Michael Thomas Pinder (27 December 1941 – 24 April 2024) was an English rock musician. He was a founding member and the original keyboard player of the rock group the Moody Blues. In 1978, he left the group following the recording of Octave, their ninth album. Pinder was renowned for his technological contributions, most notably in the emergence and development of the Mellotron in 1960s rock music. In 2018, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues.
Pinder was born in Erdington, Birmingham, on 27 December 1941. His father, Bert, was a coach driver and his mother, Gladys (née Lay), was a barmaid. As a child, he had an affinity for 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 songwriter.
Pinder was a member of several bands in Birmingham in his teenage years, among them the Checkers, who won first prize of £50 in a talent competition. In his first band, rock'n'roll combo El Riot and the Rebels, he played support to the Beatles in 1963 in a show at Tenbury. As a member of the short-lived Krew Kats, Pinder played for two months in Hamburg clubs where the Beatles had played.
Between 1962 and 1963, Pinder worked for 18 months as a development engineer, responsible for testing and quality control, at Streetly Electronics in Streetly, Birmingham, a factory manufacturing the first models of Mellotron in the UK. In May 1964 he left Streetly Electronics to co-found the Moody Blues with Ray Thomas, Denny Laine, Clint Warwick and Graeme Edge.
The band moved to London and signed with Decca Records. Their first single, a cover of Bobby Parker's "Steal Your Heart Away", failed to chart. The breakthrough came with their second single, a cover of Bessie Banks' "Go Now", which became a UK No. 1 and US Top 10 hit in 1965. In the US the band was signed to London Records. The band had further UK hits with a cover of The Drifters' "I Don't Want to Go On Without You" and the Pinder/Laine original "From the Bottom of My Heart". They released their first album, The Magnificent Moodies, in July 1965. Pinder took his first lead vocal on a cover of James Brown's "I Don't Mind". "Bye Bye Bird" from this album was also a hit for the band in France. In the US the album was titled Go Now.
Pinder and Laine began a songwriting partnership, providing most of the band's B-sides from 1964 to 1966, including "You Don't (All The Time)", "And My Baby's Gone", "This Is My House (But Nobody Calls)" and "He Can Win". They progressed to writing A-sides with "From The Bottom of My Heart" and another UK chart hit, "Everyday", in 1965. Two more Pinder/Laine originals, "Boulevard De La Madeline" (1966), and "Life's Not Life" (issued in January 1967 but recorded much earlier in 1966), were recorded for single release before Laine and Warwick left the group in 1966.
A rare, non-UK Pinder/Laine song from this era was "People Gotta Go", released on the France-only EP Boulevard De La Madeline and later included as a bonus track on a CD release of The Magnificent Moodies in 2006. The song is also known as "Send the People Away".
Pinder was partly responsible for the choice of young Swindon guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Justin Hayward to replace Laine. It was Pinder who phoned Hayward and collected him from the railway station. Rod Clarke briefly replaced Warwick as bassist until John Lodge was recruited as bassist/vocalist, completing the 'classic' Moodies line-up.
After trying to continue with R&B material, the band decided to drop covers and record only original songs after an audience member told them their R&B material was rubbish. Hayward's "Fly Me High" was the first single from the revised line-up, released on Decca in early 1967, with Pinder's old-style rocker "Really Haven't Got the Time" as the B-side. A recorded but unreleased Pinder song from this time (1967) was the jazz/blues ballad "Please Think About It". It was included on the Caught Live + 5 double album issued by Decca in 1977.
Pinder acquired a second-hand Mellotron from Streetly Electronics, and after removing all the special effects tapes (train whistles, cock crows, etc.) and doubling the string section tapes, used it on numerous Moody Blues recordings, beginning with their single "Love and Beauty", a flower power song written and sung by Pinder, which was his only A-side after 1966. He introduced the Mellotron to his friend John Lennon, and the Beatles subsequently used one on "Strawberry Fields Forever".
His "Dawn (Is A Feeling)", with lead vocals by Hayward and Pinder singing the bridge section, opened the Days of Future Passed album. Pinder also contributed "The Sunset" and narrated drummer Graeme Edge's opening and closing poems, "Morning Glory" and "Late Lament". Days of Future Passed had been planned as a stereo demonstration album for the Decca Deram label, combining rock and orchestral music. It sold more than a million copies in the US.
Pinder, Moody Blues recording engineer Derek Varnals and long-time producer Tony Clarke (a Decca staff producer assigned to them from "Fly Me High" onwards), devised an innovative way of playing and recording the unwieldy Mellotron to make its sound flow in symphonic waves, rather than with the instrument's usual sharp cutoff. This symphonic sound provided the basis of the musical style of the band's seven major albums between 1967 and 1972.
Pinder was one of the first musicians to use the Mellotron in live performance, and he had to rely on the mechanical skills he had gained from his time as an engineer with Streetly Electronics to keep the instrument functioning. In the band's first US concert, the back of the Mellotron fell open and all of the tape strips fell out. Pinder got the instrument back into working order in 20 minutes while the lighting crew entertained the audience by projecting cartoons.
On Moody Blues recordings from 1967 onwards, in addition to the mellotron, organ and piano, Pinder played harpsichord, Moog synthesizer, various other keyboards, as well as autoharp, tanpura (tambura), cello, bass, acoustic and electric guitars, and percussion including tabla and tambourine. (Hayward often boasted that his bandmate was the best tambourine player in the world.) He also sang vocal harmonies and lead vocals from 1964 to 1978 and was the group's main musical arranger up to 1978. The 1969 concert on the Caught Live + 5 album and the Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 DVD show Pinder and Thomas acting as the group's onstage spokesmen.
Pinder wrote and sang several of the band's more progressive, even mystic, numbers, including "The Best Way to Travel" and "Om" (both from 1968's album In Search of the Lost Chord on Deram Records), plus the innovative symphonic rock piece "Have You Heard/The Voyage/Have You Heard (part two)" which concluded their 1969 album On the Threshold of a Dream. Parts of this track later featured on the Loving Awareness jingles on Radio Caroline during the 1970s. Pinder also continued to the narrating of Edge's poems, notably "The Word" (1968); "In The Beginning" (with Edge and Hayward) and "The Dream" (both 1969); and "The Balance" (1970).
On Edge's song "Higher And Higher" (1969), Pinder's Mellotron simulated the sound of a rocket blasting off to open the To Our Children's Children's Children album, for which he wrote and sang "Sun is Still Shining". He also sang lead vocals on a rare co-written song with John Lodge, "Out and In". Pinder's Mellotron was prominent on tracks such as Edge's instrumental "Beyond" and the Hayward–Thomas closing track "Watching And Waiting".
Pinder's earlier non-album song "A Simple Game" (1968), for which he won an Ivor Novello Award, was used as the B-side of the group's UK hit single "Ride My See-Saw" from In Search of the Lost Chord. This song and Pinder's "So Deep Within You" from On The Threshold of A Dream (1969) were covered by The Four Tops in the early seventies.
On 12 October 1968, the Moody Blues cut a version of "A Simple Game" featuring Hayward on lead vocal, considering the song as a potential UK single, but this recording was not issued and the version sung by Pinder was used instead. The rare 'Hayward' version appeared as a bonus track on the remastered CD version of In Search of the Lost Chord in 2006. In 1969 the Moody Blues established their own record company, Threshold Records, and in 1974 included the song on a compilation double album, This is the Moody Blues, with the title "Simple Game".