This is the album that finally took the Moody Blues to number one in Britain, eighteen months after Days of Future Passed and four and a half years after Go Now. It is also the one that ends best. The last nine minutes — The Dream, Have You Heard Part I, The Voyage and Have You Heard Part II, running one into the next — are the most sustained stretch of music the band ever recorded, and they are almost entirely Mike Pinder’s. Everything before them is a very good 1969 pop record. Everything from The Dream onwards is why people still argue that these five men invented something.

The short version

On the Threshold of a Dream is the Moody Blues’ fourth album, released on 25 April 1969 on Deram, their last for the label, and in America at the end of May. Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge wrote all of it between them and play everything on it, with Tony Clarke producing and Derek Varnals engineering, both back for their third album in a row. It was cut at Decca’s West Hampstead studio early in 1969. Thirteen tracks, about thirty-seven minutes, several of them under three. It went to number one in Britain in May 1969 — their first — and stayed on the chart for sixty-nine weeks; it reached twenty in America and was eventually certified platinum there. The cover painting is Phil Travers’s, and the original gatefold came with a twelve-page lyric booklet stapled inside.

Not a concept, whatever the title suggests

Everyone has always assumed this is a concept album about dreams, and Hayward has spent decades gently saying it is not. His view is that it was a lovely title that does not actually mean anything — something vaguely to do with enlightenment and the search for it, and beyond that there is no story. Edge points instead at Tony Clarke as the driving force behind the record and at the idea that pulled it along: getting out into space, physically and metaphorically. What the album really is, like the two before it, is a set of songs conceived to be heard in order, in the manner the Beatles had established, with the segues doing the work a narrative would do elsewhere. It also drops the Eastern instrumentation of In Search of the Lost Chord almost entirely. What replaces it is Pinder’s Mellotron and a slight, surprising drift back towards the band’s rhythm and blues origins — Ray Thomas plays harmonica on this record more than he plays flute.

The sound

Lush is the word the reviews always reach for and it is the right one. This is the most comfortable-sounding of the seven: warm, unhurried, generous with harmony, with none of the seams that show on Days of Future Passed and none of the incense of the album before. Edge opens it with a poem run through a computerised voice, and both he and Thomas got hold of an EMS VCS 3, which in early 1969 made them among the first people in Britain to put one on a record. The weakness is the middle. Three or four songs in the centre of the album are pleasant and no more, and the band’s democratic habit — everybody writes, everybody sings — produces a run where nobody is at their best. Then side two gathers itself and the last quarter of an hour is untouchable. The engineering is of its time and every remaster has improved it; the 2008 expanded edition adds nine bonus tracks and, in doing so, wrecks the ending, so the original sequence is the one to hear.

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The songs

In the Beginning is Edge’s two minutes of theatre: a man, a machine and an argument about thinking for yourself, and it sets up an album it then abandons. Lovely to See You follows and is pure pleasure — the sort of song Hayward could apparently write on demand. Dear Diary is Thomas being wry about the end of the world. Send Me No Wine and To Share Our Love are Lodge’s, the first an unexpected stab at country, and So Deep Within You is Pinder’s; none of the three is essential. Never Comes the Day is Hayward’s and one of his three or four finest, an aching thing about a life spent waiting. Lazy Day is Thomas on the forty-hour week. Are You Sitting Comfortably, by Hayward and Thomas together, is as beautiful as anything in the catalogue. And then the close: The Dream, another Edge recitation, into Have You Heard Part I, into The Voyage — Pinder’s instrumental, Mellotron in full flight, taking its cue from Richard Strauss — and out through Have You Heard Part II. Nine minutes, four titles, one piece of music, and the summit of what this band did.

Reception and legacy

Number one at home and sixty-nine weeks on the chart is a fair verdict on how 1969 received it, and it went gold in America on the same day Days of Future Passed did, which tells you the whole catalogue was moving at once by then. Among fans it is the most divisive of the seven: some rate it the peak, some the weakest of the run, and both camps cite the same evidence — the soft middle and the extraordinary ending. It was their last record for Deram. The next one, To Our Children’s Children’s Children, appeared on Threshold, the band’s own label, and they never made another for anybody else. Phil Travers’s cover, all blue and rose and branch, is among the best of the covers he painted for them, which is a high bar.

The verdict

Come here third, after Days of Future Passed and In Search of the Lost Chord, and be patient with the middle. The reward is at the end, and it is the reason this album belongs in any serious account of where progressive rock came from: four tracks that flow into one continuous piece, built on an instrument nobody else was using this way, released in April 1969 — six months before In the Court of the Crimson King. Play Are You Sitting Comfortably, then let the last four tracks run without touching anything. Do not buy the expanded edition until you have heard the album end the way it was meant to.

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