Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues was not pleased with the song either, even though it in no way was meant as a slight on the Moodies. When they have the first dance, they play Poor Man’s Moody Blues. “The Greeks even use it as a wedding song. “I wish I hadn’t penned it – it’s haunted me ever since,” admitted Lees years later. To say that Barclay James Harvest are the poor man’s Moody Blues is just rubbish.” The Moody Blues were magnificent, and are magnificent, I think, but you will find them making not quite the music they were making years ago, but you find Barclay James Harvest still making the music they were making many years ago.
Legendary radio DJ Alan “Fluff” Freeman from London’s Capital Radio said in 1988: “That was a load of shit. This was Lees’ polite way of telling the journalist what he thought of his claim.įar from all music journalists agreed with the “poor man’s Moody Blues” tag. The melody is in fact entirely different, and attempts to sing the words of Nights In White Satin over the melody of Poor Man’s Moody Blues will not work – the words do not fit the music. I was so pissed off with this journalist that I sat down and wrote most of Poor Man’s Moody Blues that night.”Īlthough the song reminds us of its inspiration, Lees made sure it was not the same. “I went back to my hotel room,” he said, “and started messing around with a chord structure that reminded me of Nights In White Satin. This was not an accident, because he had a point to prove. He wrote the song in response, and it did in fact sound like a certain Moody Blues song. Vocalist/guitarist John Lees was particularly irked, and became determined to make that particular lemon into lemonade. From that point on we stopped talking to the UK music press.” “We thought it was okay to take the band to task, but insulting the people who bought our records and came to see us was taking things too far. “The worst thing about this guy was that he kept criticizing our fans”, explains keyboardist Woolly Wolstenholme. The comment was not just unjust, but angered the band. The band encountered him at the Colston Hall in Bristol on 20 October 1976 during their Octoberon tour. The song was written as a response to a music journalist from the magazine Sounds who referred to Barclay James Harvest as a “poor man’s Moody Blues”. This is a hauntingly beautiful love song, although its inspiration was anything but beautiful. One of the most popular songs on the album is Poor Man’s Moody Blues. Sea of Tranquillity was another orchestral sounding track (about the space race), built in similar fashion, and all in all a lot of the album embraced atmospheric prog and a certain level of sophistication to a larger degree. It contains what appears to be massive brass and strings, but the track is in fact built using synthesizers, mellotron and guitars. It contained tracks like the opener Hymn, which is a huge, cinematic track (about the dangers of drug use, dedicated to musicians like Hendrix, Kossoff and Joplin).
It set the foundation for an ongoing career in those markets, and since then these have been their strongest markets in terms of album sales and live shows. It was the band’s largest selling album overall, eventually selling a few million copies worldwide. It is still ranked #6 on the list of longest running albums on those charts. In Germany it peaked at #10 and stayed for 197 (!) weeks in the album charts. People in Germany, France and Switzerland in particular embraced that album, which seemed to resonate with people in those countries. It reached #30 in the UK charts – the expected “no flop, but only minor hit”-territory – but it also finally saw the band break into the mainstream European market. (And as we’ll learn later in the story, not all reviews were positive.)īarclay James Harvest released their eighth studio album, Gone To Earth, in 1977. Plenty of people will however debate that they are giants otherwise! Still, in the UK the formula would often be relatively positive reviews, somewhat lesser sales.
Towards the end of the decade they found success in continental Europe, but they are still not one of the giants in their genre from a popularity point of view. In their native England they saw some popularity in the 1970s, always borderline breaking through to the mainstream, but never quite. That’s assuming people know much about Barclay James Harvest at all. “We played Middle Earth at the Roundhouse in 1968 with The Gun, and with Pink Floyd at London All Saints, that kind of heritage.” “I don’t think people realise how far back Barclay James Harvest goes” guitarist and vocalist John Lees recently said. Barclay James Harvest are an English progressive rock band, founded in Oldham in 1966.
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