\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he 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\u2019d had a big hit a couple of years earlier with Go Now, but by 1966 they looked and sounded pass\u00e9.<\/p>\n After the show, Hayward told me a few years ago, a man came to the dressing room to see the band. \u201cNormally they would say something like, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re great.\u2019 But he said, \u2018I just thought I\u2019d tell you, you\u2019re the worst fucking band I\u2019ve seen in my life. You\u2019re rubbish. And somebody\u2019s got to tell you.\u2019\u201d 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: \u201cHe\u2019s right, that bloke. We\u2019re crap.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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 \u201clegacy\u201d song, isn\u2019t guitar: it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Ride My See-Saw, from 1968\u2019s In Search of the Lost Chord, showcased Lodge\u2019s talents: you can hear the R&B band in the rhythm section and Hayward\u2019s choppy guitar, but the vocals are layered so deeply the song becomes almost hymnal. It\u2019s very much of its time, but also entirely fantastic \u2013 the sound of pop evolving in the moment, in the studio. (There\u2019s a live version from 1969\u2019s that\u2019s blistering: this band really could rock.)<\/p>\n Lodge had chosen to be bassist because he loved pianists. As he told It\u2019s Psychedelic Baby magazine in 2023: \u201cWhen 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\u2019d 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\u2019n\u2019roll 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\u2019n\u2019roll \u2026 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 \u2018Direct from the USA, Sunburst Precision Bass\u2019 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\u2019s been with me ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s defining song for the Moodies, I\u2019m 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: \u201cAnd if you want the wind of change \/ To blow about you \/ And you\u2019re the only other person to know, don\u2019t tell me \/ I\u2019m just a singer in a rock and roll band.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n 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: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n When they returned in 1978, with the Octave album, it wasn\u2019t exactly as the Clash, but the album\u2019s opener, Lodge\u2019s Steppin\u2019 in a Slide Zone, showed that the Moody Blues could adapt to changing time without losing their essential Moodiness \u2013 the layered vocals and unusual arrangements were still in place, but Steppin\u2019 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\u2019s Survival from that same album had orchestras to go with the synths, and the gentleness that was one of the group\u2019s great qualities.<\/p>\n Yet although they were the great survivors and great successes of psychedelia\u2019s golden age \u2013 arguably only Paul McCartney had more success for longer \u2013 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cpsychedelic\u201d meant to him, and answered perfectly: \u201cI hope your mind will explore the music and take you wherever the music takes you. It\u2019s not a case of just singing along, it\u2019s 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\u2019s psychedelic. You have to listen to things, not just hear them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27280,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[861,336,2628,262,16308,686,11067,12558,10941],"class_list":{"0":"post-27279","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-band","9":"tag-british","10":"tag-force","11":"tag-john","12":"tag-lodge","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-pioneering","15":"tag-rocks","16":"tag-underrated"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}