Justin Hayward: The Days of Future Now

“It’s still daytime here,” Justin Hayward says. “Only just!” The songwriter has opened his computer, unveiling a glittering sunshine that sits at odds with the greyness that swamps Dublin at this time. “I’m very lucky,” he says. “The last few years, I’ve worked at a studio in Genoa [Italy], and had a recording partner, which is a real joy. Somebody who is always going to make your stuff, if it’s decent enough, work. I think most musicians need that kind of relationship, where they can give it to somebody else sonically. I’m very lucky to have that partnership.”

I’m struggling to place Genoa on the map. “Genoa is the big port to Northern Italy,” he admits. “A gateway to Milan, and Italy’s industrial North.” I’ve no doubt that his music has found a market there. “Certain songs,” he smiles. “Songs like ‘Nights In White Satin’, and that’s great. I’m happy with the way things are.”

Contentment is a key factor of this interview, although the conversation momentarily changes tone as Hayward comes to terms with his standing in life. “Too many people we’ve lost over the last couple of years,” Hayward sighs, “..always resonates with me.”  The interview occurs only weeks after Mike Pinder’s death, and less than three years after Graeme Edge’s – not forgetting Denny Laine, the guitarist who left The Moody Blues to form Wings with Paul McCartney, who similarly passed away in 2023.

We move past this juncture, to discuss the tour Hayward is preparing for. “I’ve been with the same people for a few years now,” he readily admits. “We have Mike Dawes, guitar genius, with me. [We have] Karmen Gould, virtuoso flute player, and Julie Ragins, who has the voice of an angel I would say. Julie was a mainstay of the Moody Blues as well. So, there’s four of us onstage.”

Keen to impress his fans, Hayward is set to play some favorites. “I would say there’s something there for everybody,” Hayward continues. “That’s how I would say it is. There are a few things that I probably shouldn’t get off stage without playing. Those are included as well, and the rest….”

He elaborates: “I’ve been around a long time. In a stage show, it’s often not what I include; it’s what I leave out. We’ve been out quite a bit already this year, so I know if I drop these, people are going to go: ‘Oh no – I liked that one!’ So, that’s the dilemma. But I’m able to do deeper album cuts, which is really nice.”

I’m guessing “Forever Autumn” sits as one of the compositions he has to play. “I think so,” he agrees. “I especially do in this part of the world [Europe], but it seems that wherever I go, people know it. It’s a beautiful song, and I was lucky to do the original version of it; a great pleasure. Yes, I’ll be doing that one.”

“Guitar is my instrument,” Hayward admits. “I play keyboards on recordings: Of course, I can do what I want. But yes, in a live setting, I’m just a guitar player, and that is what comes through. Most of the songs just jump out through the guitar anyway. So rhythmic, and it has all the parts you would need for a drummer or a bass player. It’s all contained in a guitar; an acoustic guitar.”

Hayward picked up piano around the time “when the LinnDrum first came out”. “I had lessons from when I was a kid,” he says, “and I knew enough that I could play it. When timecode really became important in songs, and you’d do things to a drum machine in demos at home, then I started writing things much more on keyboard. I had success with ‘Your Wildest Dreams’ and ‘I Know You’re Out There Somewhere’, which were keyboard-based. The discipline and freedom a timecode gives you is something I never want to be without now.”

He lets out a solitary laugh. “I enjoy that kind of recording, and I play keyboards myself on things. Patrick Moraz made a great contribution to ‘Your Wildest Dreams’, but the basic track on the DX7 is stuff I did at home. It was stuff I played on the record. It was much easier to do with a timecode and a drum machine, and those were done to a strict time. Graeme enjoyed it very much; there was never any resistance.”

Prog has become something of a trendy term in recent times – does it fit Hayward? “Maybe it was trendy in 1981,” he chortles. “I’m not sure what [prog] means, because it’s a convenient little box. I don’t think so; I’m just a guy who writes songs. I was a little bit out of place when I was included in that, because I’m a ‘two-verses and a middle-eight kind of guy’.”

In the school of Lennon-McCartney? “Would any of us put ourselves in that, the greatest songwriters ever?” Eager to clarify the sentence, he says. “I know what you mean, but for all of us, it was Buddy Holly who showed us the way. ‘Nights In White Satin’ is just three chords, essentially. So, I think it’s the feeling that we get. We can do these songs perfectly at a soundcheck, but when the audience comes in, they bring in some kind of tangible atmosphere into the room.”

