DO YOU WANNA KNOW HOW IT FEELS? [432]

My musical listening journey has created a list of artists and bands for whom I don’t have a physical copy of any of their music, an omission to remedy someday: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, the Spice Girls and so on. Some works demand better than the lossy compressions of MP3 or streaming.

Kate Bush is a different matter. Upon realising I had none of her albums, I felt embarrassed by this admission - how can I have all of David Bowie’s studio albums, but nothing by Kate Bush? I practically ran to the nearest HMV to stock up: “Hounds of Love”, “The Red Shoes”, “Never For Ever”, “The Kick Inside” and “The Sensual World”, one each of what the store had in stock. 

My CD collection felt complete in that moment, and seemingly remains so until I decide I really need something by Pink Floyd, for Kate Bush always feels like a special occasion, whenever I hear a song by her, and no matter how often I hear those songs. 

From the ethereal nature of early hits like “Wuthering Heights”, “Them Heavy People” and “Wow”, to the spiky characters of “The Dreaming” album, and the triumph of both sides of “Hounds of Love”, Kate Bush’s output became better as more creative freedom was afforded to her, and her increasingly experimental albums, made in her own time, at home through technological advances and portability, like the Fairlight CMI album first used on “Babushka”, have allowed this experimentation and freedom to become mainstream.

My favourite Kate Bush album is 1985’s “Hounds of Love”, and my favourite song of her songs is “Running Up that Hill (A Deal with God)”, from the commercial-led side A of that album – the perceived failure of 1982’s “The Dreaming”, which still reached number 3 in the charts despite singles not charting, led to a compromise that put more avant-garde material onto side B, while also becoming Bush’s first album recorded entirely at home, in her own time, at her own pace.

“Running Up That Hill” reached number 1 in the UK singles chart for three weeks in June 2022, having been used as a plot device in the Netflix TV drama “Stranger Things”. Having a song that talks about exchanging sexes to achieve a greater understanding to have come back from 1985 to become more relevant and celebrated than ever intended, is perhaps one of the best things that could have happened in pop music, and it was entirely deserved – it was like us, as the audience, had caught up with the song at last.

Kate Bush’s last album of new material was 2011’s “50 Words for Snow”, a chamber-pop-jazz-ambient album based around a single theme, with no track shorter than seven minutes in length. There is a natural expectation for any future release, but I currently like to think that she thought long enough to make music her way, having achieved a position where she can make music entirely for herself, any clash this makes with the image of a publicly accessible rock star is her audience’s problem alone.  

PEOPLE SAY I’M THE LIFE OF THE PARTY [358]

A visual shorthand for the 1970s, the 8-track tape cartridge appeared to peacefully co-exist with the competing Compact Cassette format for its entire time on sale, from 1964 to 1990, even if its popularity dwindled through the 1980s. I have only limited experience with the format, through an 8-track car player my father owned, but they only felt at the time like a “big cassette”. What allowed the 8-track to stick around for so long?

Both formats appeared around the same time. Philips unveiled the Compact Cassette in Europe in 1963, and in the United States in 1964, the same year the first demonstration 8-track players appeared from the Lear Jet Corporation, which spearheaded its development as an in-flight entertainment device. The first in-car units were offered as optional extras by Ford in 1965, alongside the first pre-recorded cartridges from RCA. Home-based hi-fi players and recorders for both formats would both appear before the end of the decade.

Like almost all tape formats, cartridges existed to make reel-to-reel tape easier to handle. The Compact Cassette miniaturised the reels and tape, to 0.15 inches wide and played at 1.875 inches per second, but the first pre-recorded demonstration cassette would not appear until 1967, the Compact Cassette’s initial poor recording quality only useful for dictation purposes. Instead, an 8-track cartridge used the same quarter-inch tape used in reel-to-reel players, playing at 3.75 inches per second, twice that of the Compact Cassette, but half the maximum speed of a reel-to-reel player, making 8-track almost an “audiophile” format by comparison. However, in splitting the tape into four programmes, each made up of two tracks, the 8-track increased both tape hiss and the possibility of “crosstalk” between the tracks and a misaligned playback head.

At four inches wide, each cartridge can play for up to eighty minutes, housing enough tape for four programmes of up to twenty minutes in a single-reel “endless loop” design, like the earlier 4-track Stereo-Pak and Fidelipak “broadcast cart” cartridges used for playing radio jingles, leading from the middle, and windingback around itself. The join in tape was bridged by a silver foil splice which, once it moved past a sensor, moved the playback head to the next programme automatically. The pinch roller usually found in the player mechanism was moved to inside the cartridge, allowing it to automatically engage and play upon being entered into the player, particularly useful when travelling.

With this form to play with, the albums that resulted on 8-track were, to me at least, not the greatest aesthetically. In terms of packaging, the hard plastic cartridge eliminated the need for the case required for a Compact Cassette, but the album cover and other information would be provided as a sticker that would deteriorate with age, along with the silver foil and foam pads inside the cartridge.

The biggest problem, however, is the inflexibilities of arranging an album onto an 8-track cartridge. With a C-90 cassette providing up to 45 minutes per side, you could fit the equivalent of an entire vinyl record on each side of a Compact Cassette, as Pink Floyd did with their double album “The Wall” in 1979. The maximum 8-track programme length of twenty minutes should accommodate one side of a record, but to minimise the amount of tape used, the maximum programme length will be the total length of the album, divided by 4. 

