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 was saddened to read in the Guardian of the death of Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues on Armistice Day.
As a drummer he perhaps wasn’t spectacular but he did the job. He was one of the group’s original members (in the days of Denny Laine, Clint Warwick and Go Now) and continued on to the glory days of the late 60s and early 70s. His contribution to the group’s œuvre was not initially musical but spoken word (poetry if you will) starting with the Morning Glory sequence from Days of Future Passed whose first verse,
“Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight,
Red is grey and yellow white,
But we decide which is right,
And which is an illusion,”
is returned to in Late Lament, the spoken coda which comes after the final song, Nights in White Satin. Unfortunately this clip omits the gong right at the end.
The Moody Blues: Late Lament
Graeme Charles Edge: 30/3/1941 – 11/11/2021. So it goes.
Previously all my Moody Blues posts have been of Justin Hayward songs. Neither he nor the writer of this, John Lodge, were original members of the band when it had its number one hit Go Now but replaced Denny Laine and Clint Warwick after a subsequent lack of chart success led to that pair leaving the band.
It was the arrival of Lodge and Hayward though which coincided with a change of direction – to which they made a significant contribution.
This video is a clip from the BBC2 late night programme Colour Me Pop partly introduced to showcase the then new colour TV broadcasts. Note the psychedelic effects. The Moody Blues’ appearance on the show was on 14th September 1968. I either watched it at the time of its first broadcast or on a reasonably quick repeat. Despite doing nothing but singing (or miming) on the clip Ray Thomas still manages to give an extravagant performance.
Though this track was written by Lodge it is Hayward’s guitar solo and the group’s signature vocal sound which stand out. The song quickly became a staple of the group’s live shows, more or less the band’s signature tune.
Ex-Zombie Colin Blunstone had a few solo hits in the 70s.
This was one of them. Unfortunately the video isn’t synched. (Perhaps he was miming in the first place, but it sounds like a live performance.)
Colin Blunstone: Say You Don’t Mind
The song’s writer Denny Laine (he of the early Moody Blues and of Wings) had recorded it in the 60s.
(This is the way my mind works. One word different from last week’s title.)
This single comes from the time when Denny Laine and Clint Warwick had quit The Moody Blues and John Lodge and Justin Hayward had just joined the group. The change signalled a new direction in which they would play only their own songs, develop a more harmony based approach and an “orchestral” sound. Fly Me High was the new line-up’s first single and was something of a transitional song as Mike Pinder had yet to acquire what would become his trademark mellotron.
The hairy guys in the picture below would only appear a few years later. At the time of this recording they were much more clean-cut.
