Ray Thomas

About

From Wikipedia:

Raymond Thomas (29 December 1941 – 4 January 2018) was an English multi-instrumentalist, flautist, singer, founding member and composer in the English progressive rock band the Moody Blues. His flute solo on the band’s 1967 hit single “Nights in White Satin” is regarded as one of progressive rock’s defining moments. In 2018, he was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues.

Early years

[…] In the 1960s, Thomas joined the Birmingham Youth Choir then began singing with various Birmingham blues and soul groups including The Saints and Sinners and The Ramblers. He was inspired to learn the flute from a grandfather who played the instrument. Again taking up the harmonica, he started a band, El Riot and the Rebels, with bassist John Lodge. After a couple of years their friend Mike Pinder joined as keyboardist. On Easter Monday 1963 the band opened for the Beatles at the Bridge Hotel, Tenbury Wells. Thomas and Pinder were later in a band called Krew Cats, formed in 1963, who played in Hamburg and other places in northern Germany.

The Moody Blues

Thomas and Pinder then recruited guitarist Denny Laine, drummer Graeme Edge, and bassist Clint Warwick to form a new, blues-based band, The Moody Blues. Signed to Decca Records, their first album, The Magnificent Moodies, yielded a No. 1 UK hit (No. 10 in the US) with “Go Now“. […]

In a 2015 interview, Ray Thomas of The Moody Blues relates how fellow bandmate Mike Pinder and himself took part in the vocal overdubs for “I Am The Walrus“.

We were very friendly at the time with the Beatles. I mean, this is going back to the original band… we lived in one big house all together in North Hampton, and that was fantastic. We rented this house for a year and it was just a year-long party. The Beatles used to come over and there’s all these girls hanging around outside, and they used to come across our neighbor’s back gardens, climbing the fences to get in without the fans seeing them. They came over and they played us Sgt. Pepper. They really admired our band and of course we admired them, and so they came over and said, “What do you think?” – because they wanted our opinion on it. In those days, there wasn’t any backbiting with bands. There was so much creativity going on. We used to sit down and listen to somebody else and say, “Bloody hell, that’s fantastic. Why didn’t we think of that?”…stuff like that. Anyway, Mike and I went into Abbey Road after that, and we played on “I Am The Walrus” and “Fool on the Hill.” And it was my idea to put all those harmonicas on. There was George and John, me and Mike around the microphone. Paul was in the control room at the desk, and we put these harmonicas down and did some vocal backing on “Walrus.”

Ray Thomas – From Discussions Magazine Music Blog: An EXCLUSIVE interview with THE MOODY BLUES’ Ray Thomas! (archive.org), January 2015

Last updated on April 10, 2023