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.

I didn’t buy the Moodies’ next single, Tuesday Afternoon, a song which – like Nights In White Satin – appeared also on the LP Days of Future Passed but I remember hearing it on the radio and thinking it was almost as good. It seems the single version was edited down to a ludicrous 2 minutes 16 seconds – missing out the repeat of the opening riff and “Tuesday Afternoon” chorus.

This is how it appeared on the LP and so contains the orchestral afterpiece tagged on by conductor Peter Knight. Knight’s “classical music” interludes linked all the songs on the LP – supposedly to demonstrate the record label Deram’s new “Deramic Sound System.” The story that the band were asked to record an album based on Dvorak’s New World symphony but instead recorded their own songs without the label’s knowledge has been disputed.

The Moody Blues: Tuesday Afternoon

Edited (7/6/14) to add:- Those orchestral interludes and the fact that it was a concept album probably make Days of Future Passed one of the first prog rock albums.