The moment everything changed for John Lodge and his bandmates in the Moody Blues came one night at the Fiesta club in Stockton. Lodge and Justin Hayward were new to the band, Lodge playing bass and Hayward guitar, who had been booked into a well-paid series of cabaret shows in northern England. The Moodies were playing a revue-style show, with bits of R&B punctuated by comedy numbers, dressed in blue suits. They’d had a big hit a couple of years earlier with Go Now, but by 1966 they looked and sounded passé.
After the show, Hayward told me a few years ago, a man came to the dressing room to see the band. “Normally they would say something like, ‘Oh, you’re great.’ But he said, ‘I just thought I’d tell you, you’re the worst fucking band I’ve seen in my life. You’re rubbish. And somebody’s got to tell you.’” Hayward and singer Ray Thomas were reduced to tears, and later on, as their van headed south from the venue, drummer Graeme Edge piped up from the back: “He’s right, that bloke. We’re crap.”
The next day, the Moodies pledged to drop the suits, the act and the past, and reinvent themselves. In doing so they became British rock’s most underrated band: pioneers of a style, consistent platinum sellers across multiple decades in the US and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees who played prestige venues on both sides of the Atlantic until their career ended in 2018 with a Vegas residency.
And John Lodge, who has died aged 82, was central to that enduring success, as bassist, singer and songwriter. With Days of Future Passed in 1967, the Moody Blues didn’t so much embrace the new psychedelic fashions as assimilate them and catapult past them in one movement: a year earlier they had been a cabaret band, and now they were creating the elements that would form a new genre: prog rock.
Not that the Moodies were terribly prone to 20-minute epics with multiple time signatures. They wrote what were at heart pop songs, but wrapped them in gorgeous arrangements, with lush harmonies and rich instrumentation (the defining sound in Nights in White Satin, their “legacy” song, isn’t guitar: it’s flute). They understood the capabilities of the studio in a way few of their contemporaries did. And in a band packed with capable songwriters, Lodge more than held his own.
Ride My See-Saw, from 1968’s In Search of the Lost Chord, showcased Lodge’s talents: you can hear the R&B band in the rhythm section and Hayward’s choppy guitar, but the vocals are layered so deeply the song becomes almost hymnal. It’s very much of its time, but also entirely fantastic – the sound of pop evolving in the moment, in the studio. (There’s a live version from 1969’s that’s blistering: this band really could rock.)
Lodge had chosen to be bassist because he loved pianists. As he told It’s Psychedelic Baby magazine in 2023: “When I was at school, there was a cafe right by my school with a Rock-Ola jukebox. Every lunchtime, I used to leave and instead of having lunch at school, I’d go to the cafe, drink a cup of coffee and put a coin in the slot and play whatever my favorite record was. I realised that what I really liked about rock’n’roll is the left hand on the piano, the driving force. I realised that the artists I was listening to were people like Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and I realised the left hand side, the boogie piano, was the heart of rock’n’roll … There were no basses in Birmingham at the time. When the bass finally came to town it appeared in a music shop called Jack Woodross. Every Saturday morning, all the young musicians would go there and play their guitars and learn something new from someone else. And one day, I went there and I saw ‘Direct from the USA, Sunburst Precision Bass’ in the window. So I went home and said to my father, could you help me buy this bass? And we went back to the store, I bought it, and it’s been with me ever since.”
By 1972, the Moodies were genuinely huge, and encouraged by their propensity for vague but faintly profound-sounding lyrics, fans took to thinking they possessed rather more wisdom than they actually did, a situation that provoked what became Lodge’s defining song for the Moodies, I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band). The track, which reached No 12 in the US as a single, saw Lodge disavowing any kind of knowledge: “And if you want the wind of change / To blow about you / And you’re the only other person to know, don’t tell me / I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band.”
The 1973 tour to support Seventh Sojourn saw the Moody Blues living a lifestyle more commonly associated with Led Zeppelin. As Lodge recalled in the liner notes for a reissue of the album: “We had our own Boeing 707 aircraft which was decked out with a sitting room and a fireplace. There were two bedrooms, some 20 individual TVs, soundsystems everywhere and we had our own butler and our name written on the outside of the plane. I had a very empty feeling knowing that things had got this excessive.”
The following year, the band went on hiatus for four years. It was probably a good job, because as Andy Childs wrote in ZigZag in January 1976, just as punk was stirring, “They make records which sell to middle-class trendy young couples living in the stockbroker belt who know and care as much as about rock music as Batman.”
When they returned in 1978, with the Octave album, it wasn’t exactly as the Clash, but the album’s opener, Lodge’s Steppin’ in a Slide Zone, showed that the Moody Blues could adapt to changing time without losing their essential Moodiness – the layered vocals and unusual arrangements were still in place, but Steppin’ in a Slide Zone had an aridity that still sounds very 1978, clean and taut and tense. Just in case anyone was scared off, Lodge’s Survival from that same album had orchestras to go with the synths, and the gentleness that was one of the group’s great qualities.
Yet although they were the great survivors and great successes of psychedelia’s golden age – arguably only Paul McCartney had more success for longer – the Moody Blues never occupied a central cultural space. But they did occupy their own space, and that was more than enough for the vast numbers of people who never stopped loving them.
And Lodge never took music lightly. He always saw in it the potential for something more than entertainment. In that 2023 interview, he was asked what “psychedelic” meant to him, and answered perfectly: “I hope your mind will explore the music and take you wherever the music takes you. It’s not a case of just singing along, it’s listening. It can be one note and that transports you somewhere. And I think if you can conjure up experiences and stories in your mind where the music takes you, to me that’s psychedelic. You have to listen to things, not just hear them.”
