The Moody Blues: Videobiography | Music Documentary | Tony Brown | Chris Welch | John Cavanagh

foreign [Music] musicians Anonymous I was a Moody Blues fan I like The Moody Blues I don't know how it started I started taking it in 1964 but I couldn't stop I mean it's terrible isn't it as a music journalist you do sort of almost have to apologize for being a Moody Blues fan which I think is ridiculous [Music] [Applause] [Music] friends [Music] foreign [Music] 's a wonderful thing isn't it you know progressive rock in the 70s was huge and hugely fashionable lest we forget with the the enkis the music press the enemies the melody makers were all writing about yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer but you know you'll find Scan numbers of these people know who would actually admit that they I ever hard without brush and The Moody Blues were seen as as possibly one of the you know the worst of the dinosaurs but at the time this was all seen as something fresh and new and taken us to another place and you know you can't rewrite history you can only revise what you think and hope people will believe you were really that hip [Music] [Music] thank you I always felt that The Moody Blues really did their own thing they didn't like just a fellow fashion day stuck true to their own style they threw away sort of boundaries and limits they pushed things technologically and musically I think The Moody Blues were the most unfairly unacclaimed banned by the critics but not by the public and not by the fans who worshiped them in their Millions and still do [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] The Moody Blues are a rich man's Barclay James harvest my thoughts about The Moody Blues is in a way they were musical Time Travelers because their music spans the generations and expands the decades and it has that floating at its best it has that kind of floating time traveler kind of feel to it you imagine you're watching a space movie I think you'd like to hear or would like to be listening to a Moody Blues album [Music] found around here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] running running ladies and gentlemen and guys and girls today we hope to bring you a completely new slant on the pop music world and we have got some wonderful groups lined up for you so I'll tell you what we'll do we will not mess about no time to say anything I am going to introduce you straight away to The One and Only The Moody Blues well The Moody Blues were rhythm and blues band when they first started in Birmingham I mean everybody was a rhythm and blues band in 1964 I mean the Yard Birds the who the animals The Kinks everybody played rhythm and blues because it was the cool thing to do [Music] it when The Moody Blues fall in 1964 they overhauled as one of the most exciting r b bands in the country because they came from Birmingham which was a change from Liverpool everybody was used to Liverpool groups obviously the Beatles And The Hollies came from Manchester but The Moody Blues remaining the best and brightest from what was called brombeat the burning in the scene and they started to build up quite a big farming actually it's a live Club X because that was the days when they were live music was all important so The Moody Blues had quite a decline it's a really authentic r b rhythm and blues Soul band thank you [Music] the Live Safe would include material by James Brown Sonny Boy Williamson and they were very good at their stuff you know they were probably upsides maybe not as rough and edgy as the pretty things but they were surprisingly good at that material [Music] The Moody Blues spent quite a while building up a fan base they came from to London from Birmingham and got a residency at the Marquee club which is where I first saw them and I was very impressed by this very large lineup they seem to have lots of people jumping around on stage which is quite unusual because most salmon bands like say for like for example The Yard Birds or The Kinks so a rather more cautious as a stage act they weren't so you get a lot of lead guitar players would stand staring at their feet for example shoe gazers whereas The Moody birds were very much like a cabaret band in a way they were very much into having more than one singer Denny Lane is their lead singing then but they all did backup vocals and they all took part in the action so it's a very Lively stage Act [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the public began to take more notice of The Moody Blues when they had their big hit single go now in fact it was their second single I think their first one was probably I think it was called lose your money and as Tony Lane says they did they lost all their money on that one we've already said [Music] goodbye I first became aware of them with go now the uh first or second single their early singles weren't recorded a Deca they were recorded through an independent production company and deca released the tapes [Music] before you see me cry [Music] in early rock and roll quite a bit of it was driven by piano you had Jerry Lee Lewis you had Little Richard by the time the beep group explosion happened it was all about boys with guitars so a record that was piano driven that wasn't a big ballad you would expect of a piano on a Dusty Springfield record but you wouldn't expect to have a one on a sole record with big harmony vocals that sounded like a beat group track but was