Michael Thomas Pinder was born on 27 December 1941 and passed away on 24 April this year. He was a founding member and the original keyboard player of the Moody Blues. He was the last surviving member of the group’s original lineup, as Justin Hayward and John Lodge were not part of that original lineup, coming on board a few years after the group’s inception. Mike was born in Erdington, Birmingham and as a child he had an interest in rocket ships and outer space which earned him the nickname “Mickey the Moon Boy”. These interests would be recurring themes throughout his career as a song writer.

In his teenage years he was a member of a number of bands including the Checkers, El Riot and the Rebels, and the Krew Kats, and once supported the Beatles. In the early 1960s Pinder worked for 18 months as a development engineer at Streetly Electronics, where he was responsible for testing and quality control. Streetly was involved in the manufacturing of the first models of the Mellotron in the UK. In May 1964 Mike left Streetly Electronics to join Ray Thomas, Denny Laine, Clint Warwick and Graeme Edge in the Moody Blues. After a few albums of material mostly in the R&B vein, Warwick and Laine left and were replaced by Justin Hayward and John Lodge, cementing the classic Moody Blues line up and bringing a change in musical direction.

Mike certainly had an influence on the sound of the Moody Blues, through his songwriting and playing, his voicing of the poems of Graeme Edge (at the end of Nights in White Satin, for example), and with his rich baritone voice, which (along with Ray Thomas) was used very effectively as a counterpoint to the higher pitched vocals of Hayward and Lodge. This is something which I feel they lost after Mike left the band and Ray Thomas retired from performing. But I digress…
Mike’s real contribution to the history of rock music, and especially prog rock, is of course his championing of (and pioneering work with) the Mellotron. The original Mellotron was a cranky instrument prone to many technical problems. But Mike saw something in the instrument, and through his work with Streetly Electronics in the early 60s he had identified several of the shortcomings. He came up with improvements to make the Mellotron sturdier and more durable for transport and touring and changed to an electrical system with a DC motor and transformer, which helped keep the thing in tune! His use of the Mellotron became a staple of the sound of the Moody Blues in their classic period from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s.

But Mike’s influence on music doesn’t end there. In 1967 he told John Lennon that he really must try this Mellotron thing, which Lennon promptly did. The result was the pseudo flute intro to Strawberry Fields, which surely raised the profile of the Mellotron among musicians and the listening public in general. After that, the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones became interested and used the Mellotron to great effect in the song 2000 Light Years From Home. And thanks to Pinder’s continual use of the Mellotron and the increasing popularity of the Moody Blues sound, other musicians were becoming interested in the instrument as a way to take orchestral sounds on the road. Count among them Robert Fripp of King Crimson and Tony Banks of Genesis. The rest, as they say, is history…the Mellotron became a staple of the sound of our favorite sub-genre of rock music, progressive rock, largely thanks to Mike Pinder.

In 2018, Mike was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues.

Mike Pinder at wikipedia.org/

mikepinder.com/