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I knew what the mellotron sound was from an early age. It was all over the Moody Blues music, King Crimson, Yes, Bowie – a lot of the bands I liked when I was in high school. But the cult of mellotron worshipers?

I first got a glimpse of that when I was writing a book (New Sounds: A Listener’s Guide to New Music, now out of print) and interviewing musicians of various types. A New Age composer named Don Slepian had a piece of music with what sounded like a flute. Knowing him to be a synthesizer player, I asked him if he had used a real flutist for the piece. “That’s an almost philosophical question,” he replied. “It’s a mellotron. There was a real flutist playing originally, but now it’s transposed in time.”

“Transposed in time…” No wonder people didn’t know what to make of this instrument, and freaked out about the possibility of mellotrons and similar keyboards putting orchestral musicians out of work.

Of course, it didn’t put musicians out of work. The Moody Blues, perhaps the leading mellotron band of the late 60s/early 70s, proved that by working with the London Symphony Orchestra. When you need that orchestral sound, sometimes you just have to have a real orchestra. A mellotron, because it’s made of taped sounds, will soon begin to show the signs of tape use – a warble here, a hissy patch there – and those become part of the instrument’s sound. Soon it doesn’t sound like an orchestra. It sounds like a mellotron – a sound distinctive enough that even my untrained ears could differentiate the two when I was in high school.