The making of the Moody Blues

Rarely has one irate punter so affected a band’s trajectory. Without the anger of the man who went to see the Moody Blues at the Fiesta Club in Stockton in 1966, the band would never have reinvented themselves, never have transformed into psychedelic pioneers, and next month they would not be travelling to America to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the honour bestowed annually upon those the US music business deems the most significant artists of all.

The Moody Blues had been a moderately successful group — everyone who has ever listened to an oldies radio station knows their version of ‘Go Now’, a No. 1 single in 1964 — but by 1966 they were on the skids. Their two most creative members had left, to be replaced by a new bassist and the 19-year-old singer-guitarist Justin Hayward. That night in Stockton, in a club where a version of the Playboy bunnies was a major attraction, the group donned their blue suits and went through their tired routine of R&B covers and comedy songs, earning the money for the repayments on their guitars and the cost of their petrol.

‘We really weren’t very good,’ Hayward recalls. ‘This chap came in the dressing room afterwards, and 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 burst into tears, joined by his bandmate Ray Thomas. An hour or two later, as the group passed Scotch Corner on their drive south down the A1, the drummer Graeme Edge piped up from the back of the van: ‘He’s right, that bloke. We’re crap.’

‘Literally the next day, we said: let’s get rid of the blue suits and do our own songs and see what happens,’ Hayward says.