(Of A Strange And Distant Time)
Moody Blue Justin Hayward Makes Tracks For The Future
Interview by Vincent Barajas |
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Preface (August 14, 2000): It was early February when I got the idea to interview Justin Hayward, after spotting a Rick Wakeman feature in Outre #18. From there, I got the support of the magazine's editor (who, as it turned out, was a fan), and he and I contacted Justin's publicist. Finally, on May 12, we received word that Mr. Hayward was willing to take some time out of his busy schedule and talk to me. The interview took place on May 25, 2000, and was published August 11 in Outre issue #21. For this reprint of the interview, I've chosen to leave in most of the extraneous conversation that may seem irrelevant to the subjects at hand. Doing so, I feel, helps put a more "human" face on someone we often have a tendency to view as superhuman. I begin from the moment Justin answered the phone. This interview would not have come to pass without the help of James Wilson and Lori Lousararian. **** "I want to ride the range/Across those skies of black." So proclaims Justin Hayward in English Sunset, the rousing opening track of Strange Times, the first new album by venerable British progressive rock act The Moody Blues in eight years. And for over three decades, the gifted singer/songwriter/guitarist has ridden across a wide range indeed, in a career spawning numerous accolades and hits. Haywards career in music can be traced back to early 60s London, but his career as a Moody Blue began in June, 1966. Invited to join the band after the departure of original frontman Denny Laine (who later joined Paul McCartneys Wings), Hayward and new bassist John Lodge assisted founding members, keyboardist Mike Pinder, flautist Ray Thomas, and drummer Graeme Edge in creating the landmark 1967 album Days Of Future Passed. Combining spoken word passages, orchestral arrangements, and straight-up rock songs to imaginative effect, Days went on to become a classic, spawning the international smashes Tuesday Afternoon and Nights In White Satin (both written by Hayward). But Days proved to be only the beginning of a remarkable run for the band. Between 1967 and 1972, the Moodies released seven top 40 albums (two of those in one year!), a nearly unheard of feat in todays industry wasteland of one-album wonders. The bands psychedelic musings reached stratospheric heights with their fourth release, 1969's To Our Childrens Childrens Children, a concept album about space exploration which [almost] coincided with the first Apollo moon landing. Nearly a quarter-century later, in 1993, chief NASA astronaut Robert "Hoot" Gibson presented the band with a cassette of Days Of Future Passed that had traveled more than 10 million miles (420 times around the Earth) on space shuttle missions aboard the Challenger, Endeavor and Atlantis. The decade of the nineties also offered what was perhaps the most substantial evidence of the Moodies place in the pop-culture firmament: a guest spot on Foxs The Simpsons. When Outre caught up with Hayward, the active 53 year old was shuttling back and forth between his adopted home country of France, and Italy - where he was mixing the music for the Moody Blues upcoming PBS concert special (which had recently been taped at Londons Royal Albert Hall). He discussed Moodies projects both new and classic with candor: JH: Hello? Outre: Hello, Justin. This is Vincent with Outre Magazine. JH: Yeah, Hello Vincent, how are you? Outre: Good. How are you? JH: Yeah, I'm fine, thanks. I just left a message on your answering machine. Outre: You did? I'm sorry ... JH: That's alright, that's ok. It's so difficult sometimes, with the time change and everything, and I just thought I'd check it out. But anyway, you're not at your number, so here you are! Outre: Were you just calling to remind me? JH: I was just calling to make sure everything was ok, yeah. I called about five minutes ago. Outre: I'm glad I finally got in touch with you. My editor and I have been trying to get this going for a few months now. JH: Oh really? Outre: Yeah, well we knew you were on tour in the UK, so we expected to wait awhile. JH: Oh, ok. Well I'm actually working in Italy right now ... just doing some mixing, that's all, at the studio. Outre: Was it for the concert that was taped? JH: Yes, that's right, it's for the PBS special that we did at the Albert Hall. So I've been going between there and here. I left it yesterday, and the engineer knows exactly what to do for a couple of days, anyway, and then I'll go back tomorrow. Outre: Great, I'm looking forward to that special! JH: Me too. Outre: Ok, I have quite a few questions here ... let's go ahead and get started. I'd like to ask you about the song Gypsy. JH: Oh yeah! [sounds excited] Outre: Was that inspired by Doctor Who, as I've heard? JH: Well, it's a long time ago, that's for sure. 1969 - incredible, really. The whole idea for the album [To Our Childrens Childrens Children] was really Tony Clarke's - our record producer at the time. He had a bee in his bonnet about doing an album about space; he was an astronomer and followed the stars. He built this dome on the top of his house with big telescopes, and really used to get quite boring about it! But it was a baby of his, and his