The Moody Blues were in Decca’s West Hampstead studio in July 1969 when men landed on the Moon, and the album they were making turned into a response to it. Graeme Edge has described the idea as a time capsule: everything the five of them thought and felt about being alive in that particular summer, sealed up and addressed to people not yet born. Mike Pinder put it better still — they were building a rocket for everyone who wanted to go and could not, one you boarded by lying on the carpet with the stereo turned up. It is the most elaborate record they ever made, and they could barely play a note of it on stage.

The short version

To Our Children’s Children’s Children is the Moody Blues’ fifth album, released in November 1969, and the first record on Threshold, the label they had just founded and named after the album before it. Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge all write; Tony Clarke produces; Derek Varnals engineers, as on the previous two. It was cut at Decca Studio One in West Hampstead across May, June and July, with Candle of Life done at Wessex in late June, overdubs through August and the final mix in September, all on Decca’s new eight-track machine. Thirteen tracks. It reached number two in Britain and fourteen in America, and went gold there eventually — more slowly than anything else from their psychedelic years.

Threshold, and a meeting with Mick Jagger

The label came first and shaped everything else. Apple was the precedent, as Hayward has said: the Beatles led and everyone followed. The band wanted an artists’ workshop, and Decca were willing — they gave the Moodies studio time and eventually an actual studio. There was even a meeting with Mick Jagger about starting a label jointly; in the end the Stones and the Moody Blues each got their own imprint inside Decca. What Threshold bought them was control of their masters and their sleeves, which Hayward says was the whole point, plus the freedom to work without a commercial clock running. Others followed them onto the label — Trapeze, whose 1970 debut John Lodge produced, Providence, the singer-songwriter Nicky James. And having bought themselves unlimited studio time, the band used every minute of it, layering overdub on overdub until they had made something no five people could reproduce in a hall. That bill came due immediately, and A Question of Balance is what paying it sounded like.

The sound

The densest thing in the catalogue. Pinder’s Mellotron is on every track except Hayward’s two solo acoustic miniatures, and around it sit a seven-foot harp, a bass flute, an EMS VCS 3, celesta, Hammond, double bass and stereo effects that pan across your head. If anyone deserves credit for showing what a Mellotron could do in a rock band, it is Pinder, and this is the record that proves it. The production stands comparison with anything from 1969, In the Court of the Crimson King included, and the atmosphere is arguably better than any of them. The cost is focus. The mix is crowded, guitars and vocals sometimes disappear under the weight, and the record floats where the previous two walked. It is also their most introspective and least cheerful album: for a work about the Moon landing, it dwells a great deal on time passing, on distance, and on being a long way from home.

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The songs

Higher and Higher launches the album on a rocket and one of Edge’s poems, and it is noisy, silly and completely irresistible. The Eyes of a Child arrives in two parts with Ray Thomas’s Floating between them: Lodge’s idea was that you would miss everything up there if you took preconceptions with you, and that seeing it as a child would is the only way — Pinder plays a golden harp, Thomas a bass flute, and it is lovely. Floating was misheard in America, whose radio programmers found a reference in it that was never there; it is a song about family holidays in space. I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Hundred is Hayward alone with a guitar for a minute. Beyond is Edge’s instrumental and a genuine surprise. Out and In is Pinder at his most cavernous. Gypsy (Of a Strange and Distant Time) is the rocker and became the show opener. Eternity Road is Thomas’s, and its opening comes from his own childhood: three phrases his grandmother and the neighbours would call to each other in the air raid shelter when the bombers came over. Candle of Life is the warmest thing here, Sun Is Still Shining turns east, and Watching and Waiting closes the record as a wistful fairytale that has nothing to do with space and is the best song on the album.

Reception and legacy

Number two at home, fourteen in America, and the single — Watching and Waiting, of all things — did not chart at all, which remains one of the odder injustices in their story. It sold the least of the psychedelic albums and took the longest to go gold. And then, in 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 took it with them and listened to it in space, which is the single most Moody Blues fact in existence and closes the circle the record opened. The band toured it as the Threshold Roadshow, and the Royal Albert Hall show of 12 December 1969 was recorded properly and has been reissued repeatedly since. Among fans this is the great divider of the seven: for a large minority it is the peak of everything the band did, dense and beautiful and unrepeatable; for others it is the moment the songs went out of focus. Both sides are hearing the same overdubs.

The verdict

Headphones, and no distractions. This is the least casual album the Moody Blues made and it gives up nothing to background listening; the detail is the point, and a good remaster with the volume up rewards you the way few records from 1969 do. Start with Higher and Higher for the launch, then let side one run to Beyond without stopping. Then Watching and Waiting, twice. If it lands, this may become your favourite of the seven and you will find company. If it does not, go to A Question of Balance, which is the same band having decided that being playable mattered more than being magnificent.

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