“This man said, ‘I’ve brought my wife for a night out and you’re the worst band I’ve seen in my life. You’re crap.’” How the Moody Blues finally came good with Days Of Future Passed
In 1967, a new line-up of The Moody Blues embraced their symphonic influences to create a groundbreaking album that not only pushed them in a new musical direction but also brought about the birth of progressive rock.
Having relocated to London, by the end of ’65 the band played the NME Poll Winners concert to 10,000 excitable youngsters and supported The Beatles on their December UK tour. Less than a year on, their management company had folded and disappeared with all the Go Now! royalties and record advance money – leaving the band in debt to Decca – and follow-up singles weren’t connecting so well with the media or the audience. The Moodies definitely had the Blues – and even being managed (very briefly) by Brian Epstein wasn’t making much of a difference.
Warwick was the first to make a change, leaving the group in July to spend more time with his wife and young kid. Next was Laine, in September. Prompted by the Decca debt that they’d inherited and the sense that they should soldier on, Pinder, Thomas and Edge immediately sought two replacements. The first was easily found: Thomas’ friend John Lodge, a young bassist who had fleetingly been in the earliest Moodies line-up, formed by himself, Pinder and Thomas from the ashes of Thomas’ Mexican-suited Brumbeat rock’n’rollers El Riot And The Rebels. Lodge – nicknamed Rocker because of his fast playing and love of boogie-woogie – left the band to finish a course in engineering with a view to going into car design. “They’d said, ‘We’re going to London, do you want to come with us?’” recalls Lodge, speaking from his current home in the US. “But I wanted to complete my studies, so I said no. Eighteen months later Ray called me up and said, ‘Rocker, have you finished your course?’ and I said yes. He then said, ‘Denny’s left the band, could you come and join us? Get down to London straight away and bring your songs!’ So I went down, re-met Graeme, who I knew from Gerry Levene And The Avengers, and that was the start of something new…”
Next they needed a lead guitarist, and possibly a lead vocalist too. One night Thomas was in Soho club the Bag O’ Nails with Eric Burdon, who was recruiting for a new Animals line-up. Burdon put a stack of rejected applications Thomas’ way, and a few stood out. But one in particular made an impression – a younger musician, Swindon-born songwriter and guitarist Justin Hayward.
Since his mid-teens, Hayward had worked with rock’n’roll star Marty Wilde and his wife Joyce in The Wilde Three, and he was published and managed as a solo act by Lonnie Donegan. His style came more from folk clubs and a love of The Everly Brothers; the 19-year-old had a country- tinged troubadour sensibility. Hayward had been based in Blackheath, south London, but without a steady income had part-time moved back home.
“I’d fired off a demo and a letter to Eric Burdon, because I knew his secretary,” Hayward tells us over Zoom from a tour break in France. “I didn’t expect to hear back, it was just on the off-chance. But then I was in a music shop in Swindon, Duck Son & Pinker’s, and the guy behind the counter said, ‘This bloke says he’s from The Moody Blues and wants to talk to you.’ And it was Mike Pinder. I said, ‘How did you find me?’ And he said, ‘Your phone number’s on the letter you sent to Eric. I spoke to your mum and she said you’d be down here.’”
Pinder – who was sadly unavailable to talk with Prog for this feature – asked Hayward to come and meet him in London. Hayward, of course, knew the group from the success of Go Now! but their activities had dropped off his radar. “Mike, Graeme and Ray wanted to stay together,” Hayward says. “Mike was the most important musically, and he wanted to move it forward. I really liked him and he really liked me.”
Collecting Hayward by car to take him to the band’s shared pad in Esher, Surrey, Pinder had a 7” record player in the vehicle and put on Hayward’s debut single for Pye, a hyperactive folk-skiffle number called London Is Behind Me. “He’s the one for us,” Pinder thought – and later, Edge, Thomas and Lodge agreed, recognising their own material had started taking tentative steps in a less R&B/beat direction with tracks such as the dramatic From The Bottom Of My Heart and the more whimsical Boulevard De La Madeleine. Hayward also had a Vox AC30 amp, “which was more than they had,” he laughs.
“When the five of us were together at last, I think the other three guys were happy that me and Lodgy were there,” Hayward says. “We looked quite nice, a couple of pretty boys and some serious blokes. It was fun and funny. We had a lot of laughs.”
It’s at this time that another enormous and defining change occurred in the group: the introduction of the Mellotron. A piano-style musical computer where pre-recorded tape loops were fixed to each key, it was being used in social clubs and cabarets across the UK to give any venue access to a pantheon of lead instrument sounds (on the right side of the board) and backing, rhythm tracks (on the left) – effectively, the one-man band idea turned up to 1,000, and the birth of sampler keyboards.
Mellotrons were the UK version of the portable analogue-sampler Chamberlin organ, developed by US inventor Harry Chamberlin in the 50s. They were bulky, weighed a ton and were very expensive – around £1,000 when they launched in 1962 (nearly £20k today). Made by Streetly Electronics in Birmingham, Mike Pinder had worked as a tester in the factory for 18 months. Pinder hada B3 Hammond, the standard keyboard for many blues and beat bands at the time, but seeing musicians such as pioneering blues organist Graham Bond add the new instrument to his collection, and having experienced the range of sounds you could access –recorded by then-IBC Studio engineers Glyn Johns and Allen Stagg – he really wanted a Mellotron.