John Lodge, who played bass and sang in the Moody Blues — including on the English band’s “Nights in White Satin,” a No. 2 hit in the United States in 1972, and on “Your Wildest Dreams,” which cracked the top 10 more than a decade later — has died. He was 82.
His death was announced in a statement by his family, who said he died “suddenly and unexpectedly,” but didn’t specify a cause or say when or where he died.
“John peacefully slipped away surrounded by his loved-ones and the sounds of The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly,” the statement said. According to Lodge’s website, he had tour dates scheduled this year starting Dec. 4 in Cerritos.
Born in Birmingham, England, in 1943, Lodge joined the Moody Blues in 1966 along with singer Justin Hayward; the two replaced Denny Laine (who went on to form Wings with Paul McCartney) and Clint Warwick.
The group had started out as one of countless young English acts aping American R&B in the mid-’60s. “We were originally a rhythm and blues band, wearing blue suits and singing about people and problems in the Deep South,” Hayward recalled in an interview with The Times in 1990. “It was OK, but it was incongruous, getting us nowhere, and in the end we had no money, no nothing.”
Having been asked by their record company to come up with an LP that would show off the hi-fi possibilities of its new recording equipment, Hayward and Lodge pushed the band toward a more ornate sound that blended rock and classical music.
In 1967, the band released “Days of Future Passed,” an elaborate concept album featuring the London Festival Orchestra; today it’s widely regarded as an early landmark of the progressive rock sound that would later encompass the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer.
In addition to “Nights in White Satin” — heard recently in a sultry Chanel commercial starring Timothée Chalamet — the album spun off “Tuesday Afternoon,” a pastoral orchestral-rock number about “gently swaying through the fairyland of love.”
Neither single was a smash at the time. Yet steady FM radio play kept the songs in rotation through the early ’70s, by which time rock was full of proudly ambitious outfits such as Genesis and Electric Light Orchestra.
In 1972, the Moody Blues topped the Billboard 200 with its album “Seventh Sojourn,” which included a hit single, “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),” with Lodge on lead vocals.
The band broke up after “Seventh Sojourn” — Hayward told The Times that “we were getting more and more enclosed and introverted, and there was just nothing left to talk about” — though he and Lodge released a duo album, “Blue Jays,” in 1975; two years later, Lodge put out his first solo LP, “Natural Avenue.”
The Moody Blues reconvened in 1977 and went on to find success in the synth-pop ’80s with songs like “Gemini Dream,” “The Voice” “and “Your Wildest Dreams,” the last of which became a hit on MTV with a music video starring Hayward as a musician looking back at his life.
The band toured through the late 2010s, performing at England’s Glastonbury festival in 2015 and at the Hollywood Bowl in 2017. Ray Thomas, a founding member of the group who played flute, died in 2018; Graeme Edge, the band’s founding drummer, died in 2021; Laine died in 2023; Mike Pinder, who played keyboards in the band until 1978, died last year. Hayward wrote Friday on Facebook that he was “very sad and shocked to hear of John’s passing” and said he had “such happy memories of making music together.”
In 2023, Lodge released a solo album that he said represented a reimagining of “Days of Future Passed.” His survivors include his wife, Kirsten, two children and a grandchild.
In 2018, the Moody Blues were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame by Heart’s Ann Wilson, who said the band “took me from childhood to adulthood.”
“The Moody Blues are not cool or ironic — they’re not a construct,” Wilson added. “There’s a beautiful and approachable honesty about the poetry and a natural intelligence in the music.
“You can lie back and listen to any one of the albums, beginning to end, and go out of the world.”
