Breathe Deep, The Moody Blues Cruise: Graeme Edge Gets Moody
by on March 18, 2014 at 10:28 am
Since their start in 1964, classic rockers The Moody Blues have gone through many changes, both in personnel and musical style—from the lush, orchestrated balladry of “Nights In White Satin” (1967) to the synth-rock of “The Other Side Of Life” (1986).
But through it all, one facet has remained consistent over the band’s 50-year history: the presence of founding drummer Graeme Edge. The only person to have played on all of the band’s many studio albums, he remains an integral part of The Moody Blues live band, which continues to tour with longtime members Justin Hayward and John Lodge.
Beyond his distinctive drumming, Edge has also contributed poetry to the band’s classic run of late 60s/early 70s LPs. While he wasn’t always the voice reading the poems (read on for the reason why), these spoken passages were a unique part of the classic Moody Blues sound.
When we spoke to Edge, he was preparing for the upcoming Moody Blues Cruise, which will sail the Caribbean April 2-7, featuring a host of classic rock artists (including The Who’s Roger Daltrey) along with multiple shows and presentations involving the Moody Blues.
In the following interview, Edge discussed plans for this year’s cruise, the origins of his poetry on the records, surprise jams and listening sessions with legends, and the possibility of new music from The Moody Blues. To quote one of his most famous poems, “breathe deep,” and read on.
Howard Whitman: Let’s talk about the upcoming Moody Blues Cruise.
Graeme Edge: Oh yeah!
Whitman: So is this the second one, Graeme?
Edge: It is. We did another one about this time last year.
Whitman: How did it go last year?
Edge: It went very well! It was kind of scary for us. I never sat on stage all alone for an hour before, delivering—I suppose you could call it a lecture. A bit of poetry, some funny stories and all of that … and I felt like I’d been up there 20 minutes, and I started to sweat on how I was going to get through the whole hour, and then I’ve been on there an hour and 15 minutes and a guy in the front is giving me the “cut-throat” signal, so I’d get off and (they’d) get John on.
Whitman: I guess you have a lot of stories to tell by this point?
Edge: Yeah, a lot of them I can’t even tell in public (laughs).
Whitman: Those are the good ones—you’ll save those for the book, right?
Edge: The other ones, yeah!
Whitman: How is it to be on a boat with all of your fans for a week? Did you find it was hard to get some privacy or time to yourself?
Edge: You stay in your room. You can’t go out. Our fans are great—they’re not monsters or anything. But they all ask the same questions of course, and you’ve got to have a touch of Napoleon to have that much affirmation and adoration. Because we know we’re not worth it. We put are trousers on one leg at a time!
Whitman: But to we, the fans, it’s like going on a Star Trek cruise and there’s Captain Kirk walking by—you’re going to want to say hello, right?
Edge: Me personally, I’d be over there.
Whitman: Well, to some of us, you guys are more important than Captain Kirk, you know?
Edge: Aw, well … look what he did. He gave America the idea to go to the moon, or at least (Star Trek creator Gene) Roddenberry, more than him …
Whitman: True! But you guys took us on some journeys as well, you know?
Edge: Yeah! And you American audiences took us on some journeys …
Whitman: Absolutely! From Timothy Leary on down, right?
Edge: Yeah, we had some great times together. We still are having a great time together.
Whitman: Yes! Now, you have a great lineup on the cruise, don’t you? What are some of the other acts that will be performing on board?
Edge: Well the one I like is having Roger Daltrey, he’s an old buddy from way back. And I also like having Rod Argent, yeah, because he was a pal from way back. He’s there with the Zombies, and the Zombies are great; I was really impressed with them, they were on the last cruise. But Rod Argent and I, he was one of the keyboard players … the other one was Robin Lumley, you remember him from Brand X?
Whitman: Sure!
Edge: And the lead singer from Procol Harum, Gary Brooker … those three keyboard men and me and some others were in a local little pick-up band a few years ago, and would turn up at pubs and play just for the fun of it. But I think we had the best name for a band I’ve ever heard of … we were called Loud, Competent and Wrong (laughs).
Whitman: Great name. That’s a supergroup right there!
Edge: (laughs) Yes indeedy!
Whitman: Any recordings of that band exist?
Edge: No, no … there were no cell phones and things around then, and also there was a time in 1965, 66-ish or around there … I was in a club called where they used to have a band setup and it was a very popular rock spot. And I was up there, just doing a jam with Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton, and Chas Chandler comes walking in with this new discovery of his—a black guy.
Whitman: I know where you’re going with this …
Edge: Yeah, and I was behind them two …
Whitman: James Marshall Hendrix.
Edge: That’s it. And I was playing behind them (Clapton and Hendrix) … I’ve seen it mentioned in three or four books, but nobody ever mentions the @@@%+% drummer or bass player! (laughs)
Whitman: I hear that!
Edge: You know? They just talk about them two, and you can’t blame them. I mean, it was magic. And again, no cell phones or nothing around back then, so no copy exists.
