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Thehe point all changed for John Lodge and his fellow musicians in the Moody Blues happened one night at the Fiesta club in Stockton. Lodge and Justin Hayward were recent additions to the band, with Lodge playing bass and Hayward on lead guitar. They had been scheduled for a lucrative series of cabaret shows across the north of England. The Moodies were performing a variety-style performance, mixing rhythm and blues with comedy numbers, all while dressed in blue suits. They had achieved a big hit a few years earlier with "Go Now," but by 1966, their style and sound seemed passé.

After the performance, Hayward mentioned in a past interview, a man approached the dressing room to speak with the band. "Typically, people would say something like, 'Oh, you're great.' But he stated, 'I just thought I'd tell you, you're the worst fucking band I've seen in my life. You're rubbish. And somebody's got to tell you.'" Hayward and singer Ray Thomas were brought to tears, and later on, as their van drove south from the location, drummer Graeme Edge spoke up from the back: "That guy's right. We're awful."

The following day, the Moodies pledged to drop the outfits, the routine, and the past, and reinvent themselves. In this process, they emerged as British rock's most underrated group: trailblazers of a distinct sound, consistent chart-toppers across multiple decades in the United States, and Hall of Fame inductees who performed at renowned venues on both sides of the Atlantic until their career concluded in 2018 with a Las Vegas engagement.

And John Lodge, who passed away at the age of 82, was key to that lasting achievement, as bass player, singer, and songwriter. With their album Days of Future Passed in 1967, the Moody Blues didn't just embrace the new experimental trends but assimilated them and propelled past them in one movement: a prior year, they had been a variety act, and now they were developing the elements that would define a fresh category: progressive rock.

Not that the Moodies were particularly inclined to 20-minute epics with complex rhythms. They wrote what were, at heart, catchy tunes, but wrapped them in beautiful orchestrations, with rich vocal blends and detailed musical layers (the defining element in "Nights in White Satin," their "iconic" song, isn't the guitar: it's flute). They grasped the possibilities of the studio in a way not many of their peers did. And in a group packed with capable composers, Lodge stood out prominently.

"Ride My See-Saw," from 1968's "In Search of the Lost Chord," showcased Lodge's talents: you can hear the rhythm and blues roots in the beat and Hayward's staccato playing, but the vocals are layered so intricately the track becomes nearly hymnal. It's quite of its time, but also entirely fantastic – the experience of pop changing in the moment, in the studio. (There's a performance recording from 1969 that's electrifying: this group truly knew how to rock.)

Lodge had decided to be a bassist because he loved pianists. As he stated in a 2023 discussion: "Back when I was at college, there was a cafe right by my campus with a branded music player. Every midday, I used to leave and instead of having lunch at the institution, I'd go to the cafe, have a cup of espresso and put a coin in the machine and play whatever my favorite song was. I realised that what I truly liked about rock'n'roll is the bass line on the keyboard, the rhythmic engine. I realised that the musicians I was listening to were people like Fats, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, and I saw the left hand side, the rhythmic piano, was the heart of the genre ... There were no basses in Birmingham at the time. When the instrument eventually arrived to the area, it appeared in a music shop called Jack Woodross. Every Saturday morning, all the aspiring players would go there and practice their instruments and learn something new from others. And one day, I went there and I saw 'Direct from the USA, Sunburst Precision Bass' in the window. So I went home and asked to my father, could you help me buy this guitar? And we went back to the store, I bought it, and it's been with me ever since."

By 1972, the Moodies were genuinely massive, and encouraged by their tendency for vague but faintly deep-seeming words, listeners began believing they possessed rather more insight than they actually did, a situation that inspired what became Lodge's defining song for the Moodies, "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)." The song, which peaked at No 12 in the United States as a single, saw Lodge disavowing any form of expertise: "If you want the wind of change to blow about you / And you're the sole additional person to know, don't say / I'm just a vocalist in a rock 'n' roll group."

The 1973 concert series to promote "Seventh Sojourn" saw the Moody Blues experiencing a way of life more commonly associated with Led Zeppelin. As Lodge remembered in the liner notes for a reissue of the album: "The band had our own Boeing 707 which was decked out with a sitting room and a hearth. There were two bedrooms, some twenty separate TVs, audio systems everywhere, and we had our own attendant and our name written on the outside of the aircraft. I had a quite empty sensation knowing that matters had become this over-the-top."

The following period, the band went on break for four years. It was probably a wise move, because as a critic commented in ZigZag in the mid-70s, just as the punk movement was stirring, "They produce records which sell to affluent fashionable pairs residing in the suburban areas who know and care as much regarding the genre as a fictional character."

When they returned in 1978, with the "Octave" album, it didn't quite resemble punk bands, but the album's opener, Lodge's "Steppin' in a Slide Zone," showed that the Moody Blues could adjust to evolving times without sacrificing their essential identity – the multitracked vocals and unusual arrangements were still in place, but "Steppin' in a Slide Zone" had an sharpness that still sounds quite of that era, precise and tight and edgy. Just in case anyone was put off, Lodge's "Survival" from that very album had orchestras to complement the synths, and the gentleness that was one of the band's great traits.

Yet although they were the remarkable enduring acts and major achievements of psychedelia's's golden age – arguably only Paul McCartney had more success for longer – the Moody Blues never occupied a prominent cultural space. But they did occupy their own niche, and that was sufficiently adequate for the vast numbers of people who continued loving them.

And Lodge did not take music casually. He consistently saw in it the potential for something beyond mere amusement. In that 2023 interview, he was asked what "psychedelic" meant to him, and replied aptly: "I hope your mind will delve into the sounds and take you wherever the composition guides you. It's not just about joining in, it's listening. It can be one note and that carries you elsewhere. And I believe if you can create experiences and stories in your thoughts where the music leads you, to me that's mind-expanding. You have to engage to things, not just hear them."