“Bowie said, ‘For you, this is a piece of cake'”: The story of the greatest synth piece in rock music
If this story teaches you anything, it’s that you should get ahead. You should go out, find some new and niche technology and make yourself a master, quickly. If you do, you might get a call from whoever today’s equivalent of David Bowie is.
Sometimes you have an idea and you’re not quite sure how to make it happen, or even what that idea is made up of. The story comes up time and time again of artists hearing something in their head, and then the struggle becomes trying to figure out what exactly it is. A certain sound, a certain beat – but how do they bring it to life, or what instrument even makes that noise?
In 1969, David Bowie experienced that. As he was crafting ‘Space Oddity’, trying to pull together a song that sits somewhere between futurism and old school nostalgia, he knew he needed a particular sound. But back then, when a lot of the musical technology we have today was either in its infancy or simply did not exist yet, that task was far trickier. It wasn’t that he could just purchase some new plug-in for the production software. Instead, he had to find a particular person.
The particular sound he wanted was a Mellotron. Only invented in 1963, they were still basically brand new, so while Bowie already had his cast of session musicians and knew who to call for certain instruments, he didn’t have a Mellotron guy yet because there weren’t really mellotron guys yet. With an instrument so new still, even the professionals were still figuring it out before they could be competent enough to be called in for sessions.
Rick Wakeman was racing ahead of the pack, though. In 1969, right as Bowie was working on this track, he quit his degree at the Royal College of Music partly because of the Mellotron, as he knew he was hitting onto something new that few could also offer, and even less could offer with his level of competence.
“A few people could play it,” Wakeman said of those days. But the Mellotron in its early form was genuinely a tricky beast, as he explained, “The difficulty people had was keeping it in tune.”
He’d figured it out, though, messing around with the instrument more in another session with Bowie’s collaborator Tony Visconti when he figured out the trick; “The only way I found of keeping it in tune was, instead of playing chords, I’d never play more than two notes at one time.”
It was a perfect storm. Wakeman had made the sound work, Bowie was looking for the sound, and Visconti was the tie that bound them.
“Later, I got a call from Tony: ‘I’m at Trident Studios with Gus Dudgeon and David Bowie. David desperately wants the mellotron to go with the other strings, and nobody can keep the effing thing in tune,’” Wakeman recalled. It’s the call of dreams – David Bowie needs you. Obviously, you go immediately.
“So I walked into Trident and met David for the first time,” Wakeman remembered, and in the singer’s ever-charming fashion, “He said, ‘Gus and Tony say, for you, this is a piece of cake. Ever played a piece of cake before?’”
