Moody Blues, The
Entry updated 13 September 2021. Tagged: Music.
UK band formed in Birmingham in the early 1960s by Michael Pinder (1941- ) and Ray Thomas (1941-2018); they combined rock-pop and orchestral musical idioms to notable and popular effect. The band's second release, the concept-album Days of Future Passed (1967) is not sf, despite its title (it tells the story of a single day – a Tuesday – in the life of an ordinary man). In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) is tinged with Indian mysticism. On the Threshold of a Dream (1969) embodies a rather attractive incoherence very characteristic of the hippier varieties of the late 1960s, and seems to be about a spirit-voyage around the cosmos. The group's most straightforwardly sf album is To Our Children's Children's Children (1969), inspired by the Apollo space programme. It begins with a musical recreation of a Saturn V launch (the Rocket employing, we are told, the "power of ten billion butterfly sneezes") and ranges across the future to the year one million and human expansion into the universe. The whole is diluted rather by a taste for sentimental meanderings (the quatrain "so love / everybody / and make them / your friend" is repeated several times). The Lost World of "Lost in a Lost World" (on Seventh Sojourn, 1972) is the Earth from the alienated perspective of a contemporary City dweller. [AR]
links
previous versions of this entry