Mike Pinder, co-founder of the Moody Blues whose work on the Mellotron became their signature sound – obituary

The first incarnation of the Moody Blues, l-r: Mike Pinder, Clint Warwick, Denny Laine, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge – Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

Mike Pinder, who has died aged 82, co-founded the Moody Blues and was the last surviving member of the original line-up; though he played an array of keyboards and other instruments, it was his Mellotron, with its plangent, eerie, faux-orchestral sweeps of sound, that gave the band their distinctive flavour and helped them sell more than 70 million records.

The instrument was based on the Chamberlin, a 1950s instrument that used sound samples stored on a collection of tapes which were activated by pressing the keyboard. Among the early Mellotron owners were Princess Margaret, Peter Sellers, King Hussein of Jordan and the Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard (not to mention the comedian Jim Davidson, who loaded it with comic sound effects).

According to Robin Douglas-Home, who reportedly had a brief affair with Princess Margaret, she “adored it”, while her husband Lord Snowdon “positively loathed it, and was supremely bored whenever she went near it”.

Pinder worked on developing the Mellotron at an electronics firm in Birmingham before co-founding the Moody Blues, and when they moved away from r’n’b to a more symphonic, proto-progressive sound, he made it their USP: “Fans call it the ‘heavenly atmosphere,” he said. He first played it on their 1967 single Love and Beauty; that went nowhere, but the next release, Nights in White Satin, went everywhere, and the Mellotron had arrived.

Michael Thomas Pinder was born in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham, on December 27 1941, to Bert, a coach driver, and Gladys, a barmaid; a love of rockets and outer space, which would last throughout his life and would frequently feature in his lyrics, led to the nickname Mickey the Moon Boy.

He had a string of teen bands, including the Rocking Tuxedos, and the Checkers, who won the £50 first prize in a talent competition at Birmingham Town Hall.

Elsewhere in the Second City, Ray Thomas, singer and harmonica player (and future Moody Blues flautist), and bassist John Lodge, had formed a rock’n’roll band, El Riot and the Rebels, and in 1963 they were joined by Pinder, just back from a short stint in the Army, who made their sound a little more distinctive than it might have been with his clavioline (effectively a primitive early synthesiser).

They split when Lodge went off to college in 1963, and Thomas and Pinder formed the Krew Kats, heading off to Hamburg, where they played the Beatles’ old haunts. Having failed to make it big in Germany, they returned to Birmingham, where Pinder took a testing and quality-control job at Streetly Electronics, whose big project was the Mellotron.

The Moody Blues on Ready Steady Go! – CA/Redferns

After a while, though, he felt the call of band life again. “I left the job and went and got Ray Thomas out of the factory he was working at as a tool setter,” he recalled. “We went around all the Birmingham groups and tried to steal the best people we could, and that’s how we formed the Moody Blues in early ’64.”

The new recruits were the bassist Clint Warwick, drummer Graeme Edge and guitarist Denny Laine, who had all been together in the R&B Preachers. The Moodys’ rise was rapid, and within months they had moved down to London and signed for Decca.

Their second single, Go Now, went to No 1, but it took a couple of years, and the exit of Warwick and Laine – replaced by Lodge and Justin Hayward respectively – before they took the direction that made them truly famous.

The change came after an audience member accosted them after a set of r’n’b covers to inform them that they were rubbish – and they found that they agreed with him. “We had been playing music that wasn’t suited to our characters,” Hayward recalled. “We were lower-middle-class English boys singing about life in the deep south of the USA and it wasn’t honest.”

Looking for new sounds to adorn their change in direction, they cast about for the right keyboard for Pinder, who remembered his work on the Mellotron and got in touch with his former employers. “Les Bradley of Streetly Electronics gave me a call and told me that he had found me a suitable instrument at the Dunlop tyre factory social club. I went to see it and I just had to have it. At £300, instead of the usual £3,000, the instrument was a steal.”

Nights in White Satin was the closing track on the Moodys’ album Days of Future Passed, a harbinger of prog-rock and one of the first concept albums, a day in the life of Everyman. It was intended to be a stereo demonstration sampler for their label, the Decca subsidiary Deram, fusing rock and orchestral music, but the band went off in their own direction, and the album went on to sell more than a million copies in the US alone.

The Mellotron defined the band’s sound but it could be a nightmare, practically speaking – even though with his employment history Pinder was better equipped than most to deal with its caprices, which included misaligned or warped tapes. On one memorable night the back came off the instrument and the tapes spilled out, rolling all over the stage. There was a 20-minute break while Pinder conducted running repairs as the lighting crew kept the crowd amused with cartoons.

But the sound was worth the hassle, and Pinder became a Mellotron proselytiser, introducing the instrument to The Beatles, who used it on Strawberry Fields Forever – as Pinder recalled, “the first time I heard it, I was in bliss.” He became friends with John Lennon, and was slated to play Mellotron on his album Imagine.

Days of Future Passed was one of the first concept albums – Alamy

“However,” he recalled, “the tapes in John’s ’tron looked like a bowl of spaghetti. It was a hopeless mess. So I grabbed a tambourine instead and played my socks off on I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier, Mama, the last track on the album.”

The Moody Blues never had a hit single to match Nights in White Satin, but Days of Future Passed was followed by a succession of classic albums – In Search of the Lost Chord, On the Threshold of a Dream and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour – which all reached the top of the charts or very near it, with Pinder contributing piano, harpsichord, synthesiser, tablas and guitars as well as Mellotron, and arranging all the material.

But, tired of touring and tired of each other – Pinder and Edge in particular had stopped getting on – the band went on hiatus in 1974, reassembling for the 1978 album Octave, Pinder’s swansong. He had already decamped to the US, where he eventually took a job with the Atari computer company, for whom he worked throughout the 1980s.

“I had gotten sick of the way things were in England – the weather, the politics – and I desperately wanted to move to America,” he recalled. “It seemed like a wonderful hope for the rest of the world. I especially liked California, with people inventing things in their garages.”

He later released two solo albums on his own label, Among the Stars (1994), and A Planet With One Mind the following year. In 2018 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Moody Blues.

Mike Pinder married, firstly, Donna Roth, with whom he had a son, Daniel, who followed his father into the industry as a bassist. They divorced, and he married Tara Lee Pinder in the early 1980s; they had two sons, Michael Lee and Matt, who perform together as the Pinder Brothers.

Mike Pinder, born December 27 1941, died April 24 2024

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