| It was the end of the Sixties when you launched your own label,
Threshold.
JOHN LODGE: We had now become disassociated from the record company.
Sir Edward Lewis, the chairman of Decca, was a champion of us — as was
a person called Hugh Mendl and his American counterpart, Walt McGuire.
We were just working with these three people, really. After every record,
we'd set a precedent by organising a playback session and inviting everyone
along. It was really important that Mendl and McGuire would be there and
we'd send Sir Edward a copy to listen to. But we didn't have a strong relationship
with the rest of the company, so we wanted to have our own label where
we didn't have to fight about double gatefold sleeves or the artwork or
what inserts we could have. We wanted to present a complete package, not
only with the album but the artwork and also the advertising and promotion.
And that's what we set about doing.
RAY THOMAS: We wanted control of the whole artistic process, right from
front to back. We convinced Sir Edward Lewis to let us have the No. 1 studio
building to put our gear in. Decca was so antiquated and the old man knew
all about that, so he didn't want to revamp the studio with company money.
We said, well, if you let us have the building, we'll do it. So that's
what happened. We'd go in until we were too tired to record any more. We
used to call it rolling a boulder across the door — we'd just stay in there.
People would stagger out and go back to bed for a few hours and then drive
back to the studio.
GRAEME EDGE: We also wanted to set other artists free. That was part
of the plan, at least. Then we got our own studio; we bought all the equipment
over and flew Tom Hedley over to build it for us. It was the first audio
studio in Europe made by the famous American production company, Westlake
— absolutely superb, state of the art. Tom was the first guy to experiment
with techniques which are taken for granted now, like sound baffles. He'd
build a false wall and leave the bottom foot of it covered with cloth but
like a sweep so the sound waves got sucked up behind the wall. The idea
was to aim for no reflected sound in the studio.
Then we had our own equipment to go out on the road with. We started
the travelling sound systems. We set up the first-ever company to do it
with our own stuff, so we had a whole bunch of lights and sound equipment.
We had an office to look after us, and we had a recording studio for when
we were making records. But when we weren't using them, they were sitting
there doing nothing. We thought, we formed a label with the idea being
that, when we weren't using it, other artists could — though they had to
be ones we liked or admired. We weren't going to throw the door open to
anybody! It was always going to be a co-operative, a venture between us
and the other artists. Of course, they stopped being like that and treated
us like a proper record company and started asking for advances, and we
realised it was a bit of a mistake. We found ourselves sitting the wrong
side of a desk and saying things that had been said to us! And that wasn't
why we did Threshold, so that phase didn't last long — about four years
before we let the other artists go and now, of course, Threshold is just
a glorified production company.
How did you fund its launch?
JL: With our own royalties.
The records were still manufactured by Decca, though?
JL: Yes, and they were happy in a way, because Deram was their progressive
label and we didn't really fit in there.
Did you not see the Moody Blues as part of the progressive rock movement?
JL: No, because it was still really singles-oriented in 1969. and we
were an album band. We were using different people at the studios as well.
We'd now almost taken over one of the classical studios at Decca — the
‘big room’, as it was called — whereas everyone else was using the normal
rock'n'roll studios. We were in there 24 hours a day, and sometimes we'd
have it for three months, concentrating on albums. All our LPs were cut
by the classical engineers, because their equipment was far better and
more harmonious than that of the people who were cutting pop records.
Did you all have different roles at Threshold?
RT: Oh yeah. We had our own offices, just off Oxford Street. Justin
organised more of the advertising and I handled the press aspects, but
it got to the point where we were in business meetings instead of playing
music. We were doing what we went into the music business not to do.
Going back to the album and its loose concept of space travel...
JL: It was to celebrate man landing on the moon — we recorded it before
the journey actually took place. We knew the moonshot was about to happen
in the not-too-distant future and we wondered what it would be like to
be the first spaceman leaving earth for the first time and going out on
this journey to the moon — (a) you've got the excitement of reaching this
planet, but also (b) it's the trepidation of what the new frontiers would
bring. It's what eventually you could be leaving behind as well as what
you're about to find. So the album was written with that as a theme.
GRAEME EDGE: The fantasy or uniting thought for the album was, imagine
that the LP had been put under a foundation stone and wasn't going to be
taken out for a couple of hundred years. It would let people know how we
were feeling at the time man first went to another planet. That was the
concept.
RT: By then, we'd just give a few ideas a go.We were mucking about with
sound and somebody discovered that if you played, I think, B-flat at a
certain decibel level, and played it backwards, you got this reverbration
on the diaphragm that made people shit themselves! We thought that'd be
good to put right on the end, this sound you couldn't actually hear. And
the more albums you do, the harder it became because we were trying not
to repeat ourselves.
The album begins with this almighty roar of a spaceship launch.
JL: We wanted this sound of a rocket taking off so we phoned up NASA
and asked them to send us a recording. They did so, but it sounded like
a damp squib! So we set about making our own rocket — and this was one
of the aspects it was brilliant to explore. It took a long time to combine
lots of different sounds but eventually we made, at the very beginning
of TO OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN'S CHILDREN, one of the most authentic rocket
sounds you could have.
What about your individual contributions?
RT: I wrote ‘Floating’ as a tongue-in-cheek song. I always found the
actual lyrics to many of our songs, including my own, very heavy and so,
to give it some light relief, I wrote songs like ‘Floating’ or ‘Dr. Livingstone,
I Presume’ — they were just light-hearted. But some people read more into
them, especially the Americans. They thought I'd got some weird cosmic
insight, when I was talking about “you'll find rocks with the moon right
through” — but they don't have seaside rock! They figured, how did I know
that?
I understand that the space idea came from your producer, Tony Clarke.
JUSTIN HAYWARD: Since we'd met him, Tony had wanted to do an album about
space. We were finding that songs we'd recorded on THRESHOLD OF A DREAM
were actually very difficult to play on stage because we were playing odd
instruments. I was playing a lot of keyboards, and mixing acoustic and
electric together was an impossible balance to reproduce. But it still
remains one of my favourite albums. People were always saying “What you
need is another ‘Nights In White Satin’!” It sounds incredibly simple,
but three years later, we'd got sick of hearing the song. ‘Watching And
Waiting’ was the first single on Threshold, which we all thought was wonderful.
We all had a shiver up the spine when we recorded it and thought, finally,
this is it, an answer to ‘Nights In White Satin’. And it came out and sold
about ten! Fortunately, the album was a great hit and since then, ‘Watching
And Waiting’ has become very popular!
Note: TheMoody Blues took a leaf from The Beatles by forming their
own label, Threshold. This gave them far greater control over every aspect
of their career, starting with a concept album about space travel.
Special thanks to: Wyn Mather at Threshold, Bill Levenson, Matthieu
Lauriot-Prevost, David Costa, Phil Smee.
Digitally remastered by Steve Fallone at PolyGram Studios.
Sleevenotes and interview by John Reed.
Art: Phil Travers. Photography: David Wedgbury. |
