To Our Children's Children's Children

The album was the first released on the group's newly formed Threshold record label, which was named after the band's previous album from the same year, On the Threshold of a Dream. It was inspired by the 1969 Moon landing. Drummer Graeme Edge remembers, "It was a very exciting time. Man had just gone to the moon and we thought of the album as a sort of time capsule - all our thoughts and feelings about living in such an epoch-making era." Keyboardist Mike Pinder adds, "To me, we were creating a rocket for every person who wants to go to the moon but couldn't, and would get to do so with the earphones on or the stereo turned up, lying on their backs on the carpet." ==Writing==

Like the group's three previous albums, ''To Our Children's Children's Children is a concept album, one with a common theme that ties the songs together. For Children'', the band was inspired by the space race and the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, which occurred during the album's sessions. Keyboardist Mike Pinder remembers, "We were watching man going to the moon. In the studio, we were watching it. I remember Neil Armstrong setting down. We weren't in the studio that night but I remember it was like 4 A.M. in the morning and I was in my apartment in London. I remember that part of it. But the album was all around the moon mission and man's venturing into space. This was the beginning of maybe discovering man's true legacy." Hayward remembers producer Tony Clarke being a driving force behind the concept: "''To Our Children's Children's Children''...was really driven by Tony Clarke, our producer. It was something that he really wanted to do, and I'm glad that we were able to share that with him." He elaborates, "He had a bee in his bonnet about doing an album about space; he was an astronomer and followed the stars. He built this dome on the top of his house with big telescopes, and really used to get quite boring about it! But it was a baby of his, and his idea was really to try and coincide releasing an album - in our usual kind of pretentious way - with man landing on the moon. I'd already written a song called 'Watching and Waiting,' which was done on this old pipe organ, and then, to balance that, I had the idea for 'Gypsy.' Clarke confirms, "I very much wanted us to make a space album, and at the time I was very immersed in that sort of thing. Now that was my frame of mind, and I rather pushed it in that direction, so everybody capitulated." The album has the additional theme of the passage of time. Drummer Graeme Edge explains, "''To Our Children's Children'' was kind of buried under stone to be dug up in 200 years with a time capsule kind of feeling." He continues, "The idea behind the album was to imagine that the record had been placed under a foundation stone and wouldn't be removed for a couple of hundred years." The album, like its predecessors, begins with a Graeme Edge poem "Higher and Higher", recited by Mike Pinder. The spoken word introduction is set to a musical simulation of the sound of the Saturn V rocket blasting off. The band had intended to begin the album with the actual recorded sound of the moon mission rocket launching, and contacted NASA who provided the group with tapes. The sound proved unsatisfactory, inspiring the group to record their own interpretation on Mellotron and rock instruments. Lodge remembers, "We actually got NASA to send over a recording of real rocket taking off, but when we listened to the tape it sounded like a damp squib! We had to set about creating our own rocket sound which ended up sounding more authentic." Flautist Ray Thomas' whimsical "Floating" imagines a low-gravity stroll on the moon The song uses the Mellotron and stereo panning to create otherworldly effects in order to convey the experience of observing the gas giants while traveling past, taking inspiration from The Planets by Gustav Holst. "Out and In" draws from Pinder's lifelong fascination with space and the night sky. He explains, "It is still one of my favorite songs. This was written 'within me', and draws from the experiences I had as a kid looking up into the night sky." The songs on side two explore the emotion of space travel, and coming to terms with the isolation and loss of personal connection that a long voyage alone would present. It opens with the rocker "Gypsy (Of a Strange and Distant Time)", which would become the group's show opener in 1969 and 1970. Ray Thomas' "Eternity Road" opens with the words "Hark, listen, here he comes." In an interview, he explains that the phrases were inspired by his early child experiences in an air raid shelter during World War II: "I was born in 1941 and during the war I was taken down the air raid shelter. There was our family and two other families who were our neighbours. Sometimes the Luftwaffe were all over us before even the sirens came off. Every night my grandmother would go 'Hark' and her friend Mrs. Ackland, next-door, would go 'Listen'. Mrs James lived on the other side would then go 'Here he comes'. So they became known as 'Hark', 'Listen' and 'Here he comes'. So that stuck in my head so that's how I started "Eternity Road." the lyrics "Turning, spinning, catherine wheeling / Forever changing, there's no beginning" make reference to a catherine wheel, a type of firework design that spins. The song features flamenco style guitar flourishes during the crescendos. Lodge's emotional "Candle of Life" considers loneliness while advocating compassion. Pinder considers his place in the universe in "Sun Is Still Shining". Pinder explains the song's lyrics "So if you want to play, stay right back on Earth, waiting for rebirth" are intended as a wake up call. One can either wake up and stay centered, or give your attention to worldly distractions. He laments that the latter has prevailed: "It's come to represent the drudgery of the mediocrity in life of our civilization. All of this [technological] greatness has only resulted in the sense of the mundane that prevails." The album closed with its only single, "Watching and Waiting", sung by Hayward and composed by him and Thomas. The group had high hopes for the song's success. Hayward remembers: "People were always telling me that I needed to write another song to equal 'Nights in White Satin'. When I came up with 'Watching and Waiting' I thought it was one of my best songs at the time, and we all felt sure that it would be a certain hit. When the single failed to sell we were all mystified, although with the benefit of hindsight I do see why it didn't capture the public's imagination in the way 'Nights in White Satin' did." Hayward wrote the song prior to the conception of the album's theme, and made modifications to align it with the space travel theme. He remembers, "To tie it in with the theme, I changed it to make it, you know, [about] a being from a lost world. A beautiful, lonely world. I altered it from being just a straight love song, to give it that dimension for the sake of the album. Probably I made it much more obscure than it needed to be, but it still moves me, and I'm not sure that I can explain why. I feel every single word of it, it invokes images within me that I find particularly moving. It does have a spiritual dimension to it, a religious-almost dimension to it." ==Recording==

