Telykast Talk Again Original Album Cover
The Moody Blues Album Covers by Phil Travers
The gilded historic period of progressive rock music in the early 1970s saw a number of collaborations between audacious musical acts and visual artists who complimented the music with striking and imaginative anthology covers. Many of the major acts had a go-to artist or design house that supplied them with creative imagery. For many tape buyers the appeal of the album sleeve was a major factor in a decision to purchase a record. The 12-inch square size of an LP album embrace chop-chop doubled every bit gate folds became the norm. Artists started to take advantage of the newly found extra real estate and expanded their sheet. Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd and others had their Roger Dean, Paul Whitehead and Hipgnosis. This article focuses on The Moody Dejection and the six albums featuring the artwork of Phil Travers. Nosotros shall talk about those covers and play a favorite piece of music from each album.
The story of these albums begins after the Moody Dejection released their quantum anthology Days of Future Passed at the end of 1967. On that album the band quickly abandoned the original thought of a stone realization of Dvorak'due south 9th Symphony and wrote their own music. The album, a milestone symphonic rock production that utilized a full orchestra, produced the hitting Nights in White Satin. Its success gave the band a new freedom in making creative decisions near their music and how it is packaged. Enter artist Phil Travers, who recalls how he met the band: "I spent two years at Decca, working on album sleeves, then got a task in a design office down in Wimbledon. I was then contacted by someone I knew at Decca who said the Moody Blues director liked an illustration of mine and wanted me to meet the band to hash out doing the sleeve for their new album. I met the Moodies in a London pub, and nosotros worked out the details of the commission."
For their next anthology the band created their own symphonic sound with the help of a mellotron, enhanced by the band members playing classical instruments such as harpsichord and cello. The result was the anthology In Search of the Lost Chord, an first-class collection of belatedly 1960s psychedelia dealing with favorite themes of the time: college consciousness, space travel, spirituality and philosophy.
Travers struggled to come up with ideas for the album cover: "The band wanted me primarily to illustrate the concept of meditation. This was not something that I had much personal experience of and and then my initial thoughts about such an ethereal subject were, unfortunately, insubstantial. I wasn't producing any cohesive visual ideas, with this lack of ideas evident in my first rough designs. In fact, as fourth dimension was getting short I was starting to panic."
Ideas started to class when he was invited to the recording studio to heed to the music the band was creating: "While I was listening to the music, the concept for the cover was really given to me in some sort of subliminal manner. The recording and mixing area of the studio where I was sitting was separated from the area where the ring would play by a large glass window and in this drinking glass I could see several images of myself – ane above the other – well-nigh as if I was ascending upwards into space. Subsequently that, everything just fell into place."
A favorite vocal from this album is Fable of a Mind, written by Ray Thomas as a tribute to Timothy Leary, the man who can fly the astral plane, take y'all trips around the bay and bring you dorsum the same twenty-four hours.
The song is a fantastic showcase of the mellotron by Mike Pinder, who created a sound feel suitable for the subject matter. Pinder commented on that experience: "Listening to music, you enjoy information technology nearly when you're in a meditative state and I call back the drug influence was able to put you into that state instantly."
Starting with their next album On the Threshold of a Dream, the front cover illustration expanded to include the back cover, assuasive the LP buyer to enjoy a large 12"x24" canvas when opening the gate fold. This format connected throughout the rest of the albums covered in this article. The anthology also included a 16-page booklet featuring for the commencement time the song lyrics. The album encompass contains snippets of imagery referenced in the vocal Are Yous Sitting Comfortably? – a fleet of golden galleons on a crystal sea, Merlin casting a spell and Camelot.
The increased focus on packaging did not go easy with Decca, the parent characterization of their more adventurous arm Deram to which the Moody Dejection were signed. Ray Thomas remembers: "They were concerned that it would increment the cost of the sleeve by two pence an album. We were originally told by the head of production that if the album was as good as we said it was, it could be housed in a brown newspaper bag! Eventually, later a great deal of protest we managed to get our way."
Favorite rails: Have You Heard (part 1) / The Voyage / Have You Heard (part 2), the suite that closes the anthology. The band spent more time in the studio perfecting their arts and crafts and it shows on this sequence of songs, including the instrumental The Voyage. Graeme Edge explains: "The album was our one where we actually concentrated on recording and weren't rushing off to do gigs here and there. As nosotros'd only come off bout the music we created combined the knowledge of studio techniques that nosotros had acquired recording In Search of the Lost Chord together with the craft we had learnt through performing on stage every night. That may explain the presence of On The Threshold Of A Dream of more than instrumental parts."