I suggest he’s being modest about his work, but Hayward is adamant that his “songs are not hard to do.”  “You just have to go with it,” he explains. “It’s all about dynamic: You can’t just start at the beginning, and keep the same level until the end. There has to be some mood change in it. I’ve always found that to be very important.”

“I came to The Moody Blues a songwriter,” he admits, suggesting that it was Pinder who pushed the band to move from performing covers in favor of their own songs. “I learned that before I was in the band, because I was a guitar player for Marty Wilde, a rock & roll singer. He said to me: ‘To survive in this business, you’ve got to create your own identity.'”

He says there was some “understanding” early on to “move The Moodies forward.” He seems more relaxed these days, suggesting that he “can take it easy a little bit” when it comes to recording. “When me and John joined, I think it became the band everyone wanted to be,” he admits,” whereas I don’t think it was like that before. I know it wasn’t like that before, because it was short-lived, and no one was really happy.”

I’m curious to hear why The Moody Blues continue to enjoy a fanbase in America, considering their “Englishness”. “Pastoral is a very interesting word that you used,” he beams. “America is the land of my musical heroes. In our case, when we first went to America, we were third or fourth on the bill, and never expected to be anything more than that. I think what happened with us was a lot of luck. We didn’t have success for a long time, and we weren’t really ‘personalities’, but on the first tour in 1968 of America, we were opening for a group called Canned Heat. The Decca recordings we made were so beautifully recorded that when FM Radio were just starting, our stuff was the perfect stereo image. I was always disappointed with a lot of the stuff that was recorded coming out of the U.K. that focused on a middle register for an AM radio. Our stuff, not by any design, was thanks to our record company who believed in a beautiful stereo-spread image. Our stuff sounded really sweet, and that carried us along from the late 1960s into the 1970s.” He still carries that philosophy to this day.

Hayward is set to perform a series of “double-headers” across America with Christopher Cross. “He does his show, and I do mine, and the other way around. I’ve toured with Christopher before, and it’s a real joy. He’s a pleasure: him, and all his musicians. From my point of view, every song’s a winner.” Would they consider writing together? “I think we’re both happy as we are,” Hayward replies, laughing as he does so. More pertinently, Hayward hopes “the weather is good”, and that “we all have a nice time.” “The tour manager I’m working with now has never done this part of the US, so it’s always a joy to be with someone who has never experienced a great part of the country as well. That’s always interesting too.”

And his voice? “I think my voice probably has [changed over the decades]. These things change with age. There’s a naivete about youth; these things just come out of your mouth.” He coughs, before continuing: “You learn how to do it. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’m happier now with the way I can control things, and I’m happier now with the people I’m playing with. I mean, I can hear myself, whereas with The Moodies [while] I loved every moment of it, we had to be two different bands. We were a band that played onstage and had to play in front of great, big Marshall cabinets. We were a recording band that was relatively quiet and careful about what was going on. The fact that we tried to be ‘two-bands-in-one’ created some tension, and that might be why Mike left in the mid-1970s. It was a hard dynamic.”

Hayward says he called the shots on his songs: “I was never afraid to say anything. It’s much more relaxed now, because I was the group member from hell. With my songs, I was telling people what to do: ‘This is what the bassline is…’ I was fortunate to be in a group where they didn’t hit me.”

Despite living on the European mainland for “25, 30 years”, he still retains an indelible sense of Englishness about him: “I’m from Wiltshire, which is where Stonehenge is at.”

Will he play there again? “I did a British tour in March of this year, which I enjoyed very much. I was welcomed, and everybody seemed pretty happy. I’m doing the U.K. again in October: Scotland, and the North of England. Very much looking forward to it.”

He’s busy working on new material: “Always got stuff: Some new things coming out in the summer. They’ll be ready for the summer; I always like to think I’m moving forward.”

But for now, his focus isn’t on the Italian sun, but the American shows. By the time this article goes to print, he will have performed some solo shows by himself – commencing with Lobero Theatre at Santa Barbara – before joining Christopher Cross at Red Bank in New Jersey on July 3rd.

“I want fans to feel that they’re in safe hands, he promises. “I know that they’ll know some of these songs, and we will all be there for the same purpose. And that’s to create something nice in the room.”

More information about ‘Justin Hayward’s Blue World 2024 Tour Dates can be found here.

-Eoghan Lyng

Photo: Justin Hayward (John Nichols)