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The First International MelloFest 2008
INTERVIEW No. 6

ROBERT WEBB
(England)

NA: Now we'll welcome Robert Webb of England - he'll talk a bit before playing for us later.

RW: First of all, on behalf of everyone I'd like to thank Andy Thompson and Gary Knight who supplied the Mellotrons. Without any Mellotrons this would be a very different event!

NA: We did need two... um, just in case one of them broke down! In fact, someone phoned up last week about the event and made the genius comment that it would be quite typical if they BOTH broke down and then we would have a "Classic Minimalist Mellotron Evening". Anyway, Robert, were you another case of being born ten years too late? Robert was busy making a lot of music during the early '70s and then suddenly found himself for all sorts of reasons - quite logical reasons as they must have seemed at the time - starting up a prog rock group just as punk broke, which again must have been quite frustrating for you?

RW: [Momentarily distracted by Andy Thompson's retuning of the Mellotrons and Minimoog] Andy, are you all right there? I'll check it. [Back to the audience] We've got a double problem here because the Mellotron is a little prone to tuning and the Minimoog is EXTREMELY prone!

NA: Well, as Andy tunes, this might be a good point to bring up the fact that Robert very famously sawed a Mellotron in half.

RW: I didn't do it famously - or at least I haven't become famous for it yet.

NA: Maybe we can make you famous!

RW: It was a very practical decision. You've heard people mention that the Mellotron is heavy and the first one I met in the band was the huge Mark II. It's a double keyboard but it's more complex than that - it's not simply two keyboards put next to each other like is the later M300, which was two M400s together. The much older Mark II is virtually the original Mellotron concept and used a valve pre-amp whereas the later models use transistor pre-amps. The transformer section - the heavy section! - is at least three times as big in the Mark II because it has to handle a motor which spins all the tapes on.

NA: [To the audience] There'll be a demonstration later on!

RW: The M400 has only three available sounds unless you put a new rack of tapes in. The Mark II on the other hand had 18 sounds per keyboard, and since it had two keyboards you had 36 possibilities. The motor that drove the mechanism to wind these tapes on is like a washing machine - big motors, all very primitive stuff which made the whole thing very, very heavy. So I cut mine in half!

NA: And...?

RW: Well how do you do that? It's quite simple. If you can picture it, you have two virtually identical keyboards and the only thing that's in common is the capstan wheel. It functions like a tape recorder in that if you watch a cassette machine or a tape recorder when you put it into play there's a spinning metal rod and it meets against a rubber rod and that pulls the tape through. The rod on the Mellotron goes to about four feet and if you cut it in half and move the bearing onto one half you've got yourself half a Mellotron. It still works exactly the same. So that's how we resolved the problem of the weight. I also put the transformers in a separate box so that that meant that you carried two bits. So the actual Mellotron itself was now comparatively light and you had a heavy transformer box instead.

NA: I'll just interrupt you for a second. [Across the stage] Andy, how much is a Mark II worth now?

Andy Thompson: Ten-twelve grand!

NA: Ten or twelve grand... okay. But I'm somehow guessing that half a Mellotron is not going to be worth six grand. Where's the other half?!

RW: My half is still alive and now owned by Gordon Reed at Sound on Sound magazine. He managed to find it. Martin Henderson, who's sitting over there tonight, the bass player with England, put it in his Mini after the band broke up and we drove it to a guy called Dylan who bought it in 1982, He was very very happy to have it, but frightened to death to switch it on! So it just sat in his home. I think he got married quite recently and the "Half-a-Tron" was in a cupboard or storeroom somewhere. Gordon heard about it and offered to buy it. So it went up to Streetly Electronics who still make the Mellotron, up in the Midlands, and they completely serviced it, or at least it's in a queue of things to be serviced. Gordon told them: "That horrible case that Robert made for it out of plywood painted black" - as most equipment in rock bands is, you know! - "can you make a case like the old Mark II?" That means highly lacquered wood, and he's got Streetly to create a perfect Mark II case that just happens to be half the width, and he's having the Mellotron put inside that so he'll end up with a very special instrument. It also happens to be one which I also personally spliced the tapes in, because I wasn't happy with some sounds and thought it would be good for the type of music that England were doing if I added a choir sound and the timpani I had on a particular rack of tapes for an M400 - it also had strings. The timpani I had were in two forms: one was hitting with a stick - bong! - and then if you played an octave higher on the keyboard you've got a roll on the same timpani. This seemed to be a fantastic idea that would be unusual and creative to have on a keyboard at the time. So I thought: "How am I going to get these three special choir and timpani sounds on my wonderful Mellotron that I've cut in half that does everything else...? Well I'll have to splice it in myself." If anybody's ever done this - at least anyone here who's over 30! - the sort of splicing tape that we had to do for cassettes and cine film where we used to have to splice and glue. You'd cut a bit out and glue it together in a straight line. I had to do this on all 35 tapes on Station Five and it was a very risky business, I didn't think it was going to work. Apparently, 30 years later those bits of sticky tape that I used are still holding up - it still works. Unbelievable - and since Gordon's going to have a new set of tapes put in I'm getting my old tapes back!

NA: Now all we need is the other half to put them in! Now, what are you going to play for us this evening? We're going to see the Mellotron and Minimoog used together - a classic combination.

RW: I thought I'd give you something from the England album called "Garden Shed", which was released in '77. It's a very special piece of music for me and it is an example of using the Mellotron in the way that we thought - or I thought - would fit the group.

[Plays]

RW: Thank you very much! As you probably know the tape runs out on Mellotrons so that's how long you can hold on to the chord before it just dies. Listen to this... [plays a chord] I'd always be looking at the drummer, like "don't make the drum fill at the end too long, don't make it too long!!!" Anyway there we are. Thank you very much again! Can I also thank Nick Awde for the splendid book? It's called "Mellotron" but clearly it's about a lot more than that. In historical terms this is somebody looking at the musicians who were active in this period, something that is much needed and I think it's absolutely fantastic to get 20-plus chapters of people who were involved in this type of music-making all in one book. It's absolutely brilliant, thank you Nick.

NA: Thanks too to you all for coming to celebrate the people in the book! What I suggest is we take a small break here and I think Andy or Gary might now show people the insides of a Mellotron...

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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