A DRUM TRIP
Skint, starting from scratch, Brummie beat boomers remade themselves as psychedelic dandies, minds blown by cosmic concepts on a prog-pop flight of fancy. But little did they know just how seriously they would be taken. “They told me I’d been picked to fl
SUNDAY JUNE 25, 1967. IN EMI’S ABBEY Road studios, The Beatles perform their idealistic Summer of Love anthem All You Need Is Love in front of four hundred million TV viewers. Present in the studio alongside the group, orchestra, and the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, are Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Keith Moon, Graham Nash and Marianne Faithfull. Noticeably not present are the band’s recording neighbours from down the road at Decca’s Broadhurst Gardens studios, for The Moody Blues are currently engaged on a fortnight’s cabaret tour of the north of England. “That was soul-destroying,” remembers the band’s drummer, Graeme Edge. “I must have had a giant pair of balls to carry on and not sling in the towel.” No one was happy. In the three years since the band had formed as a dark-blue-suited R&B five-piece in the industrial Birmingham district of Erdington, Edge, along with fellow founder members keyboardist Mike Pinder and
singer/flautist/harmonica player Ray Thomas, had seen their fortunes plummet. First, their singer and frontman, Denny Laine, had quit, then profits from their huge 1965 Number 1 – a cover of Bessie Banks’s Go Now – had magically disappeared. With Thomas’s teenage pal John Lodge recently joined on bass, and young Swindon guitar prodigy Justin Hayward added on vocals, the group were playing the Fiesta Club in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, promoting their new single, Fly Me High, in front of an audience shouting for Go Now. “We were still wearing the blue suits, still doing the R&B act [and] I wasn’t very good at it,” says Hayward today. “Our price had dropped from a hundred pounds to 25 quid, doing gigs for petrol, staying in digs. For a 19-yearold like me it was a bit grim.” That night, a punter popped backstage to have a word. “We thought he wanted an autograph,” remembers John Lodge, “but instead he said, ‘I think you’re the worst band I’ve ever heard.’ He’d said he’d come along with his wife, to enjoy himself, have a sing-along…”
“I remember afterwards, Ray put his arms around me and he blubbed,” says Hayward. “Then I blubbed. It was terrible. We drove on in silence, then someone said, ‘He’s right you know, we are rubbish.’ The next morning we threw away those blue suits and started writing our own material.”
LISTENING TO THE NEWLY REMASTERED REISSUE of The Moody Blues’ third studio album, In Search Of The Lost Chord, it’s startling to imagine how a band who’d been playing R&B covers on the North-east’s chicken-in-abasket circuit some six months earlier could have crafted such lush yearning hymns to psychedelic enlightenment as Voices In The Sky, The Best Way To Travel, and Legend Of A Mind. However, that new sound of the Moodies was, in fact, born mere days after their fateful Stockton encounter, when Mike Pinder had purchased a secondhand mellotron from the Dunlop Tyre Social Club in Solihull. “I jumped at the chance,” says Pin-
der. “I knew the mellotron would create the lush orchestral sounds that I heard as part of the Moodies’ new songs. I knew the capability of the instrument.” Pinder, who’d previously worked for Birmingham’s premier mellotron manufacturers, Mellotronics, from 1963 to ’64, testing out these analogue-tape proto-samplers, had already turned The Beatles on to the instrument’s eerie symphonic sound – as utilised on their February 1967 single Strawberry Fields Forever. Wheeled out in a July 17 recording session, for dreamlike pop chorale A-side Love And Beauty, the instrument captured something of the euphoric, mystical optimism that Hayward and Pinder had been after ever since they’d first dropped acid with Lodge and Edge in Richmond Park that May. “If The Beatles did it, we did it,” explains Hayward. “That was a wonderful day. Myself and Mike were looking for some kind of enlightenment and revelation, whether it be religious or chemical. We were doing it seriously.” “I was sceptical,” says Edge. “The first trip was stupendous. Mind-opening. By the fourth or fifth I just thought, Here we go again. But it did give us an ambition to find that ecstasy from music, which I think was the Moodies’ goal.” Still lumbered with debt, and beholden to Decca for £5,000, the group were enlisted to make an orchestral demonstration record for the label’s new “Deramic” stereo system. To accompany titles like Strings In The Night, Decca’s head of special products Michael Dacre-Barclay wanted a group to work with conductor Peter Knight and the London
