The Best of Lodge

The most romantic album to come out of the Moody Blues' orbit, and the biggest success by any of the members during the group's five-year hiatus, Justin Hayward and John Lodge's Blue Jays actually started life as a busted collaboration between Hayward and Moody Blues keyboardist Mike Pinder, with Tony Clarke producing and John Lodge in a supporting role, until Pinder pulled out. Clarke then salvaged the early work by holding it together as a collaboration between Hayward and Lodge. Hayward has the more distinctive body of songs, but their strength as a unit lies in their vocal pairing, which is as strong here as it ever was with the group. The pair play the guitars and basses, backed by a group that includes members of Providence, who were signed to the Moodies' Threshold Records.

The best-realized of their classic albums, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour was also the last of the group's albums for almost a decade to be done under reasonably happy and satisfying circumstances – for the last time with this lineup, they went into the studio with a reasonably full song bag and a lot of ambition and brought both as far as time would allow, across close to four months (interrupted by a tour of the United States right in the middle)…

The Moody Blues' best album in five years benefited mostly from the presence of the Top Ten single "Your Wildest Dreams," authored by Justin Hayward, which turned their status as survivors from the '60s psychedelic era into a plus, with a great beat to boot; it also debuted with a very entertaining video featuring young British psychedelic rockers the Mood Six playing the young Moody Blues to promote the song on the newly dominant MTV and rival video outlets. Unfortunately, nothing else that Hayward or anyone else turned in for this album was remotely as catchy, and, in fact, much of the rest of the album - apart from the closer, John Lodge's "It May Be a Fire," which recalls his and Hayward's collaboration on the Blue Jays album - shows signs of a group running on empty creatively…