The Moody Blues started as a Birmingham beat band and nearly broke up broke
Before Nights in White Satin, the Moody Blues were a scrappy Birmingham rhythm and blues act named partly after a brewery they hoped would sponsor them. They scored a number one with Go Now, then watched their management vanish with the money, leaving them bankrupt within a year.
The band formed in Birmingham in May 1964 around Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder, veterans of a local group called El Riot & the Rebels, with drummer Graeme Edge, guitarist Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick. John Lodge was offered the bass slot but stayed in college. Hoping for backing from the Mitchells & Butlers Brewery, which owned many music clubs, they called themselves the M&B5. The name soon became the Moody Blues, keeping the letters while nodding to Duke Ellington's Mood Indigo and to the rhythm and blues they played.
They moved to London that summer and signed with Ridgepride, a management firm that leased their recordings to Decca. Go Now reached number one in Britain and the US Top 10 around the turn of 1965, but follow-ups faltered. After the launch party for their first album, The Magnificent Moodies, in July 1965, they phoned Ridgepride about a drinks bill of 100 pounds and found the office shut and the managers gone, along with all their record earnings.
Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager, took them on, and they toured behind the Rolling Stones and supported the Beatles on what proved to be that band's last British tour, in December 1965. Yet Warwick quit music in July 1966, Laine left that October, and Epstein dropped them. Rebuilt with Justin Hayward and Lodge, they embraced psychedelia, and their 1967 album Days of Future Passed blended rock with classical music.
A run of albums followed, among them In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) and Seventh Sojourn (1972), before a hiatus in 1974. In all they made 16 studio albums, sold 70 million albums worldwide and earned a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2018. Every founding member had died by the end of 2024, and Lodge died in 2025.
Source: The Moody Blues