Festival Orchestra, on a rock update of Dvorák’s New World Symphony. “Peter came to see us at the 100 Club,” remembers Hayward. “We were in this pub afterwards and he said, ‘Justy, I don’t think you’re going to get this [Dvorák] thing together, do you? I think it’d be better if I did your songs.” Inspired by Sgt. Pepper, the band proposed an album structured as “a day in the life”, with Knight’s lush orchestral arrangements acting as bridges between the Moodies’ tracks. The group already had three songs written that Knight decided to reference in his orchestrations: Another Morning, Dawn Is A Feeling, and a plaintive love song by Hayward called Nights In White Satin. But time was tight. The rest of the songs needed to be recorded within the week. The Moodies asked if they could have the studio 24 hours a day. The label agreed. “That was great,” says Pinder. “Just the five of us, free to immerse ourselves in the muse of creative energy. We found ourselves with that album. I have a vivid memory of playing it for John Lennon, Paul and George. They were blown away.”
THEY WEREN’T THE ONLY ONES. NIGHTS IN White Satin was released as a single on November 10, 1967, with its parent album, Days Of Future Passed, issued the following day. The single reached Number 19 in the UK, selling 20,000 copies a day. The album, meanwhile, went to 27, and follow-up single, Tuesday Afternoon, broke the US Top 30. Yet while the long-player was hailed by some as an artful blend of the pop and symphonic forms, it was dismissed by New York magazine and Rolling Stone as “a ponderous mound of thought-jello” and “an English rock group strangling itself in conceptual goo”. “Then Decca started getting feedback from American radio,” says Hayward, “this stuff is getting played! I think that was the only reason they let us do In Search Of The Lost Chord.” As with Days Of Future Passed, the group first decided on the album’s conceptual theme. They settled on the meaning of life, and the consciousness-expanding powers of music around the world, inspired by an old 1947 Jimmy Durante song, I’m The Guy Who Found The Lost Chord – an unlikely chart hit in 1964. “Mike would play that on the pub piano,” says Hayward. “We knew the silliness of this, as well as the seriousness.” Another, more sincere, influence was the group’s Transcendental Meditation sessions at Belgravia’s Eaton Square. “I think George Harrison was funding those,” adds Hayward. “We didn’t have enough money to meet with the Maharishi, like The Beatles, but it was the same organisation. Four of us did the training, the same four [who’d tried acid]. It was lovely.” “These [new] songs were about meditation, the status of the world, the journey out and in,” explains Mike Pinder. “They had a more contemplative, introspective side.” Sessions began at Decca in mid-May 1968. The group, who all lived in the same block of Bayswater Road flats, developed a collaborative songwriting approach, which Edge describes as “like a colouring book”. “Mike and I always had finished songs ready,” says Hayward, “whereas some of those other Lost Chord songs were like sketches.I’d make up riffs for them, but I’d think, I don’t know if I like this approach. But it became the norm and was probably the right thing to do.” The group’s wildly varied music grew out of five strong personalities pulling in different directions (“Nobody was ‘pals’,” says Hayward. “It’s what made the group interesting”). But if there was a consistent alliance, it was between Hayward and Thomas. “Ray’s flute and my acoustic guitar worked perfectly together,” says Hayward. “We developed this relationship of laughs, getting stoned and working together. When people were pulling their hair out, trying to get a groove going, or locked in one of Mike’s very long mellotron sessions, Ray and I found a broom cupboard where we’d sit and play. That’s how that relationship started. On a track like Visions Of Paradise it just worked.” A song in which Hayward’s meditative, psychedelic “sounds in my mind” are conjured by Thomas’s dancing, drifting flute, Visions Of Paradise epitomised the wide-eyed, gently philosophical Moodies sound, while tracks such as John Lodge’s Ride My See-Saw developed the seeds of a more rhythmic, driving groove the group would develop on the road. “We became two groups,” explain Hayward, “the group with acoustic guitar and flute, and the group who played onstage with, you know, 200-watt Marshalls. Gradually, it became very difficult to reconcile the two.”
IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD WAS RELEASED IN THE UK and US on July 26, 1968. As with Days Of Future Passed, the opening track was a poem written by drummer Graeme Edge. Entitled Departure, and delivered with manic exultation, the poem established the album’s theme, the need to access our inner selves through “sight, sound, the smell, the touch”. “I was reading Dylan Thomas and Poe,” explains Edge. “For DOFP I wrote what I thought was a lyric but Justin said, ‘You
can’t sing this. Too many words.’ Someone said, ‘Do it as a poem,’ and it became a tradition. When we had the concept it was my job to do the poem that sewed it all together.” Met with almost unanimously positive reviews in the UK, and verdicts that ranged from “beautiful” (Billboard) to “inane” (Rolling Stone), Lost Chord reached Number 5 in the UK album charts and Number 23 in America, eventually going platinum with sales of one million copies. “Lots of people took Lost Chord to heart in the summer of ’68,” says Lodge. “Stereo FM radio had just started and people were listening on headphones to this band writing about the philosophy of life, and going, ‘Yeah, I’ve had that experience!’” On October 19, 1968, the Moodies Mk II embarked on their first US trip. Booked by promoter Bill Graham, the “tour” covered New York’s Fillmore East and San Francisco’s Fillmore West with no venues or transportation in between. “Bill didn’t know or care we were English,” explains Hayward. “There wasn’t enough money to get back home so we hired a U-Haul with the mellotron in the back and worked across America. Psychedelic clubs, love-ins, the Jefferson Airplane’s truck, you know, all of those places where the light show was the top of the bill.” Against the fringed, organic look of US hippies, the Moodies, in their Savile Row suits, cravats, Regency shirts and pastel polonecks, cut a different dash altogether. “I knew these guys called Dandie Fashions on the King’s Road,” says Hayward. “That was their look, with an old Savile Row tailor working for them. After the Fillmore East gig David Crosby came over to me. I was all, Hey, have you heard this new record by Tim Hardin? He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. Where’d ya get your clothes from?’” When the group returned from America in December 1968, they immediately began working on their next album, On The Threshold Of A Dream. They fed in new American influences (Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon), smoking a lot of dope, experimenting with pink and white noise, recording with their new Scully 8-track recorder and trying to craft a stereo effect that, in John Lodge’s words, “went forwards and backwards instead of left and right”. Hazy and hypnotic, On The Threshold Of A Dream was hailed as a masterpiece in the US, and when the group returned to tour there in winter 1969, they were met by a new breed of devoted fan. “Most just wanted to sit and talk about life,” says Lodge. “But it all got a bit intense when there’d be people outside the venue with signs saying, ‘THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH AT THIS MOODY BLUES CONCERT’. I remember coming back from that tour and there were some American fans outside my door, saying I’d been picked to fly the spaceship that saves the world. I said, It can’t be me, because I don’t like flying. It sounds funny, but the scary part was these people were depending on you to help them.” Aptly, the next Moodies album would be space-bound in conception. Producer Tony Clarke, who’d recently seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, wanted the group to make a conceptual time capsule, To Our Children’s Children’s Children, that could be sent into space. The opening track, Higher And Higher, recorded nine days after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, was originally intended to begin with a NASA recording of a rocket launch. “They sent us these rocket sounds,” says Lodge, “but they all sounded like damp squibs so we made our own. We recorded amp feedback, the mellotron motor and the sound of a piano falling off the roof of Decca studios. We sent it to NASA saying, This is what a rocket sounds like!” The resultant track, Higher And Higher was a proto-spacerock groove that predated Hawkwind’s Space Ritual by two years. The album proved, for many, the pinnacle of the Moodies’ epic, overdubbed sound, but tied to songs of deep melancholy and loneliness.
