I discovered on Saturday that John Lodge, bassist, vocalist and songwriter of The Moody Blues has died.

Long-standing readers of the blog will know the Moodies were my favourite 1960s band.

This was the band’s second incarnation though, after Denny Laine and Clint Warwick had left and Lodge and Justin Hayward become members. This presaged a switch from playing blues and R&B to the more prog rock sound with which the band is now principally associated. Indeed the Days of Future Passed LP could be claimed to have started off the prog boom.

Lodge was a major contributor in a song-writing sense, penning at least two songs on each of the band’s LPs and of course even  more to Blue Jays, his collaboration with Hayward at the beginning of the brief hiatus when the Moodies took a collective break  in the mid 1970s. I actually saw the pair play in Glasgow on the Blue Jays tour which promoted the album and the subsequent Hayward written single Blue Guitar.

Given the prog emphasis above it might seem perverse that I’ve chosen this song, but it shows that the Moodies could rock with the best of them and it features Lodge’s bass heavily.

The Moody Blues: I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)

John Charles Lodge: 20/7/1943 – 10/10/2025. So it goes.

After their next LP, Seventh Sojourn, which spawned two singles in Isn’t Life Strange and I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band) both of which – unlike The Story in Your Eyes – troubled the charts, the Moody Blues broke up.

During the five years they spent apart most of them released solo LPs but the most successful venture was a collaboration between Justin Hayward and John Lodge which produced the LP Blue Jays but most memorably the song Blue Guitar, a no 8 hit in the UK. According to the Wiki article above Hayward actually recorded this with 10cc rather than Lodge but nevertheless the two took “Blue Jays” on the road mainly – as I recall Lodge introducing the track on stage – because of Blue Guitar.

Here they are performing it (ie miming) on Supersonic.

Justin Hayward and John Lodge: Blue Guitar