Justin Hayward, live - 7 Moody Blues songs from 2 recent shows + interviews [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Still sounding great at 76...

I was originally planning to post just video with the first 5 of these songs, from his concert in Peterborough, Ontario on May 29, but decided to add several videos from an interview he'd done a week earlier in Canada...and one of those clips reminded me of a magazine interview from a couple of years ago that I ran across recently, and that led to a concert video from a couple of weeks ago. Hope you don't mind my rambling.

Peterborough ON 5/29/2023

From the YouTube description:

Somehow I managed to press the pause button without noticing so I missed out on some of the classics, but here are:
1) The Actor
2) Driftwood
3) Tuesday Afternoon
4) The Story In Your Eyes
5) I Know You're Out There Somewhere

Band: Mike Dawes (guitar), Karmen Gould (flute), Julie Ragins (keyboard).

Videos from an interview Justin did a week earlier...and see the note and article excerpt below the videos:

The interview segments above are in the order posted, except for the next-to-last one, which was posted 9 days ago, 6 days after the video about tribute bands that ends with the end of the interview.

I don't know why that discussion of "Your Wildest Dreams" was added to the interviewer's YouTube channel late, but I'm glad it wasn't omitted, both because it's about one of the biggest Moodies hits, and because Justin stresses the importance of relationships - which "are everything" - and he's talking about male and female friends as well as women he's loved.

I'd heard, and loved, "Your Wildest Dreams" for years before I found out that a lot of hardcore Moodies fans didn't like that song - in fact hated the way the Moodies' sound had changed, and all too often blamed producer Tony Visconti for that change. They didn't even want to accept that Tony and Justin are friends - Justin had even been best man at Tony's wedding to May Pang - and the fans' attitude was that somehow Tony had led the band astray, away from their late-'60s/early-'70s sound.

If any of those fans are still around (some might not be, since they were boomers), they probably came close to having heart attacks or strokes if they saw interviews Justin did in the last 10 years where he talked about Tony. In an interview he did in 2015, he listed The Other Side of Life as one of his three favorite Moodies albums, along with Days Of Future Passed and A Question Of Balance:

https://longislandweekly.com/days-of-future-passed-justin-haywards-album-faves/

The Other Side of Life (Threshold/Polydor) – “I met [producer]Tony [Visconti] socially and then we got on so well and he had such a great studio. I went down to his studio on Dean Street in Soho and we hit it off straight away and then it was a natural for us to go straight into doing an album together and it became The Other Side of Life. Like Days of Future Passed, it was a huge milestone.”

Justin had even more to say during an interview for Vulture two years ago:

https://www.vulture.com/2021/04/justin-hayward-talks-moody-blues-song-your-wildest-dreams.html

April 12, 2021
How ‘Your Wildest Dreams’ Finally Gave the Moody Blues Their ‘Ecstasy of Success’

By Devon Ivie

The 1980s were far from temperamental for the Moody Blues, with the prog-rock patriarchs embracing that new decade of pop with the same enthusiasm they’d previously brought to their mystifying poeticisms and luscious interludes about the times of day. (Hell, even Homer Simpson was a fan.) It began with 1981’s Long Distance Voyager and the synth-lite bop “Gemini Dream,” ushering in what would become the band’s defining MTV moment with the lead track from 1986’s The Other Side of Life, “Your Wildest Dreams.” A catchy-as-hell Billboard top-ten hit, the song’s infusion of pop presented the Moodies with a whole new set of fans: Ones who weren’t, say, old enough to attend or care about Woodstock, or those who lusted after frontman Justin Hayward’s upbeat musings about a first love. Exactly 35 years later, “Your Wildest Dreams” remains an incredible case study of a band who met their heyday in the ’60s, only to falter through the ensuing decade and then reemerge with an entirely new sound, resulting in one of their most successful songs ever.

Hayward, who wrote “Your Wildest Dreams” and still has a fabulous head of hair, recently told Vulture he was inspired by the “common experience” of romantic curiosities and what-ifs that often haunt people as they grow older. However, in the aftermath of the song’s release, it ended up spurring a personal journey for Hayward that he would advise “anybody else against doing.” Well then! Far less cryptically, we also discussed how super-producer Tony Visconti transformed the Moodies’ sound with The Other Side of Life, the band’s fleeting “lost” feeling, and how “Your Wildest Dreams” gave them their biggest taste of success yet.

So, it’s the mid-’80s, and the Billboard charts are starting to see a prominent shift away from rock to pop. Can you give me a better idea of where the Moodies were creatively at this time?
I wish there had been a plan for us, because there was none. We had just come off an album called The Present, and that was our last album that took a lot of time to record. We’d start at three in the afternoon and come home at five in the morning. We didn’t want to do that anymore. The ’80s in London was such a wonderful time in music. There was so much going on that I really enjoyed. As a band we still kind of looked good. We were okay. [Laughs.] But we were looking for a new producer. I had previously met Tony Visconti and I fell in love with him. He had everything that a musician and songwriter wanted. He had the most beautiful little studio in Soho, right in the middle of London, and every big artist would come and visit. It was a total open house. So many famous people would just pop in. Tony is a magnetic character and I decided I wanted to work with him. There was no argument there, he had to do this record. He was a great choice for us. There was no plan, really, we were lost. We were guided to Tony.

While working with him, was there a sense of urgency that the band had to adapt to a more pop-orientated sound?
I was never quite sure, but from my perspective, I was the right person for wanting to go in that direction. I was always trying to write a pop song. Fortunately, it went into all of these greater concepts in the past. “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Question” have something to say about the world, but they still seem to fit in to the pop genre. If you had taken out parts of them individually, they would’ve been pop songs. I was lucky that they fit in with the rest of the songs. I think it was time for us where we had to adapt or else we would’ve drowned underneath a prog-rock label. It wasn’t that we were looking for something new; it was the fact that we were lost. But when I met Tony, I knew that I just wanted to be with him. “Your Wildest Dreams” was perfect for that. I wrote it at home and I still have the instruments that I wrote it on. That was the big change.

-snip-

Much more at the link, including Justin talking about some Moodies fans who actually staged a protest over the change in their sound at one concert during the 1986 tour supporting that album. When the Moodies started playing their new material (most if not all of their concerts on that tour started with older songs), the fans got up and walked out...and according to another fan Justin talked to the next day, the protesters were standing outside crying after leaving the venue, realizing they'd made a mistake. I'd never heard about that particular protest before reading the interview, but a lot of their fans continued to whine about that album for more than a decade.

Justin also said he thinks "Your Wildest Dreams" is one of the Moodies' 7 best songs (he doesn't say what the others are).

I'm guessing those fans, if they're still around, are happy Justin is still touring, even if his interviews might come close to making their heads explode...


Justin on June 14, Huntington NY, "Never Comes The Day" and "Your Wildrst Dreams":