driven by the piano so gone out was pretty unusual in that respect for 1964-5 it's a great song and that's another thing that's you know gotta have had a huge impact on the listeners the Bessie Banks song is just fantastic because [Music] that record go now was Superior to a lot of the stuff that that you know there were some very very lame English r b records that one on the strength of of Denny Lane's vocal I I was quite strong in fact you know I remember reading years later that Paul McCartney had felt humbled by it he he said that it was a a record that he'd wish the Beatles had made Denny Lane was actually quite credible you know he was a tiny skinny little Englishman but sang well he sang very well [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] it was a beautiful ballad and Denny sang it really well I think the problem was it was almost too beautiful a ballot because it meant that they had to abandon essentially regarded itself as a rhythm of Blues Band now had to live up to a reputation in the charts of being balladeers and they have problems with this and it was one of the things that broke the band up [Music] at first Clint who was married that got children he was finding it hard really with all the touring commitments and so he decided to to drop out in early 1966. Denny Lane almost inevitably split to become a pop star solo and then it meant regrouping and finding two new members John Lodge the bass player they found had previously played with Ray Thomas in our Riot and the rebels so he was an easy find a way and fitted in very nicely another brummy Justin Hayward came from left field he was a Swindon boy and his background was essentially folk I think came from the skiffle group then a bit of light rock and roll with Marty Wilde and the Wildcats Justin was a wild cat and played down the end of the pier with Marty Wilde and in fact at one point in time he was about to give up and the thing that saved him or the person who saved him was Lonnie Donegan because Donegan was on the same end of the pier show saw Justin in a very kind of depressed state one afternoon and said what's wrong he said I think I'm going to have to quit because I'm just running out of money I can't live on what we're earning um and I'm just gonna have to give up I don't really done again said well don't you have any other way of making money do you have a publishing deal and Justin said no I said would you write songs Justin said yes he said I'll give you a publishing deal and he gave Justin 50 pounds for his publishing deal and about two years later Justin wrote a little song called Nights in White Satin which aren't Lonnie Donegan at least a million pounds well Justin applied obviously to an advertisement Melody Maker or something like that for a guitarist he um applied to join a band he didn't know what band it was turned it was going to be the animals but Eric had given the details to uh Mike and Graham Etc I believe Justin was a friend of Brian Greg who has played in the tornadoes at the time Justine had sold all of his gear apparently so borrowed Brian's guitar and amp etc for the audition with The Moody Blues so obviously he impressed them greatly and was signed up immediately to join them the difference between the first band and the second band was the the titles they were doing the type of music they were doing whilst Mike was a r b pianist his songs weren't so rock and roll they were a bit more structured Justin was more of a gentle songwriter so they went that way to a certain extent anyway and also the times you know 67 almost the summer of love when we made those early singles and the nature of the songs was were the nature of the songs were going in that direction [Music] [Applause] in the past was initially conceived as a demonstration record it was put together by Decca who had a new sound system called duramic sound which was a you know some sort of special new High Fidelity system they were pushing out and they wanted somebody to demonstrate it The Moody Blues agreed to play on a limited edition of bojack's Ninth Symphony performed by a rock group they looked at this and thought well how about we try and get them to record our new stage act instead and the guy who's going to do the orchestral side of it Peter Knight they went to him and said what if you do arrangements and and pieces that fit with our stuff instead of just you know chopping up bits of Dvorak and they were allowed something which was quite it wasn't unprecedented The Beatles were allowed to go in and use studio time in it and what became known as a lockout just use the studio for days on end but for a band like The Moody Blues who really didn't have that kind of success to back it up you know there's no way that they would have been allowed to spend that time and that money in a studio to make this record unless it was being paid for for other purposes and a demonstration desk aided by Sir Edward Lewis was uh it was the way forward [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] I bought the album it was in a fruit for me to buy an album on my my student budget represented an enormous commitment so the eight or nine albums I own were all very close friends to me and and that that was one of them even though I I think back with some embarrassment really spectacularly schmaltzy that poetry that poetry that begins and ends the album I is quite extraordinary in rock history I think they've sort of