Permanent Spring

In June 1969 David Bowie recorded Space Oddity at Trident in Soho. The studio owned a Mellotron the engineers had stopped using because it would not stay in tune, and the session got Rick Wakeman, twenty years old, nine pounds a session, who had made himself useful around London by learning to keep the instrument in line. He played the part in one take. The single came out five days before Apollo 11 left the ground, and the BBC played it over its coverage of the landing, nobody having listened too closely to how things end for Major Tom. A Mellotron is a cabinet of recordings. Under every key lies a strip of magnetic tape holding a real player sounding that one note; pressing the key runs the strip across a playback head, and releasing it lets a spring haul the tape back to its start. The strip is eight seconds long, so no note can outlast it. And the pitch never quite holds: the motors drift with the temperature, the speed sags when the mains sag. The unstable tuning was part of the appeal. An orchestra that wavers is an orchestra remembered. The flute line that opens Strawberry Fields Forever is a Mellotron, played by Paul McCartney; who played the flute inside the tape has never been established. The record is two performances in different keys and tempos, joined at the sixtieth second because Lennon liked the beginning of one and the end of the other, and the second half runs slowed, so that most of the song hangs a little below true pitch. King Crimson took the machine further out. In the Court of the Crimson King, made in about ten days in the summer of 1969, stacks the Mellotron's strings through generations of tape until they stand up like a wall, and on tour the wall moved: a strong downbeat on the opening chord of the title song could drag the D major strings down toward D flat. Robert Fripp settled the matter in a liner note: tuning a Mellotron doesn't. The sleeve carries no lettering, no band name, no title. A face fills it edge to edge, and the mouth is open. The face was painted by Barry Godber, a friend of the band's lyricist, who had left Chelsea School of Art and worked as a computer programmer. He listened to the demo tapes and brought back two faces in watercolour: outside the screaming one, painted from his own reflection in a shaving mirror, and inside the gatefold a second face, smiling, the Crimson King. He died in February 1970, four months after the album's release, aged twenty-four. His trade in those years ran on paper and tape. A programmer wrote in pencil on coding sheets, shaping each zero so it could never be read as the letter O; rooms of women punched the sheets onto cards; and around it all turned the half-inch reels, spooling forward and back, the image the cinema reached for whenever it needed to show a computer thinking. Godber spent his working hours minding one kind of magnetic tape and painted his one album cover for a band whose orchestra lived on another. The band's biographer set the screaming face beside William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar: the king of Babylon on all fours, naked, eyes wide, hair grown to feathers and nails to claws, grown mad, in the words of Blake's biographer, with unbelief. In the weeks after the eleventh of September, MTV kept returning to a Ryan Adams song called New York, New York, filmed four days before the attacks under the Brooklyn Bridge, the towers standing behind him across the river. The album it opened, Gold, was to have been released on the eleventh itself, and was pushed back. Music recorded well before the attacks was suddenly heard as being about them. Hell, I still love you, New York, ran the refrain, and the city took the song for its own. Adams had written it about heartbreak; the New York he still loved was a girl. In September 2009 Kanye West took the microphone from a nineteen-year-old singer at an awards ceremony, and for a season he was the most disliked man in American entertainment. The president of the United States called him a jackass. West removed himself to Hawaii. The single that announced his return was called Power, with the voice of the Schizoid Man running underneath the boasting, and its video is one slow pull backwards, marble columns, a sword hanging over the singer's head, an empire, its maker said, on the brink of collapse from its own excess. The king of Babylon had been there first. It is in the fourth chapter of Daniel: Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty? While the word was in the king's mouth a voice fell from heaven, and the same hour he was driven from men; he ate grass as oxen, his hairs grew like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws. Le Mellotron is a bar on the rue Beaurepaire in Paris, between République and the canal, with a radio station inside it. The booth stands against the bar with a red neon that says "On air". I was there on a winter evening in 2018 with friends, a crew called Printemps Permanent. I hear in the opening track the wavering sound of Bowie and King Crimson, and the Beach Boys. I Just Wasn't Made for These Times.