Laine,who sang Go Now and co-wrote Mull of Kintyre,had suffered lung disease in recent years
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| Photography by ; David Cole |
The Moody Blues frontman Denny Laine, who later achieved great success with Paul McCartney in Wings, passed away at the age of 79.
Interstitial lung disease had damaged his lungs. In an Instagram post, his spouse Elizabeth Hines said, "My darling husband passed away peacefully early this morning." I played his favorite Christmas songs for him while I was by his bedside holding his hand. Never again will my world be the same.
Laine co-wrote Wings' Mull of Kintyre, one of the best-selling songs in UK chart history, and provided the vocals for Go Now, one of the seminal ballads of the 1960s.
In 1944, Brian Frederick Hines was born in Birmingham. He changed his stage name to Denny Laine and the Diplomats when he was in his teens, and the band featured future glam star Roy Wood as the singer and future ELO member Bev Bevan as the drummer.
In 1964, he formed the Moody Blues with other up-and-coming blues and R&B stars from the "Brumbeat" scene.y of the song's chorus contributed to its enormous success, as it peaked at No. 1 in the UK and No. 10 in the US.
With their second single, Go Now, a cover of Bessie Banks' R&B ballad, the group had an immediate hit. Driven by one of the most unique, depressing starts to a pop song ever—a melancholy, soulful Laine singing, "we've already said goodbye" to a recently broken heart—and a gorgeously harmonised chorus, the song became an enormous hit thanks to Laine's hurtful, jazzy delivery of the song's top line, which peaked at No. 1 in the UK and No. 10 in the US.
Though a song co-written by Laine, "From the Bottom of My Heart (I Love You)," made it to the UK top 30 in 1965, the band first had trouble matching that level of success.
Later that year, the Moody Blues and the Beatles embarked on their last UK tour together, but Laine left the band in 1966 when things were at an all-time low.
(After he was replaced by Justin Hayward, the Moody Blues found success in a more psychedelic direction, releasing albums Days of Future Passed and songs like Nights in White Satin.)
With a more psychedelic sound, Laine's subsequent group, the Electric String Band, opened for acts like Jimi Hendrix. Laine put out solo music, joined the Brummie supergroup Balls, and joined Ginger Baker's Air Force, another supergroup.
However, the greatest and longest-lasting success he experienced was with Wings, the band that Paul McCartney and his wife Linda founded after the Beatles split up.
Photography by-Richard Young/Shutterstock
Laine was experimenting with a solo album when McCartney called and told him to drop it. "I just called [Laine], who I knew from before, and asked him, 'What are you doing?'" McCartney has provided an explanation. “Nothing,” he replied, so I responded, 'Okay.
Then, hurry up! Laine joined the band for the first time with the album Wild Life and worked with them for the next ten years, contributing to several of their hits, including the powerful Celtic ballad Mull of Kintyre, which became a Christmas No. 1 in 1977 and the first British single to sell two million copies.
Although Wild Life did not reach the UK top 10, the band's subsequent five albums (including the live album Wings Over America) all reached the top of the US charts. This may have been due in part to McCartney's temporary addition of his name to the group. They included Band on the Run, a timeless highlight in McCartney and Laine's back catalog that includes the Laine co-write No Words.
On the other hand, Laine and McCartney wrote Mull of Kintyre without considering the title's mull, where McCartney resided.
"Paul had written the chorus, and we wrote the rest together," Laine recalled, sitting with a bottle of whisky outside a cottage in the Kintyre hills one afternoon. A local band of pipers added an extra touch of Scottish flair, and it went on to surpass the Beatles' She Loves You as the UK's best-selling single, a record that stood until Band Aid's Do They Know It's Christmas? in 1984.