become infected with the bug you know that around this time you needed a guru to to appear cool you you needed a guru The Beatles had one uh thus everyone needed one so what I think The Moody Blues did was they made this sort of spirituality and and this sort of uh thing accessible to people in the nafest possible way and the most easily accessible Naf way of uh you know like poetry at the end and the choruses of angels and this is all this this is this isn't this isn't just pop music anymore this is this is very important [Music] reflections [Music] that got myself [Music] I think Days of Future Past was something different for for most people I mean it was a concept album in the days when concept albums were very few and far between particularly in rock music areas concept of days of future pastors to kind of phrase from a Beatles song A Day in the Life you know it starts at dawn and it goes through the procession through afternoon and evening into the following night and it has songs interspersed with these orchestral pieces which at best with the big sort of sweeping romantic mates and white satin theme are very good and at worst I kind of like that um English light music you know Eric coats in town tonight the Knightsbridge March and the stuff that Edward Elgar called uh Stout and stakey and if you like your music Stout and stakey I think there's some stuff in there for you but it doesn't all work for me I'm afraid well the interesting thing when The Moody Blues came up with this new album in Days of Future Past in 1967 was perfect timing because everybody was expecting everybody else to experiment after the The Beatles had done Sergeant Pepper and there were artists like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention it was a year of psychedelia an experiment of all different kinds the doors were open and literally the doors were [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] a move towards more symphonic pop records that was felt Specter obviously there was the Big Stone stage things that Johnny Franz and either Raymond did at Phillips for the Walker brothers and Dusty Springfield and then there was a kind of thing that Andrew Oldham was was doing with these big orchestrations and he got records coming in like loves forever changes album which had strings and horns on it and of course the The Beatles were becoming more textured as well but Days of Future Past I think did do something that sounded quite distinctly different at that point and probably even just having the concept thing applied to it I think definitely dead opened the door to progressive rock For Better or Worse what said it never reaching there let us [Music] say well they were performing in France and um I believe there's a TV appearance and somehow their their song got transmitted I think they were running over running or something and their song happened to get transmitted and caught the attention of a lot of the views and that so what from that point you know there was a big buzz about about their new mood to blues and it was in France that Nights in White Satin first became a hit because they weren't going to release it as a single enabled you're some genius at Decker decided you couldn't dance to it and they put out something else I think from the album initially which didn't do anything and then as Nights In White Saturn started to become a hit in France somebody thought well ah maybe we made a mistake plus we should put it out in England and they did in a kind of half-hearted way and it after I think it took quite a while for the word it was kind of almost my word of mouth at nights and why it's happened became a hit and it edged its way very slowly up the charts and into the enemy top 30 where I was working at the time and as soon as I heard it I leapt on it because I just thought it was a wonderful Melody and I still do it today I think it's one of the most glorious melators in pop music that record has been a top 20 hit no less than five times on re-release it's extraordinary they release it about once every five years and it goes back into the charts [Music] I recognize that in some ways it's it's really a poor piece of work and in other ways I really love it I think it's called a guilty pleasure what's really interesting to me about it I know that it's kind of a blank slate it's a song that that really you anybody can write whatever they want to on top of it because the lyrics are kind of like completely unintelligible really when you come right down to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was done in one day quite quickly but the the key thing about Nights in White Satin was trying to get the melaton to sound smooth and sweet and that was quite difficult half of that battle comes from Mike or the player which you need to use the swell pedal the volume pedal if you like to um control the the abrupt start of each chord it's always an Abrupt start and so you have to fade the chords in so you have to anticipate the beat which is what I mean by getting your head round the Metatron as well as your hands on it so in the next battle was me trying to make it sound sweet now I've spent a long time and on my on that session working with Mike using the few controls that he had at his disposal and as I recall I think he was pumping it out through a martial amp which is an which isn't the nicest way of presenting a melaton but by tweaking the knobs a bit we managed to