4. The Moody Blues - A Question Of Balance

Released: 7 August 1970

My pressings: Original Threshold UK LP and Friday Music repressing.

And it was good??

Psychedelia was on the wane by 1970. A slew of bands in the mid-60s had striven towards a more sophisticated and complex sound, only to turn their back on it a year or so later. The Rolling Stones were the first. They had released the roots rock of Beggar’s Banquet in 1968, a reaction to their less than well-received Sgt Pepper also ran, Their Satanic Majesties Request. The Beatles themselves famously sought to “get back” to a more organic and simpler work ethic after their elaborate productions of 1967, and began 1969 with the intention of rehearsing new material for a live show. Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys released a trilogy of simple “homemade” albums that were the antithesis of Pet Sounds. The Who followed their “rock opera” Tommy with Live At Leeds, a live album of raw, spontaneous power. Bands like Free, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin were emerging with music steeped in the blues, and meanwhile The Moody Blues released A Question Of Balance.

For a band who toured as much as the Moodies did, translating their heavily tracked music live was always a problem (their 1968 album In Search Of The Lost Chord famously featured 33 instruments, all played by the band themselves). But by 1970 they had decided to follow in the footsteps of The Beatles and Stones and consciously planned an album that could be perfectly replicated on stage. Also as a first, the band entered the studio without any ready written material to rehearse.

Unlike most bands of this era, all five members of the Moody Blues contributed material. Guitarist Justin Hayward and bassist John Lodge tended to pen the more straightforward rock songs that could be lifted as singles (Nights In White Satin, Ride My See-Saw, etc.). Master of the mellotron Mike Pinder wrote proto-Prog Rock epics, notably the Have You Heard suite from 1969. Flautist Ray Thomas composed tongue in cheek Kinks-like observational pieces like Another Morning and Dear Diary, and rather charmingly, drummer Graeme Edge composed poetry.

Despite the varying nature of the material, Tony Clarke’s lush production of earlier Moodies albums would bind the compositions together and the different styles would complement each other. With the no frills approach of A Question Of Balance this irregularity is far more apparent, making the album more of a patchwork than previous efforts. It’s also a very downbeat album – full of songs about despair, lost love and feeling insignificant.

A Question Of Balance begins with its best-known track, the epic Question. A cut-and-shut of a song (Justin Hayward basically stitched two unfinished pieces together), a superior single mix got to number 2 in the UK chart and was kept off the top spot by the England Football Team. The other stand out tracks are Ray Thomas’s And The Tide Rushes In (written after a spat with his wife) and Mike Pinder’s Melancholy Man. Never the greatest vocalist, Pinder here rises to the occasion at the song’s climax – spewing dejection and anguish over a sea of backing vocals.

Tellingly the band would return to a more familiar sound and format for the next album, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, but in the short term they had achieved what they wanted – a long player perfect for the road (Question, Melancholy Man, Minstrel’s Song and Tortoise and the Hare were performed at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival). Compared to other Moodies albums before and after however, it lacks a cohesion, and rather ironically, a balance.