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 playing a revue-style show, with bits of R&B punctuated by comedy numbers, dressed in blue suits. They’d had a big hit a couple of years earlier with Go Now, but by 1966 they looked and sounded passé.
After the show, Hayward told me a few years ago, a man came to the dressing room to see the band. “Normally they would say something like, ‘Oh, you’re great.’ But 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 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: “He’s right, that bloke. We’re crap.”