avoid the overload and the squawking that you can get from electronics and we sweetened it up with reverse [Music] foreign I think what happened with with the success of Days of Future Past was that it sold more albums [Music] off the back of what was supposed to be a demonstration album the Decker could possibly have envisaged it was the biggest selling album that they had because of the success of the album sales Decker decided that this was a album selling band they had now the second album was also designed to be a complete album sometimes we put songs down and the theme of the album or the so-called word concept hadn't even been dreamed up there's one or two exceptions to that but you would find that the uh the songs came first and and then the uh album was put together because they were finding their feet with a melaton on the first album and because the second album they decided not to use Orchestra they wanted more of themselves and less Orchestra because I think if you get the stopwatch out in time how many minutes and seconds of band there is on Days of Future Past it's not a huge amount you'd find that on in search for the last chord there's a lot more on the side of the touch or the center of the sand or the strength of an oak will be in the ground The Wonder of flowers to be covered and then to burst up through tarmac to the sun again or to fly to the sun without burning a wing to lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing to have all these things from the user to help us [Music] [Applause] [Music] In Search Of The Lost Court didn't have the orchestra on it what it did have was the members of The Moody Blues playing some 33 different instruments Hayward took up the sitar there was an Indian tambura Ray Thomas played the flute but he also played the oboe so he took up a double read instrument which is quite hard to go and if you've ever tried one of those and this was at the time when British Studios had only just moved from four to eight track operation it's a very complex album to make with all this overdubbing and all the changes of instruments so they were certainly very experimental as far as the tone and texture of the record goes and um trying to achieve this big sound with just the members of the band don't you run it in many ways it's better than Days of Future Past because this was the group Standalone band showing that they could do it without a big flowery Orchestra this really established the band as an experimental unit where they would use overdubbing lots of different instruments and spend a lot of time devising poetry and lyrics creating an entirely new package which had tremendous appeal in amongst the hippie population in the states of course so it was an important album for them and uh very successful too [Music] instead [Music] Mary [Music] 68 was becoming more of a split as rock music and pop music started to diverge you would have bands like Pink Floyd for example but Pink Floyd was still issuing singles the real split came later on when Led Zeppelin just made the statement of we're not single with band we do albums only but at that time the idea was still to have the pop head and get on top of the pops so the the platform for making concept albums really just just wasn't quite there yet [Music] the question about whether they invented classical rock is a really interesting one as a uh an easily Bamboozled University student I remember having a an argument with a musician friend of mine that that stuck with me and I see now that he was right where I I said I I just don't know how much farther music can go because you know the these these people are doing this and these people are doing this and The Moody Blues I actually specifically about rock how how much farther Rock can go because the moodies have have so wonderfully integrated classical music with Rock and he just snorted in derision and he said no they didn't they just they just put a malotron on top of everything it's a it's not a it's not classical meeting rock at all it's just like a layer of this enormous layer of syrup if you will to mix metaphors over the top of a perfectly ordinary pop songs [Music] everything [Music] [Applause] passing away [Music] I suspect that on the threshold of a dream really casts the mold for The Moody Blues as the anti-fashion heroes of millions of buyers of their records because they sold so many records and yet was so terminally unhip and with this album you know you you had a thing called the void Suite which was based on Rickard strauss's also sprach zarathustra you had more of Graham edgy's poetry it was all wrapped up in this concept about dreams and I do think that really did cast the mold for the the future opinion and received opinion of The Moody Blues on the threshold of a dream is a fantastic album I think it's my favorite of all of them it starts off with um sort of a computer type voice very electronically sound in that and uh ethereal kind of voice of Justine questioning you know where am I what am I doing here that kind of thing and it launches into quite a range of other songs [Music] [Applause] guys [Music] well on the threshold of a dream which was another concept album and of course that was devoted to songs written about the the theme of dreams and dreaming and this was a very successful album for them and so it was I suppose in in some respects it was more of the same it was the same Moody Blues we've grown to to love