Last edited Thu Oct 20, 2022, 02:32 PM - Edit history (1)
since I was wondering about any new articles that might have been published because of his birthday on the 14th.
And I found a new article from Goldmine, which is interesting for Justin's comments on a variety of subjects, even though these are from old interviews - "Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues on his first impression of America, the '80s as his favorite decade and preference for pop songs":
https://www.goldminemag.com/music-history/justin-hayward-of-the-moody-blues-on-his-first-impression-of-america-the-80s-as-his-favorite-decade-and-preference-for-pop-songs
Three of the quotes below, with the subject lines/headers:
-snip-
In awe of all of his accomplishments?
Justin Hayward: I think it’s never been enough, because there are always people who have done more and achieved more and who are much better writers and singers than me. So I have great respect for them, because it’s still a mystery to me as to how you get to those heights. Some people have scaled those heights, and some people have just gotten a part of the way up, like me. I look back and think of what I could have done, and how much more I could have done with a particular opportunity if I had opened up another door at a particular time. The only time it hit me was ... when Universal asked me to remaster the first seven Moodies albums, and because they wanted a 7.1 surround sound, all we could do with Days of Future Passed was to go back to the original four track. So when we did that, that was jaw dropping. How did we do that? Not so much with the Moodies, but with the orchestra and Peter Knight and the whole work. I found it amazing to go back the original recordings and hear the banter before and after the songs and that really brought it home to me. The rest of the time, no, I don’t think about that.
Setting high standards for himself
JH: I think it did in the ‘70s and ‘80s when I was motivated then to do my best for the Moodies and to also to be with the people I met while with the Moodies and to bring them into the Moodies fold. I met Tony Visconti first as a solo artist and I realized how good he would be for the Moodies. Often I do look back at things and think that they could have been better.
-snip-
HIs favorite decade was NOT the '60s
JH: There was one huge explosion (in the '60s) and that was The Beatles and it’s hard to overestimate how important they were. It’s difficult to explain, but they just completely changed the world musically. So they opened the door. After that it allowed the rest of us through and suddenly it made record companies respect what rock groups wanted to do. But if I could only have one decade it would still be the ‘80s. I loved the way that young kids were discovering things then. I loved working with our producer Tony Visconti who was in touch with a lot of much younger groups. And of course we did have great commercial success which I was aware of and awake for but I would still choose the ‘80s decade as my favorite. The beginning of great technology in music I thought was a great revelation.
A great record company, Mercury/Polygram — that was our label after London Records — they knew how to do it; they knew how to promote that stuff. We were given leave and permission to script our own videos and we did that and had success. Then two records later they took that away from us and decided they knew better and it collapsed. But for that brief two years when we were doing it all ourselves it worked. So we had a great record company who knew how to promote things and trusted us and we had Tony Visconti. He was not only a great producer but a great musician too, great bass player.
I imagine it would shock a lot of Moodies fans to know that Justin's favorite decade was the '80s.
And a number of them would probably be unhappy with Justin's praise of producer Tony Visconti (who was also a friend; Justin was best man when Tony married May Pang).
I mentioned a couple of things about Moodies fandom that had seemed odd to me in an earlier reply here. The widespread dislike of Tony was also something I noticed and found puzzling. But a lot of the fans I encountered/read seemed to think that if the Moodies had never worked with Tony, their '80s albums would have sounded just like their late '60s and early '70s albums, which was the sound those fans preferred. Never mind that the Moodies' sound had already begun to change years earlier, with Mike Pinder leaving the band and Patrick Moraz joining. Justin and John had gone to Tony because they wanted a different sound, and more hits, and he delivered, especially with "Your Wildest Dreams":
https://democraticunderground.com/103473030
More re Justin's love of '80s music and his admiration for Tony Visconti, in an article Justin posted on his own website, originally from the Huffington Post (dated Nov. 10, 2014, though I'm not sure if that's the date he posted it or the date it was published by HuffPo):
https://justinhayward.com/blogs/news/conversations-with-the-moody-blues-justin-hayward
This excerpt follows a comment of Justin's about how his iTunes library is mostly from the '80s and early '90s; MR is Mike Ragogna:
MR: Do you think that possibly the sounds of groups like yours and the arrangements that were happening at the time helped form the sound of the eighties?
JH: Now, Michael, I'm not going to claim that in any kind of way. Every generation has their own sounds and their own music and people so love the music of their youth that I wouldn't take credit for their youth, but certainly, it turned me on. For me, it was meeting Tony Visconti who made great records with us and the fact that he had a little Roland MIDI controller, there was a lot of stuff that I could do with him alone, just the two of us. It kind of bypassed the whole A&R s**t and all of those other people. It was very refreshing. We owe Tony Visconti a great deal.
MR: And Tony Visconti was one of the bridges between David Bowie's material and the eighties. Many new romantic and Euro pop dance owed a lot to and was inspired by some of the works of Tony and what he was doing.
JH: It absolutely did. When I was working with him for four or five years in his studio, every day, there'd be young boys and girls coming to pay homage, just to meet him. And he would always set aside some time and a tea break to meet him. Of course, they loved all the Marc Bolan and Hazel O'Connor stuff. That's the generation, I think, that influenced the eighties style, more than us and the prog rock thing. But it was a lovely time that culminated, for us, with an association with PBS in 1990 and again in 1992 where they filmed The Moodies with an orchestra for the first time. That was great. It took us another step further.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I don't want people discouraged from posting their favorites by other people trashing those songs. I'm not easily discouraged from posting music I like, but some people can be.