The First International MelloFest 2008
INTERVIEW No. 2

2.MARTIN ORFORD
(IQ, John Wetton Band, Jadis)

Nicholas Awde: A big welcome please for Martin Orford, keyboard player with IQ, John Wetton Band, and all-round--

Martin Orford: --all sorts!

NA: Now, you are not playing this evening or are playing this evening?

MO: Oh if persuaded.

NA: Okay, a bit of talk before moving on to the music. Yours has been a particularly famous love/hate relationship with the Mellotron. For example, you're on record with the evocative observation "it's a bit like playing a choir from inside a fridge".

MO: I think everybody had a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Mellotron. I mean we loved the sound of it but we didn't always love the way the sounds were delivered. And we didn't always love the way that sometimes they WEREN'T delivered! But that didn't stop us from all having a Mellotron at some point. I got mine from Kenleigh just south of Croydon. It belonged to Adrian Wagner before I had it - he was sort of a great-great-grandson of the composer and had a solo album out on Virgin, I think, at one point.

NA: David Cross was discussing the insanity of being in a rock band that improvised and did it with two Mellotrons. I suspect that you displayed a similar spirit by plunging into prog rock just as punk was exploding all over the place.

MO: We were born ten years too late. It's as simple as that. Although IQ did prog rock with a bit more of a high-energy slant on it, in that we were playing around all these gigs that had punk bands on and if we just played quiet Mellotrons and acoustic sections we wouldn't have got out alive. So we had to crank up the volume a bit.

NA: Personally, IQ rocked from the beginning and their attitude was as punk as punk ever was. Which brings up another misconception about prog rock, namely that you had to come from an intellectual sort of background to play it. The "Mellotron" book goes into this in some detail, looking at the various musicians' upbringing, where they came from, how they were raised, and you swiftly realise that prog rockers come from the most diverse backgrounds. In IQ's case, you all came from the Southampton area?

MO: Originally yes.

NA: From some really dodgy estates?

MO: Some of us did yeah.

NA: And you were lambasted by the punks for being "toffee-nosed prog rockers"?

MO: Yes, but all the punks were probably posher than we were. They came from the "good parts" of Southampton.

NA: How did you deal with that? Because it must have been a hard grind going through all that during the late 70s and early 80s.

MO: We just played increasingly faster and louder, basically.

NA: How do you keep up with the Mellotron with that sort of thing? It not being the fastest of machines, after all.

MO: Well you just play all these big chords. At least that's what I always used it for. I used it in the most very obvious places where you want to give it that big "Jerusalem Effect" - as you say in the book: the big bass pedals, the big choral thing. It was obvious but it worked. I remember we had these guys in Bristol who used to come and cheer every time I played a chord on the Mellotron. They weren't the slightest bit interested in the rest of the gig.

NA: Now that's an idea if anyone who wants to set up a money-making band, just go to Bristol and play mighty Mellotron chords. How many pints had those guys had?

MO: Lots!

NA: So would you like to play something for us right now then?

MO: Yes. Okay folks we're going to play you a little bit of a very long track that we did with IQ many, many years ago and it used to start off with the old Mellotron flutes which is something like this. If I can remember it it used to go...

[Plays Mellotron]

Now the only trouble was that my Mellotron never sounded that good, so I'm going to do a little bit of that track on the Rhodes piano instead. This is a little bit of "The Last Human Gateway" [off the IQ album "Tales from the Lush Attic"].

[Plays]

MO: Thank you!

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Mellotron progressive rock prog rock British invasion Tony Banks (Genesis), Mike Pinder (Moody Blues), Ian McDonald (King Crimson, Foreigner), Woolly Wolstenholme (Barclay James Harvest), Greg Lake (King Crimson, Emerson Lake & Palmer), John Wetton (King Crimson, UK, Asia), Nick Magnus (Autumn, Steve Hackett Band), Martin Orford (IQ, Jadis), Roine Stolt (Flower Kings, Transatlantic, Tangent), Jakko Jakszyk (Level 42, 21st Century Schizoid Band, Tangent), John Hawken (Renaissance, Strawbs), Doug Rayburn (Pavlov's Dog), Tony Clarke (Moody Blues), David Cross (King Crimson), Dave Cousins (Strawbs), Blue Weaver (Strawbs, Bee Gees), Robert Kirby (Strawbs), Robert Webb (England), Dave Gregory (XTC), Andy McCluskey (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark). Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) provides a drummer's view of working with four classic Mellotron bands, and there are perspectives from Geoff Unwin, the first Mellotronics demonstrator, John Bradley & Martin Smith of Streetly Electronics, the original makers of the Mellotron, and Planet Mellotron's Andy Thompson Nick Awde