or hate depending on your Viewpoint it was the last they did before they launched their own label which was called threshold records uh obviously in honor of the album foreign [Music] [Applause] 1969 you've got the Apollo space program you've got the prospect that we're going to have men walking on the moon this year and The Moody Blues decide they're going to do a concept album about space and about them and make it kind of like a tiny capsule it's almost as though you've got these songs and your children's children's children go back and find them in a couple of hundred years time and look back at the way it was when we walked on the moon [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] to our children's children's children was an interesting album because it was the first album there were really only two strong concept albums Days of Future Past and children's children's children children's children's children was really Tony Clark's baby the producer he was very important to their sound and was like a kind of sixth Moody blue and Tony had just had children and I think a couple of the others were maybe either thinking about it or there was some expectancy going on and they decided they wanted to sort of try and put something down for the Next Generation I suppose or the the generation of their their own children well for many fans of the movie Blues so I think it was their the fourth of their uh their great seven albums to our children's children's children which they regard as the the ultimate uh the best album by The Moody Blues during that period and uh strangely enough it got very good reviews but it didn't sell quite so well as previous albums and hard to explain why but uh it was um it was still an important album and probably one of the best I'd say [Music] it was very hard for The Moody Blues to recreate what they were doing on record on stage I mean you couldn't possibly do Days of Future Past at that time with the next album playing so many instruments you know take all those different instruments on stage with the canopy systems that they had in venues then it wasn't going to happen very well so by the time we get to our children's children's children they started something that would become standard practice with major touring nights later on which is to take your own equipment on the road and your own crew and that way you're at least guaranteed as good a quality of sound as you can get there were things that just did not exist at that time like pickups for stringed instruments and Stage that would come later but to take your own equipment on the road was a new concept and something they definitely did pioneer by the time they made this record they had launched their own record label threshold and threshold was funded by them from their royalties Deca supplied a studio they built the latest technology into that studio so there was a kind of collaboration business collaboration between them and deca once again and aided by the the chairman sir Edward Lewis who opened many doors for this band and so they worked together so much by then they were in the studio they were working with other bands they were making a record label they were in business and music all the way through so they really were very together at that point and I suspect that that's the way they wrote that's the way they played and the way they lived and that's why it's probably the most cohesive thing they did [Music] that released an album called a question of balance and the question was the first title track on that one and um that was a sort of a mixture of two songs that Justin had been working on it was a sort of a slow ballady type and then there's a very fast you know acoustic guitar part and he couldn't really um develop either of them into full tracks on their own and decided to put them together and uh you know the result is question which you know was the one that they come out on the Encore to today so it's still you know one of the firm favorites [Music] [Music] she [Music] much [Music] question was it's like applying the Four Season mala's Symphony of a thousand and sticking it on a pop single the edited down the track from the length it is on the lp but it comes thrashing in with this really quite aggressive strong guitar part I think it's a huge Orchestra and chorus and and he would you know not being soft and funky but really belting out why do we never get an answer to all these questions about hate and death and War and it's it's actually a pretty strong slice of purple as well as being this monstrously overblown thing they dared to to say that which a whole generation had been yearning to say and that was why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door to a thousand million questions about hate and death and War I mean another moment where you you in retrospect at least you you had to laugh and I I take some solace in the fact that I laughed at the time by the time they made seventh surgeon they had been running their threshold records for a few years and what started as the idea of a kind of musician's Cooperative had grown into a business and they found themselves saying to their acts the same kinds of things that Decca had been saying to them before and they thought wait a minute this is why we started doing this and there was quite a lot of tension because they were completely wrapped up in making all these records touring constantly running the