Who played on the original mellotron tapes?

[Johnny Kidd Fan Club]

George Chisholm played a lot of the brass loops apparently. He was well known for appearing in The Goon Show from "the musicians pit".
Maybe that's a bit of him on We Love You - is that a mixed brass stop Mr Jones is using while John and Paul wail away.

[Johnny Kidd Fan Club]

Here's some more Mtron stuff. Many apologies to the writers - this is pilfered from all over the place in true pirate fashion but I did mean to include notes as to sources but forgot.
Some was from an article by Fan Club member John Pickford who writes for a few music tech mags...

"The music sessions for Mellotrons were recorded by the Eric Robinson Organisation at IBC Studios, 35 Portland Place in London England. Mellotronics had offices there and the recordings were made using a customized 9 into 3 recording desk built by IBC's Denis King. Magician David Nixon partly funded it. Eric Robinson Organisation owned IBC Studios. Eric was leader of the Eric Robinson Orchestra and many of the recordings may have utilised his orchestra members.

The master tapes for the Mellotron were recorded at IBC studios in London by Allen Stagg and Glyn Johns.

Another factor in the Mellotron's sound is that the individual notes were recorded in isolation. For a musician accustomed to playing in an orchestral setting, this was unusual, and meant that they had nothing against which to intonate. Noted cellist Reginald Kirby refused to downtune his cello to cover the lower range of the Mellotron, and so the bottom notes are actually performed on a double bass. According to Mellotron author Nick Awde, one note of the string sounds contains the sound of a chair being scraped in the background.

Ex- Ted Heath pianist Frank Horrox played on various titles of mine - most notably my film score for 'On the Buses' -and I do recall Frank recording the
'sweet' piano fills for the Mellotron MK11 in the early sixties.

The Latin rhythms were rendered by the boys from the Edmundo Ross orchestra and the violin solo voice was scraped into shape by David McCallum who had a Stradivarious. His son, also of the same name, became well known on a TV series Man From Uncle.

The fiddle sounds were recorded singley and then as a duo and then overlaid as if there were three violins playing in unison.

The Hammond organ voice was produced from a Lowrey actually.

The string fills were arranged by Arthur Wilkinson whe went on to do his famous orchestral arrangements of Beatles hits later in the decade.

Bill Franson as you may know provided the 'Yeah' on the rag-time tape."


It appears that the Fabs may have seen the mellotron when producing the Silkie at IBC on 9 August 65 (?). John apparently ordered one which arrived a week later (16 Aug 65 ?). They were also good buddies with The Moody Blues and Moody Mike Pinder was a key part of the mellotron development team and quite possibly had a part in persuading John to take a look / buy one.
still don't know who played the flute though.
David McCallum crops up elsewhere in Beatle history.

[Lord Reith]

Wow, this is great info. thanks!

the violin solo voice was scraped into shape by David McCallum who had a Stradivarious. His son, also of the same name, became well known on a TV series Man From Uncle.

And he's also the "Johnny" in Violent Playground where John said he got the "where are we going Johnny?" thing from (not The Wild One as George thought).