idea was really to try and coincide releasing an album - in our usual kind of pretentious way - with man landing on the moon ... which we missed. I don't think we released it until later on in the year. And also the concept was the concept of burying things to be discovered in a couple of thousands years time, so that was the starting point for it. I'd already written a song called Watching and Waiting, which was done on this old pipe organ, and then, to balance that, I had the idea for Gypsy. There was nothing more behind it. I can't say that I was really influenced by Doctor Who, although it sounds a bit like that. It's just an idea of a lost spaceship, and gypsies in space, really. Outre: Watching & Waiting has prompted a lot of discussion amongst fans. It's written from a strange perspective, with lyrics like, "Don't be alarmed by my fields and my forests." Who's perspective was the song being written from? JH: To tie it in with the theme [of To Our Childrens Childrens Children], I changed it to make it, you know, [about] a being from a lost world. A beautiful, lonely world. I altered it from being just a straight love song, to give it that dimension for the sake of the album. Probably I made it much more obscure than it needed to be, but it still moves me, and I'm not sure that I can explain why. I feel every single word of it, it invokes images within me that I find particularly moving. It does have a spiritual dimension to it, a religious-almost dimension to it. Outre: Speaking of spirituality, there was a lot of that in the first seven albums [Days Of Future Passed through Seventh Sojourn]. Was that intentional? JH: Like I say, Tony Clarke was very much an astronomer, and wasn't so much into the spiritual side of things. But the rest of us - particularly myself, Pinder and Ray - were dabbling in everything, trying to guzzle as much spiritual and psychedelic information as we could possibly get. We were racing toward it all the time - reading every book, investigating every kind of religion, having all sorts of psychedelic experiences. We met Timothy Leary in 1968 on our first tour of America, me Mike and Ray stayed with him on his ranch for a week or so, and we had a wonderful time. Not once were we offered any LSD, surprisingly enough. That's not to say that we didn't take it ourselves. [The Moodies meeting with counter culture-guru Leary resulted in Thomas psychedelic opus, Legend Of A Mind (1968), which remains one of the bands most requested songs to this day] So we went through a lot of religious experiences together, we tended to read the same books. I remember us all reading the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tibetan Book of The Dead, and doing all of these things together. So what we were saying was sincere, we weren't just picking up bits of information and using them in songs. We were actually living this stuff at the time, I suppose like many other people, but we took it a lot more seriously than most other musicians, and we were able to put it into music in a more accessible way than some of the other musicians who were really seriously into it, but who were inaccessible in their music. Outre: You mentioned your experiments with LSD. Many of your fans believe that certain songs of yours contain references to taking drugs - even in their titles! Fly Me High and Visions Of Paradise come to mind. Was there ever a time when the Moodies, as a band, were advocating the use of mind-altering substances? Or were the "references" just reflections of your own experiences? JH: I don't think, at the time, we were famous enough to "advocate" anything. There weren't that many people listening to us! It was only when we got to America that we really found an audience. Our audience in Europe at the time really didn't know what we were on about. Only a small percentage of the people that we knew were into the same kind of stuff as we were. I think you're right, it was just a reflection of our own lives. [Our experiences were] the only thing we knew to sing about, and it kind of set us apart. But we did have that eagerness of youth that wants to experiment. Particularly in those days, the sixties. We joined the generation that were experimenting with everything. I was smoking a lot then, smoking a lot of dope, and it definitely was part of the music, I can't deny that. I wouldn't deny it, because it was so wonderful. And being in a group of people [helped]. We had safety in numbers. We could keep cool and be private, and just do our own thing. Having said that, there was nothing sloppy or drug-induced about our music. We took that very seriously, and the quality of the musicianship was the most important thing, that never suffered. We never recorded anything if we didn't feel that it moved us - whether we were stoned or straight. Outre: You spoke of finding your audience in America, and I remembered hearing of some Vietnam-era handbills for anti-war events that had the Moody Blues listed as performers. Did you consider yourself part of the anti-war movement of that time period? JH: Well, I don't think we considered ourselves part of it, because we were never in that kind of big league. We weren't of much use to the anti-war brigade, because we weren't that famous, really. We were always on the edges of music - we weren't known faces. But