THEY SOLEMNLY COVENE TO MAKE THE SCENE [485]

I have only recently become aware of “Loungecore” as a term, because the musical genres of “lounge music” and “easy listening” already exist. “Loungecore” is used interchangeably with “easy listening”, but lounge music predates it, lasting through the 1950s and 60s, with easy listening following into the 1970s.

The suffix “-core”, banding together items with a similar aesthetic, appears here to band together common elements between genres as pop culture history elongates and flattens out, rather than grouping emerging connections before a name suggests itself.

However, I first encountered “Loungecore” in the late 1990s, as the title of a compilation CD of instrumental music by Mexican composer Juan García Esquivel. His style influenced the adjacent genres of “Space Age” and “exotica”, emphasising the music’s intention of taking you to a tranquil place – his piece “Mini Skirt” was being used as the theme tune for the BBC documentary series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” at the time, just as Andy Williams’ “Music to Watch Girls By” was advertising the Fiat Punto supermini. 

Esquivel’s lounge music had interesting arrangements and choices of instruments, more intricate rhythms, and the recordings made full use of the then-new stereo technology. The combined effect, along with various vocalised exclamations of “zoom” and “wow!”, reminded me of Spike Jones and His City Slickers. 

Therefore, my reaction to this music was to sit up and listen, not lie back – it was so unlike pop music, it made itself curious and interesting in was unintended when it first appeared, and fitting with the combination of “lounge” and “hardcore” for I took the CD compilation’s title to mean.

I am not clear why there was a revival of lounge music and easy listening in the 1990s – it may have been general nostalgia and critical re-evaluation of the previous generation, which will have been planted in the 1960s, accompanied by replays of TV series like “Thunderbirds”, “The Avengers” and the original “Doctor Who” series. I am guessing that the success of the compilation album “Carpenters Gold” when released in 2000 was a result of nostalgia sliding along to the 1970s, and into easy listening, and endless plays of the Starland Vocal Band’s languid song “Afternoon Delight”.

Even the use of the words “easy” and “lounge” symbolise my difficulty with listening to these genres as intended. The lush instrumentation inherent in a song from bandleaders like Esquivel, Ray Conniff, Mantovani or James Last only leads me to pay attention to why it sounds the way it does. Like the programming inherent in Muzak and the “beautiful music” radio format that ran in the United States from the 1950s to the 80s, there are reasons behind the music sounding the way it does, or being arranged it does, and it is usually to be appropriated for a specific use, or to deliberately sound “easier” to listen. This is either because I need music to stimulate me, or I find it hard to relax.

The most prominent example of lounge music appearing in the UK charts, as far as I remember, was a result of the deliberately ironic use of the style. The Mike Flowers Pops, an existing covers band in an easy listening style, was engaged to cover the Oasis song “Wonderwall” for Kevin Greening, a BBC Radio 1 DJ whose weekend breakfast show was recounting songs released during. After it was replayed by weekday breakfast presenter Chris Evans as his “record” of the week, demand prompted an official release. The outcome was hilarious: Flowers had as big as hit with “Wonderwall” as Oasis had, with both versions reaching number 2 in the UK singles chart, and both receiving “silver” status for selling over 200,000 copies. The Mike Flowers Pops had two further top 40 hits, with covers recorded under their own steam, before the novelty caused by the irony died down.

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