Arts & Entertainment

Justin Hayward Promises Moody Blues Hits And Deep Cuts At The Music Hall, With Christopher Cross Sharing the Bill

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Justin Hayward. (Photo credit: Valeria Maselli)

June 26, 2024

By W.B. King–

While attending an ABBA concert in the late 1970s, Justin Hayward was seated next to Bob Geldof. The two musicians had never met before, but the frontman of the Irish rock band, Boomtown Rats, relayed an inference that struck a chord. “At the end,” he said, ‘Well, it’s really all about the songs, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it—it’s just about the songs,” Hayward told The Hudson Independent.

A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee known worldwide for his enduring work as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist with The Moody Blues, Hayward’s passion for music began at an early age. “I come from a family with a very strong Anglican faith. In school, at the assembly, we would always start with a hymn from the Hymns Ancient and Modern. I still love those songs and those melodies,” Hayward confessed. “We didn’t have much [growing up], we were lucky to have a privileged but poor childhood filled with love.”

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Living for Love

With the support and encouragement of his parents, Hayward began taking piano lessons, however, at the time, the instrument didn’t quite serve his burgeoning desire to be a conduit for the musical notions he felt inside. “I pestered them for a guitar, and they gave me a ukulele, which is easy to play. And then I kept pestering them and I got the guitar when I was 10,” Hayward shared. “And then I was away, really.”

Practicing his craft, Hayward was drawn to several bands of the day; some songs spoke to the ups and downs experienced by most, if not all, teenagers. “The first time I got dumped, an Everly Brothers record just said everything for me,” he recalled. “I was in my room playing that [music] all day.”

From these distant memories, he recently penned the tune, “Living For Love.” If breaking up is the ying, this song speaks to the yang. Hayward sings: “I’m driving through the land we knew…to find that sacred ground…where moonlight of the innocence…our wildest dreams were found…we laid there to the break of day…lovers me and you…I had to give my heart away, what else could I do?”

When Hayward was 17, the trajectory of his musical career forever changed when he answered an advertisement in The Melody Maker. Marty Wilde, a UK pop star who had a major hit with “Teenager in Love” was looking for a guitar player. Hayward got the gig playing in a new band, The Wilde Three, Wilde put together with his wife, Joyce. For a year or so, the threesome bootstrapped tours through the British Isles, Ireland, Africa and the Middle East.

“If I can give musicians any advice, it is to write your own music,” Hayward said. “You have to create your own identity, which was what Marty really told me. After that time, I came to the Moodies as a songwriter.”

When asked what comes first, the lyrics or music when writing a song, Hayward said he usually begins picking on one of his guitars, including his famed cherry red Gibson 335, which he purchased in 1963. “The guitar is such a rhythmic percussion instrument, that things kind of just jump out of it. I always know what the baseline and the drums are going to be, because it’s already in the guitar rhythm,” he said. “I have a kind of melody and a chord sequence of about 10 percent of a song. And then it’s just really hard work from there to fill out the rest of it and make it a complete work.”

Gazing at People—Some Hand in Hand

In 1966, Hayward joined The Moody Blues, which had scored a hit with the song, “Go Now.” The band began as a rhythm and blues outfit, but when Hayward and bassist John Lodge came aboard, a new progressive sound emerged, giving rise to the album Days of Future Passed (1967). Considered one of the first concept albums that details a day in the life of a person—from waking to sleep, Hayward scored major hits with “Tuesday Afternoon,” and “Nights in White Satin.”

While both songs became standout hits from the album that was steeped in psychedelia, Hayward said the latter tune was initially met with skepticism. “I can’t say the rest of the group were that interested when I first played it to them. But Mike Pinder certainly was because it was absolutely right for his Mellotron and the sound that he really saw,” Hayward said of the band’s keyboardist who used the electro-mechanical instrument that was capable of imitating other instruments, including orchestral sounds.

“When he rediscovered the Mellotron things like ‘Nights in White Satin’ just made the music work for him as well as me,” Hayward said, and then added his first remembrance of hearing the song postproduction:

“We [the band] were going up the motorway in our van, and ‘Nights’ came on [the radio], and we just pulled over on the side of the road, and just listened to it. And we all said, ‘It’s kind of spooky. There’s something kind of eerie about it,’” he noted. “I don’t think we ever thought it was going to be a single. There was no mention of singles from ‘Days of Future Past.’”

Hayward credits Decca Records producer Hugh Mendl for championing the band and the song, including arranging for the London Festival Orchestra to play on Days of Future Past, which was recorded in stereo (not all that common for unknown bands at the time). “He really, really believed in it [Nights] and stuck with it. And it was a minor hit in the 1960s,” Hayward said of the song that had a major resurgence beginning in 1972 when it was rereleased. “When we played it on stage, some kind of magic happened in the room. And that’s the only inclination we had; it didn’t sound like a hit record. It just sounded like something a bit…weird.”