I have to say yes, we were anti-war, because we'd had a lot of very weird experiences. We were all children of the end of the Second World War, when we thought it could never happen again, and then we ended up being in America and playing to young kids who didn't want to go to war, and were expected to. We were reflecting what our audience was saying to us. Every night we would meet and go to people's houses after the concerts, and often we would stay in people's houses in those days. It's unbelievable really, not to think about going to a hotel, but instead just crashing at the house of some people you met! (laughs) Outre: You mean, like fans?? JH: Yeah, or just people. We would always seem to meet interesting people. I think the first couple of years in America, we didn't really have fans, we just had people that were hearing our music for the first time, and thought, "Oh, I like these guys." We had more friends than fans then. We did become involved [in the anti-war movement], and I think the thing that hit us most was that we were in Czechoslovakia when the Russians rolled in. We were there working in April, 1968, when they arrived. [During the Prague Spring of 1968, Czech leader Alexander Dubcek reaffirmed Czechoslovaks alliance with the Soviet Union, and cemented Czechoslovakias commitment to Communism] The British Air Force very kindly got us out, and it wasn't until we got back to England that we realized what was going on. It left a big impression on us - and not only because we never got paid! It was kind of like, "What the fuck's going on??" We thought all that was over. It made a big mark, and then when we went to America and were confronted by this tremendous polarization of feelings, we couldn't help but be on the anti-war side. Every kid was, for Goodness sake. You couldn't be on the fence, let's put it that way. And of course, young people had so much that they wanted to say, and so much that they wanted to do at that time in their lives. They certainly didn't want to go off to some country and fight for that kind of cause. I mean, don't get me wrong, America is the greatest nation on Earth. There's something very special about yourself and the others. You must always remember that - that you're born a member of the greatest nation on Earth. And that really means something to you inside - I'm sure it does - and it shows in every American all around the world. And that's not so if you're British, or you're French, or you're Italian - then you're members of a nation that once was great, and is not now. It [England] is struggling to keep its image and its respectability and its honor and its dignity, whereas America doesn't have that problem. Outre: Do you consider yourself a fan of science fiction? JH: Yes, I certainly do, and I was more of a fan when I was younger, I think it's a young man's game. I think probably there was better science fiction being written then. I think because so many [scientific] bubbles have been burst, it's harder for science fiction writers now, unfortunately. So many of them go over to tongue-in-cheek kind of stuff, humorous things. Myself and Graeme were always particularly into it [sci-fi], and I think we read everything important by the time we were 25. Outre: What was your reaction when Jeff Wayne approached you with his idea for a musical version of H. G. Wells War Of The Worlds? Did you think it sounded crazy? JH: I've been asked to do a number of things like that, and I've done quite a few wacky things like that, and sometimes they came off and sometimes they didn't. With Jeff, I just got a call completely out of the blue. He phoned the office, and they called me, and said, "There's this guy trying to get in touch with you, and he's from Brooklyn." I called him and he said, "I'm doing this project called War Of The Worlds, which I'm working on with my father." His father was a big part of it. The first thing he asked me was, "Are you the guy that sang Nights In White Satin?", because he wasn't sure which one of us sang it. I told him I was, and he said, "Then I've got this song for you [Forever Autumn]." So I went down to this little studio called AdVision on Oxford street, I'd kinda learned the song anyway before I got there, and Jeff had got all the atmosphere. He was an atmosphere kind of person, you know? Lights right, scarf over the lamp and all that sort of stuff, he had to have the mood right. He'd done everything, except the voices, so I did the voices and the backing vocals as well. Then he explained everything to me about the project. The next few weeks, I got more involved with the project, I played the guitar, and I did some other songs on it, and I was generally sort of hanging around. I took a fee - which was a big mistake, big mistake (laughs), because like I said, I'd done a lot of those things before and nothing had ever happened, and so I got used to saying, "Yeah, great. Of course you'd like my voice on it. I'll have the money upfront." Which is what I did, because I couldn't work out who was going to buy it. I knew the music was great, but I thought, "Who the hell's going to buy it? Who's going to try and sell this and who's going to buy it?" In '76 I recorded it, and in '78 it came out, and actually it was bought by a lot of young kids - nine, ten year old kids - first of all. And