business and really they just started to get in one another's nerves and I think it was quite a difficult set of sessions to to come up with a seventh album with seventh surgeon they decided they'd been at it long enough to to want to break and just do something of their own and then the solo album started the first album I looked after as a solo project was Ray Thomas from mighty Oaks which was the only Moody Blues solo album he's fond of telling everybody that made the top 20. it still is so I was quite pleased that that was a PR and he was quite pleased with it as a as an artist after that Justin Justin and John did Blue Jays uh and blue jays was kind of The Moody Blues without right I'm crying you know which I don't think pleased them all that much [Music] if they hadn't decided to take a break at the end of seven sojourn they would probably have fallen out so badly that they would have split for good so I suspect it was a very good idea for the longevity of the band to say well let's take some time out let off some steam do our sort of stuff and then come back later maybe which of course they did and they all got involved in doing a couple of silver things each the best known being Hayward and lodgies blue jays album and the song Blue guitar which was recorded I think at 10 CC's strawberry Studios and just as a great guitar sound which was quite akin to the sounds that 10cc got in their records a very compressed big guitar sound and it charges in with uh that noise and I think made a really effective prop record kind of like that one new [Music] troubles in a storm [Music] if you don't run away [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the world [Music] Watchers [Music] I think blue guitar to sound very reminiscent to The Moody Blues obviously when you got to the distinctive vocals I've Just Seen then it's going to anyway the thing with The Moody Blues is that um was there a lot of individual skills and talents they've always been more successful when they were a hole individually they never really achieved the individual success even with other musicians and that um all good albums in their own ride but but never quite you know reaching the same success that they have collectively [Music] never reaching the end [Music] is everything they spent four years doing their solo albums and they then decided to get back together and did octave that was when I was their press agent released octave I was busy publicizing octave in America they got fed up with waiting for the new Moody Blues album and re-released Nights in White Satin and Days of Future Past which went to number one in the album and singles chart and then octave on the back of that as it were went to number two so I think The Moody Blues are the only band to ever have had a number one and number two album in the Billboard charts were the number one single at the same time re-released five years after its initial issue [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] the 1980s older bands who made records in the 80s had what I would call a kind of retro fear it was a time when you had to be achieving and the buzzword was upward mobility and yuppies and all this thing going on in society in general so to have these older guys come back and make some records They had to be seen to be doing the modern thing and unfortunately the modern thing at that time was the absolutely hideous keyboard sound of the fairlights and the junos and these these things that you know why can't even synthesize her that sounds like an electronic instrument why does it have to sound like some farting trumpet hideous sounds and Records like your wildest dreams until lesser extent I know you're right there somewhere still quite some pleasant Moody Blues songs but they're completely destroyed by these sounds I mean even the graphics the covers the whole thing the 80s [Music] [Music] they are phenomenally successful workers people do not realize just how successful they are in this country because there is this kind of critical resistance to them the musical critical resistance not the fans Not the millions of the public that have that it is a travesty The Moody Blues have not been inducted into the Music Hall of Fame an absolute travesty I mean when you look at the millions of it's probably sold over 100 million albums they're still going out to this day 40 years later doing 35 day tours of America which people don't realize they did one a few months ago still going out I mean not a huge level I mean there may only be playing to about 5 000 people a night but it's still a lot 40 years on and with that back catalog of songs they should be there there is no reason at all why The Moody Blues shouldn't be talked about in the same breath as the Rolling Stones The Beatles The Who and Jimi Hendrix no reason at all it's except of course that they made the cardinal sin of making melodies Melodies don't mix with rock apparently well [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: THE STREAM - Movies and More

Views: 285,894

Keywords: movie, Entertainment, full movie, feature film, The Moody Blues movie, The Moody Blues music documentary, The Moody Blues documentary, Moodies movie, Moodies documentary, Moodies music, music documentary, Days Of Future Passed moodies, Days Of Future Passed album, Tony Brown, Chris Welch, John Cavanagh

Id: Xk3kbtmuJUo

Length: 51min 37sec (3097 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022