The worst example of this I could find was David Bowie’s 1976 album “Station to Station”, a six-song, 38-minute album, meaning 9.5 minutes per programme is available... but the title track is over ten minutes long by itself, taking up the entire first programme and the beginning of the second. “Word On a Wing”, song 3 of 6 on every other issue, is now song 2 on the 8-track, followed by “Wild is the Wind”, usually the album closer, itself broken up between programmes, perhaps to take advantage of a quiet moment in the song. This means that the final three rockier songs, “Stay”, “TVC15” and “Golden Years” (usually tracks 5, 4 and 2), can play without interruption. Make your album fit, or forget about it.

Meanwhile, the average length of each side of “The Wall” vinyl album was twenty minutes, fitting relatively easy onto the four programmes of an 8-track without making any changes to the songs’ length or running order, except that “Hey You”, the first song on side 3 of the vinyl version, begins at the end of one programme, and starts the next one. It is not possible to lengthen one programme to make the rest of the song fit, as you will have a gap at the end of the other three programmes, disrupting the flow of the album in a different way.

While 1978 was the peak year for 8-track sales in the United States, sales of pre-recorded albums by mail order clubs continued there until 1988, while the electronics retailer Radio Shack sold its Realistic-branded players and blank cartridges until 1990. Meanwhile, the more portable and cheaper Compact Cassette had caught up through constant improvements in tape and playback quality that did not happen with 8-track, although Dolby B noise reduction was licensed for both formats. But by then, the Compact Disc had allowed for seventy-four minutes of high-quality music, later eighty minutes to be played back on one side, without interruption.

IT’S NOT THE WAY THAT YOU SAY IT [332]

Mellotron Mark II

Introduced in 1963, the Mellotron is an organ-like musical instrument, its keys instead engaging a tape mechanism to play back ranges of brass, woodwind, string and percussive instruments, making it an analogue forerunner to the sample-based synthesisers that appeared during the 1980s. Instead of its intended sounds being manipulated, recreated or synthesised, they are recordings of the original instruments, and specifically one person’s performance, affected as much by breath and touch – you can hear the air through the flute, and the bows on the violins – as much as the “wow and flutter” of the tape, and the speed of the electric motor. The effect created by that specific combination of factors have made the Mellotron a vital, and slightly eerie-sounding, part of British music for the last sixty years, playing back a sound quality all of its own.

The Mellotron’s sound has become more important than how it works. “Baby Can It Be True”, by The Graham Bond Organization, was the first major song to use one, layering sounds over each other, but Manfred Mann’s 1967 hit “Ha! Ha! Said the Clown” then uses it as the hook, instead of guitar or brass. By this point, The Beatles and The Moody Blues used Mellotrons, including on “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Nights in White Satin”, later carving a niche in prog rock with King Crimson, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. The source of the Mellotron’s sound also means its sounds can be taken too often for the “real” thing, like the cello on Oasis’s “Wonderwall”, and possibly the choir at the end of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”, but it sounds too similar to say otherwise. It is also possible to replace the tape, the BBC using an adapted Mellotron to play in sound effects for “Doctor Who” in real time.

Streetly Electronics, the manufacturer of the Mellotron until 1986, was resurrected in 1997 initially to maintain the original version as bands like Radiohead and Oasis continued to use them, even as digital synths by Yamaha, Korg and Roland rendered them obsolete. The sheer number of moving parts in a Mellotron could be affected by humidity, smoke and, least useful for a touring band, movement. However, the possibilities of the Mellotron to a smaller band, and the timbral quality of its sounds, led to more portable versions being introduced into the 1970s.

Mellotron M4000D

The original organ was introduced as an item for the home, with a backing accompaniment available on a second keyboard, and was championed and backed financially by the bandleader Eric Robinson, best known in the UK as presenter of the classical and light music radio show “Melodies for You” on the BBC Light Programme, along with the TV magician David Nixon. Among the first adopters of the Mellotron were people as disparate as Peter Sellers, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, while also providing the only fact I knew off the top of my head about Princess Margaret.

Most notably, the sound of a Mellotron is most often mistaken for that of a Chamberlin, but only because the former is a legally distinguishable version of the latter. Harry Chamberlin designed and perfected his patents from 1949 to 1956, and counted Bobby Darin and Elvis Presley as early customers – but after a legal wrangling caused by a Chamberlin salesman disappearing to the UK and setting up production with a British manufacturer of tape heads, which became Streetly Electronics, Chamberlin and Mellotron continued to sell independently from each other, and not in their home countries. 

Therefore, American acts like The Beach Boys, Edgar Winter, Three Dog Night and Stevie Wonder had access to Chamberlins, and UK acts had Mellotrons. While David Bowie did use a Mellotron on “Space Oddity”, his later “Berlin trilogy” of albums, recorded in Germany, Switzerland and New York, used Chamberlins. Adding to the confusion, the Mellotron’s “3 Violins” sound, used prominently in “Nights in White Satin”, was the one sound licensed for it from Chamberlin.

I want a Mellotron but, due to space and lack of mechanical knowhow, it would have to be one of the modern digital versions currently being manufactured by the original company, although they are expensive: even a rack-mounted version for the studio, where you have to add your own keyboard, costs over a thousand pounds. Fortunately, because Harry Chamberlin sold his company’s rights to them in 1981, all digital Mellotrons effectively come with a free Chamberlin, to layer sounds on top of each other. Arturia sells a downloadable Mellotron sound pack for use via MIDI and a computer, but that is much less special than playing on the real thing.

What would I want to do with a Mellotron? Play on the nostalgia created by the sounds it makes? Layer those sounds together to recreate that eerie quality employed by The Moody Blues? Create something that sounds like nothing else? Yes please.

Mellotron M4000D Micro