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The First International MelloFest 2008
INTERVIEW No. 7

TONY CLARKE
(Moody Blues)

Nick Awde: A mega big welcome for legendary Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke! Now, Tony wasn't born ten years too late...

Tony Clarke: I was born ten years too early!

NA: You famously started your music career at art college, didn't you?

TC: I did.

NA: Which is a very good start in popular music.

TC: It's essential.

NA: Although unusually you finished your course and ended up working n the designs for... was it Minis or nuclear submarines?

TC: Minis and prototype jet engines - the "Flying Bedsteads" which became the Hawker Harrier jet plane.

NA: At the same time you started as a bass player and ended up professionally playing the same circuit as bands like the Beatles just before they went hit the big time. And then, handily, you decided that going into production was a far more interesting venture just as producers were starting to become regarded as artists in their own right. And soon they were calling you the sixth Moody Blue after Decca famously brought you in on the sessions that became the "Days of Future Past" album sessions that gave us the hit song "Nights in White Satin". That album changed our way of thinking, along obviously with contemporaries like the Beatles "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and the Pretty Things' "SF Sorrow". Tony and the Moodies obviously liked each so much that they stayed together for the next how many years?

TC: Ten. Then bands implode. They just do.

NA: But you still talk to them all.

TC: Oh yes. In fact I was in California last year recording the Pinder Brothers - Mike Pinder's sons. They're frighteningly good. Serious musicians.

NA: You must have seen every single type of Mellotron in action because Mike Pinder had actually worked for the original Mellotron company Streetly and continued the relationship with them, even advising them on how to tweak things and develop new models. And I know that you weren't averse to getting your hands on the odd soldering iron too.

TC: We certainly changed almost every component of the Mark II! We re-recorded the tapes, changed every kind of power supply, every pre-amp and so on. We worked on recording it into the control room along with the Minimoog, which no one had attempted before. Just imagine the two of them! The tuning alone of both machines is frightening enough but well worth the while if you can get it right.

NA: And it wasn't just the technology that you kept a watchful eye over as producer - the legend is that you locked the various members of the Moody Blues in cupboards to get them to write songs.

TC: That's true.

NA: So this dapper, cultured man standing next to me in fact isn't quite what he seems...?

TC: I'm very proud of that. And they loved it! There were so many elements in the music we were creating. I love soundtracks in particular - composers like Dimitri Tiomkin who were recording soundtracks when I was at Decca, for example. Works like "West Side Story", which I went out to see five times in a row when the movie came out - now that was a score that was so good it was fiendishly difficult to play. I love the genre and very much think in soundtracks. We even had a Cinemascope-shaped control room, which was the level up above our studio, and if you turned the lights out the effect was magical. I think we pioneered recording in the dark--

NA: In the dark? Would you like to elaborate on that?

TC: You just turn all the lights out. It's that simple.

NA: But then Robert Kirby wouldn't be able to read his music!

TC: Nobody at the time could read music! Well, I suppose I could. But that's how we did it - bring your own rug, bring your own ashtray, customise the studio, bring your own dope... Well somebody had to land an album and so I did. And yeah it was a great ride!

NA: The Moodies certainly didn't follow trends - was that because you were so ahead of the game, always finding the latest toys like the Beatles had done before you to use in the studio?

TC: We didn't have many toys. In the early days we got our hands on a panner that could pan audio left and right which was an amazing breakthrough for the time! Another time at the Decca studios I remember guys in white coats bringing in two aluminium boxes and we looked at them curiously and asked: "Well, so what are they?" And they replied: "They're 'stretchers'!" So right, that was our first Dolby right. Mark I Dolby A and the next version. We were one of the first bands to work in stereo with our desk connected to the sound lab which was another floor up where they would tap everything we were doing. We soon got asked to do stuff for Japan in 'high fidelity', we were lucky we got to do some smart stuff in that respect.