Whitman: Right! Now that would be all over Youtube, right?
Edge: Yeah, wouldn’t it? Yeah.
Whitman: I was wondering, how is it to play at sea, to play music on a boat? Was that kind of different?
Edge: Not really, because these things are so huge and they don’t really have a destination. They’re going here and there but they’ve got plenty of sea so they plot a course that’s used to minimize the effects of the wind and the sea anyway, because most of the time they’re only doing seven or eight knots because they allow themselves plenty of time anyway. So you really don’t notice you’re at sea apart from the fact that you can’t open the windows (laugh). But nowadays, at most hotels you can’t open the windows anyway.
Whitman: You mentioned you did a kind of “Storytellers” piece where you were answering questions, a Q and A thing. Are you performing at a lot of various times over the course of the cruise?
Edge: Yeah, we’re doing two sort of standard kinds of things. Then we’re doing one each of a lecture—one hour up there on your own, whatever you want to call it—a trial by fire (laughs). And then we’re planning on a kind of front-room, acoustic revisit of all of the songs and the times and the places from the Isle of Wight (concert), singing and playing and some songs. We’re trying to work out what we’re going to do—we haven’t decided yet. In our main show, we won’t do a song that Mike sang or Ray sang, because you don’t have the guy’s voice. So we just don’t do it. But for that, we might just do it in a friendly kind of way just to add it in—we’re not sure. They might just let me sing all of them (laughs).
Whitman: On your concert videos, I have seen you doing some of your poems—which (keyboardist) Mike Pinder did on the records, correct?
Edge: Most of them, yeah. I was on a couple but he did most of them. At the time, he smoked more cigarettes and drank more whiskey (laughs) so he had a nice, loud voice (imitates Pinder’s deep voice) … yes.
Whitman: You have a very nice speaking voice as well.
Edge: Thank you. Well, I’ve caught up with the whiskey and the wine and the cigarettes now.
Whitman: I’ve always been curious—how did that come about with you writing poems for the albums?
Edge: I’ve always actually written poems, ever since I was 8 or 9. I remember, in fact, doing one little thing, a piece—a composition. And they said, if you had 15 pounds—75 dollars—what would you buy? I just wrote it in rhyme. And you had to stand there and read it out to the class and the teacher said “bring it out to the front” and so I took it out to the front, and what surprised me was that I was so unaware of proper poetry. I didn’t know you put the rhyme in the line at the end of the sentence, the rhyming word at the end of the line. So mine just went across the page like ordinary lines. And that teacher was quite impressed by what I’d managed to pull off in my ignorance. And Mr. Mumford, he gave me a couple of books and talked to me about things. I got to understand the various kinds of poetry there were rather than just the limericks. So I was always writing and on Days of Future Past, we had a plethora of stuff about (times of day), from lunchtime (“Peak Hour”) to “Twilight Time,” “Tuesday Afternoon” … sunset, loads of songs. As musicians, we knew a lot about life after mid-day. But we hadn’t seen that many mornings over the years (laughs). So we were a bit blank. And I set out to write a song that covered the mornings, “Morning Glory,” and as it progressed, I also did an evening part of it, which became “Late Lament,” but I was intending to write the lyrics to a song. I took it in and presented to the boys and said, “Can anybody put any music to this?” They all read it and said, “This is fantastic but there’s way too many words, you just can’t sing that. You have to have spaces where they can hold a vowel and sing instead of just talk.” I went “Oh yeah, let’s see, I can cut it down.” And (producer) Tony Clarke said “No, no, no, that is fantastic. You read it and we’ll put music behind it, some strings—make it into something,” which they did. And then they sort of sidled up to me and said, “You know, it’s great, but it’s a bit better with Mike’s voice.” Like I was going to get upset! I was absolutely thrilled to have something on the album. So that’s the story of it.
Whitman: And that’s the start of what became a great tradition on the records?
Edge: Yep, yep. The first seven or eight albums, you kind of had an idea of where our minds were headed from the poems. Again, you can be much more direct.
Whitman: It’s been a while since the Moody Blues did an album of new material. Any possibility of new music from the band, or is it more of a live entity at this point?
Edge: We kind of discuss it now and then. It’s going to take somebody coming up and getting it together. The problem is, everything’s changed so much … there are no record companies like there used to be. So you don’t go to the record companies and work in their studio anymore. I’d love to do it, but we’ve got to wait until the circumstances are right. The short answer to your question is, there is no plan. We get somebody every couple or three years come up with an idea and say “What about this?” and we look at it and say, “No, that’s not the way we’re doing the next one.”
Whitman: Justin Hayward is still doing some things on his own, right?
Edge: Yeah, and John (Lodge) is doing a solo album as well, because you can go see them all on their own and do all that and put out a nice, simple album, but the Moodies album is going to get all three of us, at least, and you’ve got to get all three of us—I live in Florida, Justin lives in Monaco, John lives in London or Barbados, and it is a big production. And there’s nobody (at) the record company vice president level who even knows who we are anymore. Our people have died or retired (laughs).
