Having made their name with an orchestra, the Moody Blues sacked it. There is no London Festival Orchestra on their third album and no session player of any kind: every note, beat and word is performed by five men who between them picked up something like thirty-three instruments, a good number of which they were learning as the tape rolled. Sitar, tabla, cello, harpsichord, oboe, autoharp, timpani, soprano saxophone, and above it all Mike Pinder’s Mellotron doing the work an orchestra had done a year earlier. Tony Clarke, writing the sleeve notes, called them the smallest symphony orchestra in the world. He was not wrong.

The short version

In Search of the Lost Chord is the Moody Blues’ third album, released on 26 July 1968 by Deram, recorded at Decca’s London studios between January and June that year, produced by Tony Clarke and engineered by Derek Varnals. The line-up is the classic five: Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge, and the credits list runs to three or more instruments each. Twelve tracks, about forty-two minutes, including two spoken pieces written and delivered by Edge. It reached number five in Britain and 23 on the Billboard 200. The sleeve is by Philip Travers, the band’s own artist, and it is one of his best. Ride My See-Saw was the single and has been in the live set more or less ever since.

No orchestra, thirty-three instruments

Days of Future Passed had been an accident of Decca’s marketing department, and it had made the band famous for something they could not repeat: you cannot take the London Festival Orchestra on the road. So they went the other way and became a studio band in the manner of the Beatles, buying and borrowing whatever was lying around and working out how to play it. Pinder was the key. He had worked at the firm that built the Mellotron before joining the group, and is generally credited with putting the instrument in front of Lennon and McCartney, who promptly used it on Strawberry Fields Forever; here he uses it not as an orchestral substitute but as the connective tissue of the whole record. Clarke’s sleeve notes describe a studio at half past four in the morning, floor covered in instruments, the band shouting at each other to come and listen. That is exactly what the album sounds like, and 1968 sounds like it too: this is the record on which the Moody Blues went looking for enlightenment, and if the answers are thin the searching is sincere.

The sound

Warmer and stranger than the album before it, and considerably less polished. Without the orchestra the songs breathe: flutes and acoustic guitars sit at the front, the Mellotron swells behind them, and Eastern instruments turn up throughout without ever quite becoming a costume. Clarke’s production is the thing that holds it together, because he keeps the simple parts simple and lets the elaborate ones be elaborate, which is why the record does not collapse into the fog that swallowed a lot of 1968. The lyrics are the sticking point, then and now. They reach for mysticism and philosophy and sometimes land on the phrasing you would expect from five men in their twenties reading about Eastern thought for the first time. But the melodies are strong enough to carry it, and the vocal harmonies — the thing nobody else has ever quite copied — do the rest.

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The songs

Departure is forty-eight seconds of Edge’s recitation, rising and accelerating into chaos, and it slams straight into Ride My See-Saw. That pairing is one of the two or three genuinely indelible moments in the catalogue: Lodge’s song is the hardest thing they had recorded and the opening still works fifty-odd years on. Dr. Livingstone, I Presume is Thomas being very English and very silly, and it is a relief in context. House of Four Doors is Lodge’s two-part suite, walking the listener through European music one creaking door at a time — flute and acoustic, then harpsichord and cello, then piano, then out. What lies behind the last door is Legend of a Mind, Thomas’s six minutes about Timothy Leary, a lysergic tour of the counterculture’s favourite professor, whose famous opening line announces his death some twenty-eight years prematurely. Its Mellotron middle section is arguably the finest use anyone ever made of the instrument. Voices in the Sky is Hayward at his prettiest, The Best Way to Travel is Pinder’s trip, The Actor is quietly the best song here, and Om closes the record with Pinder, a mantra and a hummed reprise of Ride My See-Saw that only reveals itself on the third listen.

Reception and legacy

It sold well without troubling the top of the chart and it has aged into something more interesting than its numbers suggest. For a lot of listeners it is the entry point that Days of Future Passed is not: no orchestra, no seams, and a band who sound like they are enjoying themselves rather than fulfilling a brief. The purists’ argument against it — that it is psychedelic pop rather than progressive rock, that the mysticism is period furniture, that the technical ambition never matches the conceptual one — is fair on every count and misses what it is for. The next album, To Our Children’s Children’s Children, took the same approach into space and was dedicated to Apollo 11; after that came the retrenchment of A Question of Balance. Within the seven, this is the adventurous one.

The verdict

A very good place to start, possibly the best. Days of Future Passed is the historical landmark and A Question of Balance is the tighter record, but this is the one that shows you what the Moody Blues actually were once they stopped borrowing an orchestra: five men, a Mellotron and a room full of instruments they barely knew how to play. Start with Departure and Ride My See-Saw back to back, at volume. Then Legend of a Mind, all six minutes. If the mysticism makes you wince, that is fine — wince and keep going, because the melodies underneath it are the best of their decade.

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