The album was largely recorded at Decca Studio One in West Hampstead in May, June and July 1969 with additional overdubs in August and final mixing in September 1969. He continues, "I think ''To Our Children's Children's Children'' is the one Moodies album that didn't come across on the radio. It didn't jump; it was soft, it was quiet. Everybody was so delicate with it and handling it with kid gloves. The way it was mastered was quiet, and the way it was transferred to disc was delicate. In the end, it ended up getting a little lost. "Watching and Waiting" — when we heard that song in its studio beauty, we thought, 'This is it! All of those people who had been saying to us for the past 3 or 4 years, 'You'll probably just do another "Nights in White Satin" with it' — no! We had shivers up the spine, and that kind of stuff. But when it came out and you heard it on the radio, you kept saying, 'Turn it up! Turn it up!! Oh no, it's not going to make it.' So it didn't happen." Pinder suggests the band aimed too high with the song: "We hoped that a wide audience would be ready for a song like that. Of course, it didn't do well as a single and that was our disappointment. Yet it was one of our most progressive and intricate songs. It embodied so much of what is good about being a human being and living on this planet in this solar system in this universe. How can I put it? It was just too much quality. It was like a Rolls-Royce that was affordable to everyone, but everyone was programmed into thinking that they could never own a Rolls-Royce." The band remembers the sessions fondly, being intensely creative and also marked by a wonder sense of teamwork. According to Clarke, "The intensity was just tremendous-the camaraderie, the interaction, the second guessing, the fun of it all, and the exploring. I think it shows in the music. I've got happy memories of that album." Pinder adds that the album "still lifts you off the planet. In a sense, it was ahead of its time, as were the moon landings when you look back on them now." ==Album cover==

The album cover, a gate-fold, features artwork by Phil Travers, who created the group's previous two covers. The album cover reflects the album's theme as a lasting record to be discovered centuries later as an artifact. It depicts a cave painting, but with anachronistic elements including an airplane and rifle. The inner sleeve features a picture of the band around a campfire on a distant planet. Hayward explains, "It was the inside of the sleeve that really said something. We were depicted gathered around a fire in a cave with just musical instruments and a tape machine and outside there was nothing. I don't know where we were, but we were trying to project the thought that we were on a planet that wasn't earth, somewhere that was Utopia for us." ==Release==

In 1969, the band established their own label Threshold Records under licence to Decca Records. ''To Our Children's Children's Children'' was the first of their albums to be released on their own label. Lodge remembers the group's motivation for having their own record company: "We wanted to have our own label, where we didn't have to argue about having gate-fold sleeves or inserts our albums. We saw both music and artwork as a complete package and felt that the advertising and promotion should also become part of this package" He continues, "Total artistic control. It set a precedent for exactly what we wanted to do with our music. Everything had to be right. And not just the music, we didn't want anything to look like it was a sham or a hype." Lodge remembers, "It got to the point where we were doing more and more of the things ourselves. Like we began working up our own designs for the packages. And it got more and more us, so we finally went to them and said, 'How about giving us the complete bill, and you just distribute?' and they said yes! We didn't actually fit into any of the labels. The group and Sir Edward collectively thought of having our own label within Decca. In actual fact, Graeme Edge and I had a meeting with Mick Jagger to see if we could start a label together." The Rolling Stones and the Moody Blues both ended up with their own labels within Decca. Hayward remembers that "the precedent was Apple, The Beatles were the leaders and everybody tended to do what they did. Our idea was an artists' workshop because Decca were prepared to give us studio time and in the end they actually gave us a studio. It did give us control over our own masters and sleeves which was what we really wanted." ==Promotion==

The group promoted the album through a series of tours of North America and the United Kingdom. One highlight of the band's "Threshold Roadshow" tour of the UK was a performance on 12 December 1969 at the Royal Albert Hall, which was professionally recorded. The concert was released in 1977 on Caught Live + 5 and again as a stand-alone release in 2023. ==Reception==

''To Our Children's Children's Children'' was critically well-received and sold well, reaching number 2 in the UK Albums Chart and number 14 in the US, their best showing to that date in that country. While the single released from it, "Watching and Waiting", did not do well, "Gypsy (Of a Strange and Distant Time)" became a fan and album oriented rock radio favourite, despite never being released as a single, and remained in the band's concert setlist through the 1970s. The album was mixed and released in both stereo and quadraphonic. The album played a role in ping-pong diplomacy, and was the first album by a western pop group to be played in China during the Mao Zedong era. In April 1971, English table tennis player Trevor Taylor was invited to play in China as part of the diplomatic mission centered around the sport. He purchased a copy of the record in Singapore en route to the tournament in Red China, and had his interpreter play it in public. He remembers, "They weren't sure about it at first; there are only six records over there and they are all political." It was the first time the audience had heard western popular music, with no exposure to Elvis Presley or The Beatles. The album was one of those listened to, on cassette tape, by the crew of Apollo 15 in 1971. ==Track listing==

• Justin Hayward – vocals, guitars, sitar • John Lodge – vocals, bass guitar, harp, cello, acoustic guitar • Ray Thomas – vocals, flute, tambourine, bass flute, oboe • Graeme Edge – drums, percussion • Mike Pinder – vocals, Mellotron, piano, EMS VCS 3, Hammond organ, acoustic guitar, celesta, double bass ==Additional personnel==

Sources: • Producer – Tony Clarke • Engineers – Derek Varnals / Adrian Martins / Robin Thompson • Art – Phil Travers • Photography – David Wedgbury ==Charts==