Whitman: I’m sure there are plenty of fans like myself who would welcome some new music from you.
Edge: Yeah, there is. We just had a guy come up with a plan a couple of weeks ago, which I quite liked. I presented it to the boys. Justin gave it a lukewarmy one. … I’ll bring it up again. The guy just wants a chance to speak to us. I’ll bring it up again and see if he can inspire us. He did inspire me, actually, with his ideas. Let’s see what he can do with the guys. It’s not impossible but it’s a bit unlikely because anyway, we’ve all got so much going on in our lives—wives, children, grandchildren, houses, properties, businesses … the tax men, they love us. I get a love letter from them every week.
Whitman: And these days, the ways records are made, people record their own parts separately on laptops and send them around … but you guys like to get together and play together as a band, right?
Edge: Well, yeah, that’s the only way to get soul in your music. I don’t mean the usual meaning of the world “soul” when you’re talking music; I mean real, human feeling. You can hear it. I take the hip-hop girls out of it, because they do sing well … and I hate hearing myself say this, because they used to say it about me, but they all sound the same, they’ve all got the same programs—Garage Band—they all use the same bass drum off that, and the only time that anything remotely constructive, it’s usually nicked from somebody else, you know? And I just don’t enjoy it. But then again, we all only enjoy the music from (ages) 15 to 30, don’t we? “Whatever I enjoy, that was the music that was the best ever.”
Whitman: Pretty much, but when I was in those ages, it was the best ever. You think about all of the amazing bands in the 60s and 70s, yourselves included—it was unbelievable.
Edge: The Beatles, Beach Boys, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd …
Whitman: The Who—your shipmate Roger!
Edge: Yeah …
Whitman: There’s also a Yes cruise, “Cruise to the Edge,” (from the sponsors of The Moody Blues Cruise) … look at what Yes did!
Edge: Yeah, and the various Jefferson Airplane/Starship (bands) … a lot of good stuff around. And we never mentioned Jimi Hendrix, we should remember him. I mean, that guy was amazing.
Whitman: Yes, and it’s amazing that you jammed with him!
Edge: More than once, actually! I actually was the first person who worked with him on what became Electric Ladyland, and he was working around the corner from where I lived, and he knocked me up at 4 a.m. with a quarter-inch reel-to-reel (tape) to play me the first mix of Electric Ladyland. I was half-asleep when it started, and wide awake when it finished.
Whitman: I’ll bet!
Edge: Great, great piece of work. Sadly missed … I wonder where he’d be now?
Whitman: I ask a lot of artists I talk to about this … the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Moody Blues come up a lot when people talk about bands that should be there but aren’t. What’s your feeling on that, Graeme, on the Hall of Fame institution and why you’re not there and should be?
Edge: My feeling is—I think everybody knows—you buy it. You buy it, it’s simple as that. And for us, I’m not suggesting The Beatles bought in, people like that. But if you look at the list, one third should be there, one-third is “OK,” and one third is “who?” And frankly, every time we’re not picked there’s a little surge on Twitter and Internet: “There they go again, these savages, they don’t know anything.” It gives our career a little boost every year, so we’d probably be better off … the whole thing is kind of dying out, they had to move out of New York, they’re not getting enough interest now. And I mean, what they did with Guns N’ Roses a couple of years ago was so transparent. They were trying to get the band back together for the big thing, and those two guys were not going to work again, Slash and Axl. They weren’t going to work together again—to put it mildly, they are not interested in working together. They were hoping to put it up and get some TV out of it. I think they made a mistake calling it the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They should have called it The Music Hall of Fame, and then it could carry on, because there’s some hip-hop guys that could be going in, and a couple of tenors, what about The Three Tenors? That could get some interest. But, you know, they made their bed and I’m not going to pay for the covers.
Whitman: Hopefully you will get your spot there, it’s certainly well-deserved—without having to pay for it.
Edge: No, no, that’s not going to happen.
Whitman: If you did get in, do you think we might see Mike and Ray up there—the classic five together again?
Edge: You possibly might. (Flautist/vocalist) Ray (Thomas) is (feeling) pretty poorly. That’s why he left, because he was sick. We didn’t want him to. We keep quiet about that; we don’t talk about what it is.
Whitman: You do have a terrific player with you on flute these days.
Edge: Norda (Mullen)—yeah, she’s great.
Whitman: Yes. I did see her with you a few years back, and she was amazing. You have a great touring line up; your stage band is wonderful.
Edge: Aw, yeah. It’s great being up there with two drummers, because drummers never get to play with guitarists all the time … melody musicians—there’s always somebody there, but drummers, you’ re always on your own. I remember one famous comment from a drummer—the lead guitarist supposedly turns around and says “Let’s play it again,” and the drummer says, “OK, how do you want it this time—too !##$$*$ fast or too !##$$*$ slow?” (laughs) Because it’s always your fault, you know? And so it’s nice having two of you up there.
Click here for further information on The Moody Blues Cruise.
Visit the Moody Blues’ official site here.

