Monocled Alchemist

The Day The Moody Blues Should Have Been Called The Broody Moos! What’s behind a group’s decision to “battle on” after endless bad luck? What drives them to success? Moody Blues tell all!

Article published in RAVE magazine, September 1968

The Moody Blues: From Struggle to Success | I have always thought of the Moodies as both musicians and people. At the sound of their name I think of a string of lovely non-hit records and ravey parties. Lots of people think of them that way, but times are changing, and the Moodies have changed with them.

I recently met up with Graeme Edge, the drummer, an old friend I hadn’t had a chance to chat with for literally years. Lots of things have happened since “Go Now” and even I had lost track of how the Moodies of the “Go Now” days had evolved into the Moodies of “Nights In White Satin”. We chatted mainly about the old days, and the changes and the difference in the pop scene today.

“To start from the beginning of our story,” said Graeme, “we really started off with a record called lose Your Money’—and we did! We were just a green group from Birmingham who picked out the demo ‘Go Now’, recorded it, and the rest is history—it got to No.1.

Naturally by this time we were full of ourselves; we really raved it up. Our parties at our house in Roehampton became famous. We got the image of ravers, but it wasn’t just talk, we earned it! Everyone used to come to those parties from the Beatles downwards.

The Moody Blues: From Struggle to Success

They were really happenings. People thought we were being flash and extravagant after only one hit record, but it only cost us about £40 each party, and we were wise enough to save half of our earnings!”

They then signed up with four men in the business, who proceeded to handle the boys. However these four men were having internal strife in the company they had set up, and the Moodies still being as green as grass lost £22,000—the equivalent of eight months’ work—and all they received for “Go Now” was £50 each!

The company formed by the men for the Moodies was Ridgepride, and then they went bankrupt!

“More problems followed,” Graeme went on. “We recorded a beautiful song called ‘I Don’t Want To Go On Without You’, all done in a bit of a rush and intended really as an L.P. track. We went oft on a ten-day tour of Scotland intending to re-record it properly when we got back. But we returned to find that the rough track had been released as our new single!

We were all angry about that. From that point onwards we were called one hit wonders, as it only got to No. 16 in the Charts. We were just considered completely written off as a group, whereupon came ‘From The Bottom Of My Heart’, which we like to think of as the very first psychedelic record ever, with Denny’s very high screamy voice at the end.

“We knew things had to be done at this stage, so we signed with dear uncle Eppy, (Brian Epstein) who was a wonderful person with wonderful people in his organisation. The kind of people Nems never had to push; rather people came to them.

The Moody Blues: From Struggle to Success

So they’d never had to sell a group to the public, and they just couldn’t get us off the ground.”

This was round about the time when the line-up of Graeme, Ray Thomas, Denny Laine, Clint Warwick and Mike Pinder was about to change. Clint went, and the rift started. “At the time we put the split with Denny down to diverse musical tastes, but in fact it had got to the point where we were gradually hating the sight of one another.

Denny decided that the time had come to break with us, go solo and become a star! He gave us four days’ notice, but left after three. So there we were with a book full of bookings and left stranded. I think that secretly we were all glad really about the break, because every single day there was a punch up, and always about work. A very delicate period.”

Denny left

When Denny left they decided it was no use going on. Denny was THE voice of the Moodies. Graeme was going to go off to France, his drums on his back, to try his luck (and his current girlfriend just happened to live there!).

Mike was to become an A&R man for Ember records; and Ray just wondered what he could possibly do. They had a hit on the Continent with “Bye Bye Birdie”, so Ray said to Graeme: “Well why not try to reorganise a new Moodies and go over to the Continent for a year, pick up some cash, and see what happens?”

Mike heard them talking. His retainer fee for Ember records was £20 a week. His living expenses, minus food, were £21 12s. With obviously nothing to lose, he decided to tag along.

John Lodge then decided to join the group. An old friend of Mike’s and Ray’s from Birmingham, and in fact was the group’s original bass guitarist.

Homesick Blues

“Things were going so well, that we decided to try and make a go of it here. However we still needed someone to play lead. With Manfred Mann and Eric Burdon we put a big ad in the record papers, saying that three top ten groups were in need of certain musicians.

Out of that Manfred gained Klaus Voorman, we got Justin Hayward, picked out of sixty lead guitarists. He played us three of his songs, we dug him, liked his personality, he was a nice looking cat and we liked his taste in music.

We put a guitar in his hand and said ‘Play’, and he did.” Obviously not yet ready to perform in public, they cleared off to Belgium for six weeks, experimenting and perfecting songs and the act. Then they moved on to France for a month, and as they were going down exceptionally well, they prepared to set up their base in France, not England.

The Moody Blues: From Struggle to Success

Things were certainly moving for them in Paris, for at the Olympia they did the Tom Jones Spectacular, with the boys playing one half of the show, and Tom the other, Tom’s agent Cohn Berlin. went backstage after the show and asked them about returning to England.

All the boys felt a bit homesick, and said yes. This was January, two years ago. They had their continental earnings to live on so they concentrated on recording—and out came “Fly Me High” at the same time as Denny’s first solo record “Say You Don’t Mind”. Both were raved over, but did nothing much.

“Colin was then to become our manager, but Tom had that giant hit ‘Green Green Grass Of Home’, so he hadn’t much time to devote to us. Then when it came to our turn again, Colin got tied up with a new singer, Englebert Humperdinck who had a fantastic hit with ‘Release Me’.

We decided that he couldn’t really help us, and this was when we all decided to sit down and seriously sort out which direction we were going in. In the height of the flower power summer of 1967, we were still wearing our neat blue suits, fairly short hair, and still doing ‘Go Now’.

The two new boys, George and Justin had been smothered by the old Moodies image, and had never really been allowed to express themselves properly.

Days Of Future Passed

“With the little money we had left, we decided to lock ourselves away for three weeks of rehearsals—which meant in fact that we hadn’t any bookings anyway!

We were going to start again and we each wrote five or six songs, and worked out eight of the numbers with our new instrument, the mellotron—and out of this evolved the “Days Of Future Passed” L.P.

Shortly afterwards we met our present manager, Tony McCormick, a very rich Northern businessman who’d seen our act in a club up North. We told him what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go, and he said okay.

He understood you see and he digs people who want to have a shot at something. He removed all the financial strain we had on us. We released ‘Nights In White Satin’ which not only got into the Charts here, but got to No. 1 all over the Continent.

As Justin said at the time, ‘I couldn’t care less if it’s been No. 1 in France for fourteen weeks, just to have the record in the Top Thirty here for two weeks means everything. It’s home. This is where it matters.’ That really goes for all of us.

We seem to have broken back into the British market again now, which makes us all feel pretty wonderful. We made a lot of mistakes that groups are still making now, but we won’t make them a second time around. We’ve learnt our lesson. ‘Voices In The Sky’ and our second L.P. ‘The Moody Blues In Search Of The Lost Chord’, are moving.”

America revisited

By the end of this year, they will have revisited America with a tour of the campus circuit. Last time they were there was the Christmas of 1965 on their first time round on the crest of “Go Now”. They’re lucky that they’ve had the second chance—and they know it.

They won’t let go this time. Said Graeme as a sort of summing up, “You know I’m glad now that everything has happened the way it did, because had things been different, we might not be doing what we’re doing today. And this is, although we never realised it before, what we’ve always wanted!”

More Moody Blues on the Monocled Alchemist.