then suddenly it appeared in the charts, and then the record company called and they said, "Would you go on Top Of The Pops? Your song is the hit from it." So it was wonderful, really, I went all over the world with it, it was a hit all over the world. Outre: Was it a kick when you heard yourself on an album with [narrator] Sir Richard Burton? JH: Well, I could never put that bit together, because I thought, what an unlikely [collaboration] with Richard Burton. But, there you go, it seemed to work. Excuse me, Vincent, I'm going to have a big cough. [coughs] Outre: I think you suffer from the allergies like me, probably. JH: I do, yeah. I picked it up yesterday, it's exactly that. Outre: Is it true that at one point in time, someone was developing a musical version of Jonathan Swifts Gulliver's Travels for you to star in? JH: Yes. [pause] Yes, I sang the show, as Gulliver, and I've got the demos here. It was actually a man called Lionel Bart, a famous English musical writer [Oliver!, From Russia With Love]. He was a good pal of mine, I knew him since I first came to London in 1963. Lionel wrote a version of Gulliver's travels - it must have been back in the 70's - and I did all the demos for it, but he never got around to putting it together. It's got some lovely songs on it. As a matter of fact, they were just sent to me, because after he died [in 1999], his secretary sent me all the stuff and she said, "I saw your name all over this, so I thought you'd like it." Outre: Was Mr. Bart developing Gulliver specifically for you, or were you just helping him out with it? JH: No, he wasn't developing it for me. He would use me as a demo singer, but whether he was developing it for me, I doubt it. Because what they would want is a proper musical star to play the lead. But I certainly did the original recordings, which were never released, they were just demos for the show's producers. Outre: The style of the Moody Blues' music changed drastically after Seventh Sojourn in 1972. The newer songs seem to focus more on interpersonal relationships, and are less ponderous than the older ones. Why? JH: I think we said everything we could say as young people with the first seven albums, and they'll always be the classics. It's young people who like the music that we did when we were young people best, even though it's a bit old fashioned sounding. But a number of things changed. Two of the mystics left - Mike Pinder and Tony Clarke. They were the strange ones - the rest of us were quite normal! Mike leaving meant a change in emphasis of lyric, because I always had to play things to Mike, and I always wanted Mike's approval. He was a hero of mine, there's no getting away from it, and he was the most important figure in the band for a long while. And he knew that I was the one that was going to make it happen, but he was the one who was behind me making it happen. I mean, I wrote Nights In White Satin, but he went, "duh-dee-duh-dee-duh-duh-duh" [hums Nights riff]. That says it all, really. Just that line alone on the mellotron sold the song. His contribution was also in the rhythm of the band, because if you listen to the early records, the main rhythm is held by a tambourine, which was always being played by Mike. Mike would never play piano or anything on the first track. We'd do drums, bass, guitar, and Mike on tambourine. And it was Mike who we would follow - all of us, even Graeme on drums, would follow Mike, and so his was always the tempo. You listen to the early records, you see how far up front the tambourine is, like in The Story In Your Eyes [Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, 1971]. You listen, it's carried by a tambourine, it's so simple. So when he left, there was a change. I think it was the end of an era, I think he had kind of dried up of that mystic [nature] in a way. And the world had changed, the world had moved on, and we [remaining four Moodies] wanted to move on with it, so I think that was why they [Pinder and Clarke] were left behind. We were very lucky that we got through Octave [1978], which was a very painful album, and then we had Long Distance Voyager [1981], which was one of our biggest albums, and then we realized, "Hey, we can do this, and we can be happy with it." In the 80's, and up until today, we've been a much happier band than we were in the first years. Outre: Do you enjoy writing songs for films, and would you ever score an entire film if you were asked to? JH: It's a cut-throat business. Doing music for movies, youve got to do battle with 100 other guys whove already got their foot in the door, and are going to make sure that you dont get yours in. Theres a lot that goes on - a lot of favors, a lot of "knowing somebody", and all of that kind of stuff. Its a dirty business, I have to say that, and I found that out. I have scored a couple of movies - cheapo things that werent very good, but they were great experiences [Hayward contributed songs to such genre-related films as Howling IV (1988) and She (1985)]. I did a science fiction series for [BBC] television as well, called Starcops, with Tony Visconti [Moodies producer, 1986-1991], that I really, really enjoyed. Tremendously time consuming for not much reward, that's the only thing. But I really would like to do more of it. I learned how to do it through the