Voices in the Sky

In Hayward’s view, the band perfectly gelled on the next album, In Search of a Lost Chord (1968). A reflection of the psychedelic and spiritual movement of the day, Hayward and some bandmates were seekers and enthralled with The Tibetan Book of The Dead, the Bhagavad Gita and tuning into LSD guru Timothy Leary, who is eternalized in the song, “Legend of a Mind.”

“For some people in the band, it was a genuine kind of search for enlightenment and for others it was a convenient way to express themselves that fitted in with the kind of general consensus of the band,” Hayward recalled of this experimental time period. “I think everybody in the band had a different kind of philosophy of life. But I do say we, particularly Mike [Pinder], myself and Ray [Thomas], we’re on some kind of rather juvenile search for some sort of enlightenment. We put our hearts into it.”

Hayward, who played twelve string guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, sitar, tablas, piano, Mellotron, bass guitar, harpsichord, and percussion on the album, also penned three songs, including “Voices in the Sky,” which became a hit.

In the following years, the band would release a host of albums, including On the Threshold of a Dream (1969), A Question of Balance (1970), Every Good Boy Deserves a Favor (1971) and Seventh Sojourn (1972). All these records charted quite well and featured lavishly lush material—both introspective tracks and radio friendly numbers like “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band).”

The group would take a break in the mid-1970s and later reform. The following decade, they found new audiences with a more synth-pop approach on tunes like “The Voice” and “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere.” While Hayward had penned hit songs, the only time he truly believed he had struck gold was when he wrote “Your Wildest Dreams,” released in 1986.

“Tony Visconti [producer] did the base line and I did the [Yamaha] DX7 keyboards on Wildest Dreams. And I think we both thought then…this is a hit. So, something’s you know and you’re right,” Hayward said. “And yet other things you don’t. We did a song called ‘Watching and Waiting’ that we thought would be at last the follow up to ‘Knights in White Satin’ and my mum bought it, and that’s about it.”

What Rock and Roll Has Taught Us

Hayward has never stopped writing and performing, even when the Moody Blues were on hiatus or since the group officially stopped performing in 2018. He released his first solo album, Songwriter, in 1977—several more would follow over the forthcoming years. When he returns to the Tarrytown Music Hall on July 5, he will be pulling songs from his entire catalog.

“I hope there’s something there for everybody. There’s a lot of things I couldn’t get off stage without playing like ‘Nights’ or ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ or ‘Forever Autumn’ or ‘Question’. Our problem, the four of us, is not what to play, but what to leave out,” Hayward said. “I’m very lucky. The three players I’m with, I’m with them because they’re absolutely virtuosos and they enhance the way that I wrote these songs.”

The touring band consists of Mike Dawes (guitar), Julie Ragins (singer and keyboardist) and Karmen Gould (singer and flutist). “We do some new songs and we do quite a few deeper cuts that we’ve never done on tour before, which I enjoy very much, but only Moodie fans would know before the concert, but hopefully people will Google them afterwards,” Hayward said.

The night will also feature a set of music from Christopher Cross who has scored many hits over the years, including “Ride Like the Wind” and “Arthur’s Theme (The Best You Can Do),” among many others. “I’ve always admired him. And likewise, it’s been reciprocated. So, we’ve known each other for a while. It’s a really good combination,” Hayward said, adding that while the two musicians have often played music together, they haven’t yet had the “courage” to do so on stage. “No matter where I am in the building, when he starts playing ‘Sailing’ with that guitar sound of his, I just have to stop and listen to it and then I’m in heaven for three minutes.”

At a recent concert in San Diego, Hayward looked out to the crowd seeing many different generations of fans, which he said is rewarding. He believes that the manner in which some of the Moody Blues albums were recorded has a lot to do with the music standing the test of time.

“Decca Records, although we didn’t realize it at the time, was such a wonderful collection run by elegant rather elderly gentlemen…the recording quality was absolutely perfect,” he said. “They were made with a beautiful kind of stereo picture that stands up well on any kind of system nowadays. It’s just really beautifully recorded music. And I think we were very lucky, purely by accident, to be with such a wonderful record company.”

As he looks forward to returning to the Music Hall on July 5th and sharing these world-renowned songs that have shaped his career and touched the lives of fans who have bought upwards of 70 million copies of Moody Blues records, he said: “My life has always been just about music. I’m very lucky.”

At 77, Hayward has no plans to slow down, but wouldn’t have guessed he would be still performing at his age when he joined The Moody Blues. “As a teenager, people of my age now who were still actively playing were maybe standing in front of an orchestra or a big band or crooning, but not actually performing…making it happen,” he said. “I think that’s what rock and roll has taught us and brought to the whole music scene. In the end, it’s all about the songs.”

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