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Moody Blues Spar With Their Past

Feb. 24 saw the release of the five-track DVD 'The Best of the Moody Blues' (Polydor/Universal). For the Moodies' Justin Hayward, the videos of the 1980s singles on the release, including the top 30 Hot 100 hits "Your Wildest Dreams" and "I Know You're Out There Somewhere" -- marked a make-or-break period for an act that needed to reinvent itself as relevant to the MTV generation.

"Those things that are on that DVD are things that worked for us, and curiously enough they're the only things that we scripted ourselves," Hayward tells Billboard.com. "Brian Grant directed three of them. They were a turning point for the group. I think they were a snapshot of a time in the group's history where we had to make a change. We had to move on -- otherwise we were just dated old farts."

The Moody Blues originated in England's Midlands and started life as an R&B band before Hayward replaced original vocalist Denny Laine and moved the Moodies into a more rock-oriented direction. A series of ornate, top-selling albums followed, including "Days of Future Passed," which boasted the evergreen "Nights in White Satin." The track is a grandiose affair tailor-made for video, but unfortunately, that medium hadn't yet been invented. "It would have been brilliant," says Hayward. "There's only a couple of classic sort of things from the '60s that keep cropping up. For us, it got to us late."

Keyboardist Mike Pinder and flautist Ray Thomas are no longer part of the Moody Blues equation, and the group now revolve around original members Hayward, drummer Graeme Edge and bassist John Lodge. Hayward, however, rejects the charge leveled against groups who lose members that the original spirit of the band begins to get chipped away. "A band is the people who are in it and the five of us in 1968, it worked and at the same time there's a legacy of that," he says. "The guys that aren't there anymore don't want to do it. It's no good wanting something you just can't have, really."

Last year saw the release of the band's latest album, "December." Though it was successful, Hayward doesn't see the Moodies ever returning to their album-a-year work rate of yore, or anything like it. "I think it's going to happen when it's going to happen," he says. "I've never really known [where] the future lies. I know that we're doing a tour through May and June."

On the other hand, retirement is also out of the question: "You can retire from not going on the road but you can't retire from the Moody Blues' music because it's in demand; it's just there. There's such an amount of it that somebody's always got to be on the end of the phone about it, and that's usually me."

But that legacy is a double-edged sword. "We've learnt to kind of spar with our biggest competitor, which is our own catalog," says Hayward. "[But] it's not that the past haunts you. The past is wonderful and I'm so glad that it was part of people's lives."


Edited 1 time by MoodyJill 02/04/11 14:05:23.