“Children was Tony’s album,” says Hayward. “When he talked about music he’d say, ‘Imagine it’s three in the morning. The sun on the horizon, stars slowly disappearing behind trees. A warm light envelops you. You awake, alive to the world.’ He’d mix it like that as well. But we also had Derek Varnals, the greatest engineer I’ve ever
known. It’s a lovely album. The deepest we ever got. We needed to pull back after that.” Children was also the first Moodies LP recorded for their own label, Threshold, another idea inspired by The Beatles. However, like the Fabs’ own label venture, Apple, Threshold would prove a terrible mistake. “Threshold began as a way to help other bands,” explains John Lodge. “But the bands started expecting us to book studios for them, subsidise them on the road. Next thing, we had record shops, a touring company, a publishing company, spending all of our time and energy in meetings with accountants, lawyers, agents … I went down to the Threshold offices in Cobham one day and there was all this furniture there. ‘The London office has closed down’. First I’d even heard of a London office.”
THE ALBUM AFTER CHILDREN, 1970’S A QUESTION Of Balance, was both a reflection on the extreme fan-worship the group were seeing in America, and an attempt to reconnect with a simpler live sound. It also contained the hit single, Question, a mix of manic anti-war acoustic-Who strum and Hayward introspection that reached Number 2 in the UK and Number 21 in the US. It also made a pin-up star of the once-shy lead singer. “I was very proud to be in those lists of Pretty Boys Of The 1970s,” says Hayward, laughing. “Did it affect the dynamic of the group? Yeah. I won’t say any more. But, as I’d said, that tension was there from the start. Graeme and I, very different kinds of people, found ourselves in the middle of it. I knew Mike was unhappy. With the next album, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, it was getting very materialistic. There’d be discussions, like, ‘Oh, he’s fucking spending all this fucking money on building a fucking studio and I’m going to have to pay for it.’ I loved Mike very much and I still do, but I could see it drifting away.” The recording sessions for Every Good Boy’s follow-up, 1972’s Seventh Sojourn, began in Pinder’s garage before moving back to Decca, but the band were ready for a break. “We were exhausted, spiritually, musically, emotionally, creatively,” says Graeme Edge. “Plus, Mike wanted to cut back on touring, stay in the studio. I was at the other extreme, I wanted to stay on the road.” “There was a sadness about it,” says Justin Hayward. “We were at the peak, just at the point when we should really grasp it. And I knew we were going to screw it up.” By the time of the group’s 1972 US tour, they had achieved 20 million LP sales worldwide. Seventh Sojourn went platinum from advance sales alone. Then both Nights In White Satin, and its parent album, Days Of Future Passed, re-entered the US charts, each reaching Number 2. But a huge ’73-74 world tour came and went with no accompanying album, and in mid 1974 the group announced a recording hiatus that would last four years. They reunited for 1978’s Octave, but the spark had gone. “We were tired,” says Mike Pinder, “and wanted to find happiness with others. Marriages had fallen apart, mine included. It was time for a break. Everything fades, dies and has a season. We did our thing. We brought our boon to the planet and the music will remain here for others to discover.” Ray Thomas died in January 2018, at the age of 76, but was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April, along with the current touring incarnation of the band – Hayward, Lodge and Edge – and Mike Pinder. “It was beautiful,” says Pinder. “It was just like yesterday seeing John, Justin and Graeme. It would have been perfect if Ray Thomas and Tony Clarke could have been there as well.” “I wanted to tell myself it didn’t mean that much,” says Graeme Edge, “but up on stage I suddenly realised it was a big deal, for all of us. I look back on those years and I don’t believe it was me. I see a confident, naïve, brash young man. He was immortal, he was limitless. I wish I was that guy.” Justin Hayward has a different perspective. “It’s like we’re contemplating a ghost,” he says. “The Justin from then, sitting in this room with us, is a ghost. People are obsessed with him, but it’s not me. I’m much happier now.”