Notice the mellotron drone at the cease of the suite. In the era of the LP information technology was possible to go along that drone into the run-out groove. Depending on your turntable, that caused the drone to continue until the tonearm was lifted, or continue endlessly if your turntable was manual. Nice trick. Good luck trying that with a CD or a digital file.
Before we get to the next anthology, an important effect in the band's career took place later the release of In Search of the Lost Chord – they started their own label and named it 'Threshold'. In their 1969 tour book, producer and label manager Tony Clarke wrote: "We are concentrating upon producing and encouraging the kind of talent and records which take some lasting quality. In that location is an ever increasing market for good progressive music with durable qualities as opposed to discs which are hits today and forgotten tomorrow". In the bound of 1969, the Moody Blues all bought houses in Cobham, Surrey, and established their record visitor 'Threshold' in the village. The three-story office included graphics, advert, fan club personnel and facilities.
Threshold was distributed by Decca Records in the UK and by London Records in the United states of america.
The band'southward offset album on the new label was To Our Children'due south Children's Children, featuring another wonderful artwork by Phil Travers. Graeme Border: "The idea backside the album was to imagine that the tape has been placed under a foundation stone and wouldn't exist removed for a couple of hundred years."
The photograph featured in the inner gatefold is as well interesting. Justin Hayward: "We were depicted gathered around a burn down in a cave with just musical instruments and a tape machine and outside there was nothing. I don't know where we were, simply we were trying to project the thought that we were on a planet that wasn't World, somewhere that was Utopia for united states."
Favorite rail: the album closer Watching and Waiting, also released as a single. The song'due south writer is Justin Hayward, one of the all-time when it comes to crafting great emotional songs: "People where always telling me that I needed to write some other song to equal Nights in White Satin. When I came up with Watching and Waiting I thought it was one of my best songs at the time, and we all felt sure that it would be a sure hit. When the unmarried failed to sell we were all mystified, although with the do good of retrospect I practise see why it didn't capture the public's imagination in the way Nights in White Satin did."
Not a hit, but nonetheless a wonderful song:
We are in the year 1970, when The Moody Blues released the album A Question of Balance. This time the album comprehend was a gatefold that opened top to bottom instead of the standard left to right. Lots of detail in that prototype, starting at the bottom with people sitting at the embankment (notice the placement of the Threshold label on the flag) unaware of the brooding on-goings in the horizon and sky higher up them.
The cover art caused legal issues for the rendering of a photograph Phil Travers plant in a National Geographic issue of British explorer Blashford Snell. The resulting image, of Snell wearing a helmet and pointing a gun at an elephant, came to the attention of its subject (Snell, not the elephant) who wasted no time sending an angry alphabetic character to Decca, demanding immediate removal of that atrocity at once. Travers replaced his portrait with an imaginary person, sans-helmet.
Favorite song: This time the album opener Question, again past Justin Hayward. After a series of albums that saw the band focusing on lengthy studio productions, they realized that the songs became difficult to perform alive on stage with the amount of overdubbing in the studio recordings. With this album they decided to take a simpler approach. Justin Hayward remembers: "With Question, the song, recorded before the anthology, at that place's no double-tracking, simply repeat and a big onetime 12-string guitar. We learned to play that the sometime-fashioned way and just recorded it i Saturday. Information technology was a deliberate attempt to endeavour and pull back to something more real."
The vocal was written with the Vietnam State of war in the background: "I got very angry i night listening to the news about the war in Vietnam. The only reason to take a state of war to me is to practise with starvation … people fighting for their lives. But just for a bit of territory, a bit of state somewhere, was stupid. In my ain naive way, I put a lot of those feelings into Question."
The song is a combination of two dissever tunes sharing the aforementioned fundamental, featuring one of the most energetic 12-string acoustic riffs in the history of stone. It was released as a single and became a hit, reaching No. 2 in the U.K. and No. 21 in the U.S.
