Has-beens tbey may be, but FRED DE VRIES found it hard to remain cynical talking to John Lodge of The Moody
WAY back in 1967, a five-piece band from Birmingham recorded that song, the song which would, in time, become as famous, as loved and as loathed as Stairway to Heaven or Hey Jude. Just over four minutes of pure kitsch and absolute bliss. The song which will undoubtedly be the greatest crowd-pleaser during The Moody Blues’ South African concerts. The song we all know, and can snigger and sneer along to: Nights in White Satin.
They must have played it thousands of times, yet bassist John Lodge shakes his greying hair when asked if he’s not tired of this nostalgia for the Sixties. “No,” he says, “because it means so much. Not just to us on stage, but to the audience as well. When a song is right, it seems to play itself; it seems to have its own atmosphere, its own aura. And Nights in White Satin still has that aura for us.”
Sitting at a table near the pool of the Balalaika Hotel in Sandton, Lodge (50) turns out to be an amicable guy, bereft of rock star pretentiousness. He’s down to earth and willing to talk at length about the nearly four decades in which The Moody Blues have been with us.
We flip through an edition of Q magazine in which 100 pop stars were asked to name “the songs that changed their lives”. Lodge’s choice would be That’ll Be the Day by Buddy Holly, which he first heard on the radio when he was 13.
“Until then, all rock’n’roll artists were icons — Elvis, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis, all 100 percent image. And we English could only be a poor facsimile of that. Then I heard that song and thought ‘fantastic’. It wasn’t straight 12-bar, it had incredible guitar work, it had harmony and a chord sequence you could understand. Suddenly you had affinity.”
Some 10 years later, Lodge became bassist with the second coming of The Moody Blues, a band which had just had a hit with the soul standard Go Now, and was looking for a new musical direction. Their chance came when their label, which also manufactured hi-fi equipment, needed a demonstration record.
Lodge says: “They wanted us to record a new version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony with the London Festival Orchestra. But instead of Dvorak we recorded all our new songs and sent them to the conductor, who developed the orchestration which appeared between the songs and with The Overture.”
The result was the occasionally brilliant Days of Future Passed, released in 1967. “If you develop something that has never been done before, it’s very exciting,” enthuses Lodge about the album which for the first time ever successfully married rock with a symphony orchestra.
Listening to Lodge talking about his love of music, it becomes difficult to be cynical about a band which, for the last two decades, has been struggling to regain their creative peak. If only, you think, they had called it a day in 1974. What great work they would have left behind, including classic songs like Tuesday Afternoon and Questions, as well as a couple of truly innovative albums. They could have been up there in the British super league of pop, the “Godfathers of Symphonic Rock”.
Instead, after a four-year hiatus, they released another album in 1978. That was the height of punk rock, and The Dickies released their ultra-fast, trashy cover of Nights in White Satin, a two-finger salute to the old rock establishment of which The Moody Blues were a part.
But the symphonic musos did not get the message. They never saw punk as a reason to throw in the towel. “”You don’t form a band for the success. There’s an incredible excitement when you write a song and play it for the first time to the rest of the guys,” says
The Moody Blues traded their jeans for suits, and found a niche as a yuppie band playing well-crafted but very unexciting music. During the 1980s they lost the plot, admits Lodge. “The idea of what we were trying to do musically evaporated. Suddenly we realised we were walking around with briefcases.”
The band went back to their jeans, and somehow survived. Now they attract a surprisingly young audience who long for an era they never experienced. “The Sixties were the seed for everything that has grown,” says Lodge, who inevitably mentions the rugby as bonding people in a Sixties kind of way. “The greatest thing for me was seeing Francois Pienaar shaking hands with Mandela. As soon as you get the feeling of people getting together, you get rid of the politics. It’s the politics that ruin everything.”
The Moody Blues perform at the Sun City Superbowl on June 30 and July 1 and 2