NA: It's surprising then that the Moodies stuck to the older technology of the Mellotron with an unbroken use until the late 70s. That's almost unique - I can only think of Barclay James Harvest who had a similar unbroken run. If you and Mike Pinder had carried on working instead of leaving the Moody Blues at the same time, perhaps you would have continued using it up to the present day?

TC: In fact I was working with Mike last year and we used Mellotron, but it's now sampled - the left hand is Chamberlin and the right hand is Mellotron.

NA: [Cross-stage] Andy, you can tell the difference between Chamberlin and Mellotron?

Andy Thompson: They're often difficult to spot.

NA: Okay, I don't feel that bad then.

AT: The Chamberlin actually sounds more authentic, more like the real instrument than the Mellotron.

TC: And it's both been very good to me - it's put all my kids through college and sold 60 million records.

NA: That's a helluva lot of Mellotron if you think about it.

TC: The guys from Streetly came to my boat - I live on one - and they said: "Would you like a Mellotron? We've got three in the van!" Sadly I had to decline, I mean, where would you keep a Mellotron on a boat? You need something the size of the QE2!

NA: You have some incredible original material in your archives, like all of the original sessions for "Days of Future Passed" where, for example, at the very end of the recording with a full orchestra for "Nights in White Satin" you can distinctly hear something falling--

TC: A tree bell fell over! And I left it in because it sounded right.

NA: You also have archives of your later award-winning work with Clannad and Rick Wakeman.

TC: Medieval rock. No Mellotron there but I did do a lot of tape loops with Clannad. That's probably why I got the gig. They wanted to know how you do long sustained vocal sections. We used their own voices - leader singer Moya Brennan is just brilliant - to create these amazing textures. Other studio trickery included the new E-mu Emulator digital sampler, timpani, oh, and a plastic fork on the low strings of a grand piano, winding it up and down.

NA: You also worked on the soundtrack of the film "Supergirl" which must have particularly appealed to you.

TC: At first they asked for four sound effects using my own rack of stuff. I ended up doing 200 for the film. This was pre-samples as we understand it today. However, I did have a Yamaha DX7, I think it was, a Movement drum machine [aka the 'Movement MCS Percussion Computer'] and odd cutting edge stuff like that. The director would say things like: "Can you do us a sound of a red hot floor?" So you think" "What?! What does that sound like?" And then: "Can you do us the sound of failed magic spell?"

NA: Almost Zen-like!

TC: True. And you end up working all night and then jumping in the car in the morning. You drive to Pinewood Studios and if you manage to get it there by 9 o'clock it's in the film! In those days they'd lace it onto 35mm magnetic stripe and it would go straight into the film. The mixing desks were absolutely enormous, three or four of them in a row.

NA: So if someone came up to you and asked "would you work with a real Mellotron again" would you do that or would you say you couldn't record it now?

TC: I wouldn't be able to resist it actually. But it could be a nightmare. The biggest horror was where the Moody Blues were playing in New York and the curtains opened to what was to have been a big Mellotron chord. Instead all the tapes fell out and the curtains promptly closed. They immediately put on a cartoon film of "Roadrunner" and the band got through it somehow! Afterwards Les Paul was backstage and he said: "Bring it back to my place and we'll fix it." So we all of us got to spend a weekend with Les Paul at his home in upstate New York where we got to hear Les Paul play a Les Paul! I remember him showing me his famous multi-track tape machine - it was an experience to physically see it! He also had a cellar literally full of guitars - rack upon rack upon rack of everything that Gibson ever made he got a copy and put his own pick-ups. So that turned out to be quite a weekend.

NA: That's quite a love affair with the Mellotron.

TC: Oh yes. I've even recorded the workings of it. Not the tape sounds but the motors, the clunk, the click, the whirr! It's on some of the albums. We were happily desperate - I once took everybody's wristwatches, put them on a timpani, put a megaphone over the watches, put a Sennheiser microphone down the megaphone and recorded the result. It's all part of the allure of the machine!

NA: Tony Clarke, thank you very much!

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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