In 1971 The Moody Blues released the album Every Expert Boy Deserves Favor. Unlike the comprehend art of their other albums, this fourth dimension the ring had a house idea of what they wanted. Usually they left it to Phil Travers to conceptualize the fine art. The artist talked about the typical process of coming upwardly with the album art: "At the outset coming together nosotros would listen to the soundtrack together and discuss the themes and ideas backside the anthology. It was then left to me to produce a pencil crude which was and then discussed farther. Eventually a consensus would be reached and the painting would brainstorm in earnest. Time ever was of the essence, and many times I was working all twenty-four hour period and all night to meet the printer'southward borderline. But I have to say it was profoundly fulfilling and I thoroughly enjoyed it."
Musicians reading this may remember their early music lessons that used the album's title equally an like shooting fish in a barrel style to remember the musical notes that form the lines of the treble clef: EGBDF (Every Good Male child Deserves Favour).
Justin Hayward summarized the anthology: "It is a kind of a searching, seeking record. It was made at a time of tremendous success for the states, and that brought on all of the feelings of guilt, inadequacy and self-dubiousness that accompany that kind of success. It's a bittersweet record that pointed the direction of the next album which was the full stop."
My favorite vocal on the album is Mike Pinder'south album closer My Vocal, featuring a circuitous, lengthy instrumental. This is one of the grouping'southward highest musical achievements in my opinion, the music sounding like a classical tone poem at times.
In the studio Pinder asked that his vocalisation audio similar being outside the world, looking down on it. Engineer Derek Varnals asked "As if you lot were on a spacewalk in your infinite suit?" Pinder replied "Exactly. Do it so you can hear me breathing, just make it sound really close and claustrophobic." Banana engineer Dave Baker came upwards with the thought of putting a large carton on Pinder's caput, into which Varnals carefully placed a small microphone, making sure it didn't touch either the box or the vocaliser. Varnals: "I then filtered the indicate to make it audio like a transmission from space. We were trying to create something serious, just everyone was laughing hysterically—everyone except Mike, who was the simply person who couldn't see what we were seeing: a quite Monty Python–like image of someone continuing perfectly still with a box covering his head. It eventually ended upwards sounding a flake like Darth Vader, but this was several years before Star Wars was fabricated."
And we come to the last album in this article, also the final in this magnificent run of albums that forms the golden era of the ring. The album is Seventh Sojourn, this time the title conveying a deeper meaning. John Club remembers: "Unwittingly, we called time on ourselves via the title 7th Sojourn. According to the bible, thousand shalt residual on the seventh day. The give-and-take Sojourn means to phone call a halt. We needed to escape from our cocoon and exit and meet ordinary people one time more than to render our lives to something more recognizable as normality."
The album features another wonderful painting by Phil Travers, this one leaning towards a surrealistic style. Travers on the making of the album covers: "It is impossible for me to tell how long it took me to produce the illustrations other than to say that, in virtually cases, I had days rather than weeks to complete them and submit them for approving. Equally for the mode I painted, I used Gouache and some watercolor, and very often I employed an airbrush."
Favorite vocal: New Horizons, some other great ballad similar simply Justin Hayward can write them. If the song has an emotional effect on you, it is not a coincidence. It was an emotional feel for its writer as well: "It was at a really tough fourth dimension in my life. I'd not long lost my begetter. There was quite a lot of death around me, and I was having to cope with that and work out how you handle that and what you do and how you tin get through it. It's very poignant to me."
A new instrument, the Chamberlin, makes an introduction on this album. Developed in the belatedly 1940s, it is considered a precursor to the mellotron for featuring a tape playback mechanism triggered by a musical keyboard. In the late 1960s the instrument was vastly improved with a college-quality playback and one of its adopters was none other than Mike Pinder, who put it to great use on this album. Justin Hayward: "We'd found a great replacement for the mellotron, an American instrument chosen the Chamberlin. It worked on the same principle as the mellotron, merely had much better quality sounds – neat brass, strings and cello and so on. With the mellotron you had to overdub and overlay information technology, adding echo to get it to sound dainty. The Chamberlin was a louder instrument and had a much better audio quality."
Hither information technology is, one of the band'south peaks. An end of an era for the ring, its music, and of course – those wonderful anthology covers.
Some of the interview quotes are taken from the wonderful 120-page hard-dorsum book included with the box set Timeless Flight, an exhaustive career retrospective of The Moody Blues.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you may also like this about the making of a progressive rock iconic album cover:
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Source: https://musicaficionado.blog/2020/11/18/the-moody-blues-album-covers-by-phil-travers/
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