television series. It was a thirteen part series and we recorded so much music [including the theme song, It Wont Be Easy]. Outre: I understand that you are a great fan of the late Stanley Kubrick. JH: Kubrick always comes to mind because people say, "Whats your favorite film?", and its always been Dr. Strangelove [1964]. I remember going to Shepperton and seeing that room - the big control room where the President of the United States was. Walking onto the set, I actually saw it, and Ive got a picture of it as well. Outre: You walked onto the set? How did that come about? JH: I was doing something down there. I was just working down there, doing a rehearsal for something or other, and one of the technician guys said, "Hey Justin, theyre doing this Kubrick thing with Peter Sellers, come have a look at this." I only just peeked around the door, switched the lights on, and there it was - the whole soundstage, the big operations room. Outre: It must be great just to say you were there, because that film is pretty much universally considered a classic! JH: Oh, absolutely. For me, its probably the best film ever made. Not so much for Kubrick, but for the performances of the people in it, which were masterful, really, every single one. Outre: Tell us about Rick Wakeman's Jules Verne-inspired Return To The Centre Of The Earth [1999]. JH: I've known Rick for years, and worked with him on different projects, and he's always been a pal. He wrote to me in his usual kind of genteel, gentlemanly way, and layed the whole thing out. Just to convince me, he told me the budget and all the details. Any question he thought I might be asking, he answered already in his letter. And Then he sent me the song [Still Waters Run Deep], and I actually asked him to make a couple of changes in it. It took me awhile to pluck up the courage to actually say to him, "I would be interested, if you could change the song." And he said, "Yeah, sure, no problem", and I was so relieved, I thought he'd say, "Fuck off", but he didn't. He was lovely about it. As usual with Rick, it was very light-hearted and very enjoyable, off the cuff. The War Of The Worlds was serious - that was a very serious project. Very intense, all about the music, all about capturing a moment on record. With Rick it was very open, and everyone had a lot of laughs, and it was a different way of doing it. Outre: English Sunset seems like an unusual choice to lead off your new album, Strange Times, considering that your largest fan base is here in America. I originally thought that perhaps the change in England's government inspired the song, but I've also heard that the song was written 8 years ago, well before Labor Party politics took hold. JH: Yeah, I must have written it just after we did Keys Of The Kingdom [1991]. It didn't have much to do with the change of government at all. I don't think that's helped Great Britain, because now we have government by press agent, or "spin" government. Nothing is what it seems, really, it's just government by propaganda. English Sunset is about the beauty and the tragedy of England and being English. I admire the French very much here because they've managed to always hold their culture, and it's valuable to them. Their family structure, and the rules, and the traditions - they'll fight to keep them. England just said, "Aw, fuck it, that's all in the past, let it go." But what it's got in its place is nothing. Now it's got no character at all. It's got this wonderful past, but it's got no present, and I don't know what the future is there. Outre: Speaking of English Sunset, the song has a pretty good techno beat. Seeing as how the Moody Blues were pioneers in the field of synthesized musical sounds, your transition to electronic music seems like a natural one. Do you foresee yourself doing more in the way of modern electronica? JH: I hope so - if it works for the song. That's the most important thing. I think it did in this case. We'd already recorded the song normally with guitars, drums, and bass, and it was fine. And then I just started messing around with the keyboard player, working on a loop of some of Graeme's drums, and a hi-hat riff. We started listening to [producer, remixer] William Orbit, and those kind of things. We found a few old analog sounds and just made this loop of them, and we just mixed it into what we'd already played, and it opened up a whole world of ideas, really. So I can see more of it, yes. We're recording on a computer now anyway, so we can overlay anything easily, or move things around easily. Outre: Is your line going to beep when [your next interview] calls in? JH: No, it's not. Outre: Ok, I should let you go, to free up your line. JH: Ok. Outre: Real quick - there was a long gap between Keys Of The Kingdom and Strange Times. Do you anticipate making your audience wait that long again before releasing another album? JH: "I dont know" is the answer, and thats usually my answer with anything to do with the Moody Blues. But I hope not. I hope it wont be that long. The Moodies is one of those things - it could go on for another twenty years, it could be over tomorrow. Outre: Thanks very much for your time. JH: Its my pleasure. Check your local listing for airtimes of The Moody Blues PBS special, "Hall of Fame." Visit Outre online at http://www.filmfax.com/ |