There was a fire at the studio. They moved to a ranch in Malibu, where the rain brought the hillside down and marooned them for days. Somebody broke an arm. The producer who had shaped every Moody Blues record since 1967 walked away before it was finished. And halfway through, Mike Pinder — the Mellotron, the mysticism, the reason the band sounded like the band — stopped, and did not come back. Octave is the sound of five men reuniting after six years apart and discovering, in real time, that they might not be a group any more. Justin Hayward has said they thought they were writing the full stop.

The short version

Octave is the Moody Blues’ ninth album, released on 9 June 1978 by Decca in Britain and London in America, their first in six years after the success of Seventh Sojourn. The title is a pun that works twice: the musical octave, and the Latin octavus, since this is the eighth album by this line-up, following Seventh Sojourn. Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge all contribute songs; Hayward has four. Tony Clarke produced, as he had since Days of Future Passed, and it was his last. Sessions ran from October 1977 to April 1978 at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and at Indigo Ranch in Malibu, Pinder’s own studio — the first Moody Blues album made in America. Ten tracks. It reached six in Britain and thirteen in America, and went platinum in the States and Canada.

Six years, and everything that went wrong

The band had scattered after 1972 to make solo records, and by the time they reconvened Pinder had married, started a family in California and built himself a studio; recording in America was a concession to keep him. It did not work. He left partway through the sessions, then declined the reunion tour that had already been planned, and the band have had little contact with him since. Hayward’s account is affectionate and unsparing: two of the mystics left, he says, meaning Pinder and Tony Clarke, and the rest of them were the normal ones. Pinder had been the man whose approval he sought for every song, the most important figure in the group for years, and losing him changed what the lyrics could be about. Clarke went too, before the record was done, for reasons that had nothing to do with music. Hayward and Lodge ended up playing most of the keyboards themselves, on synthesisers. By the spring of 1978 the album was finished, the band were effectively a quartet, and Patrick Moraz — recently out of Yes — auditioned in England and joined in time for the tour that opened in Germany that October.

The sound

Thinner, harder and unsure of itself. The Mellotron and Chamberlin are largely gone, replaced by synthesisers, and with them goes the thing that made a Moody Blues record identifiable at three seconds. What replaces it is not yet the confident 1981 sound of Long Distance Voyager and not any longer the 1972 one: it is a band trying arena rock, soft rock and adult pop in turn to see which fits, in a year when punk and disco had made all three look like relics. The playing is fine and the production is muddy — the 2008 remaster, overseen by Hayward, does the songs a considerable favour. The Moodies were never going to make a punk record and to their credit they did not try. But the lethargy Hayward describes around these sessions is audible, and the five songwriting voices that had always been the band’s strength here sound like five people writing separately, which is exactly what they were.

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The songs

Steppin’ in a Slide Zone is Lodge’s and opens the album with genuine force: a synth-rocker with a distinctive intro and a Pinder solo, their first single in five years and their first ever to use synthesisers, and its lyric came straight out of the mudslide that trapped them in Malibu. It reached 39 in America. Under Moonshine and I’m Your Man are Thomas at his sweetest, which will decide the album for some people one way and some the other. Had to Fall in Love is a Hayward ballad; I’ll Be Level with You is Edge’s and one of the few things here that sounds like a band playing together. Driftwood is the other single and the one to keep: a slow Hayward love song in the lineage of Nights in White Satin, and the last record Pinder ever played on with them. Top Rank Suite is a rock and roll throwback with horns arranged by the guest saxophonist R. A. Martin. Survival is Lodge’s anthem. One Step into the Light is Pinder’s only song here and his final lead vocal with the Moody Blues, which gives it a weight the music does not quite carry. The Day We Meet Again closes the album and is the best thing on it, six minutes of multi-tracked guitar and a chorus that arrives like sunlight.

Reception and legacy

It sold well — platinum in America within seven months — and it has been the black sheep of the catalogue ever since. The consensus, then and now, is that there are three good songs and not much else, and Prog Archives regulars, who love this band, rate it lower than anything in the classic run. The promotional films are the saddest artefact: the video for Driftwood features Patrick Moraz at the keyboards although it is unmistakably Pinder playing on the record, and the Steppin’ in a Slide Zone clip simply shows four men, on a song built around Pinder’s intro and his solo. What nobody expected was the sequel. Three years later, without Pinder and without Clarke, the same band made Long Distance Voyager and went to number one in America. Octave was not the full stop after all. It was just the worst year they ever had.

The verdict

For completists and for people who want the whole story, which in this case is a genuinely interesting one. Nothing here belongs next to the seven, and if you want the comeback done properly it is Long Distance Voyager. Come to Octave for three things: The Day We Meet Again, which deserves a much better album around it; Driftwood, for the last Hayward ballad of the old kind; and Steppin’ in a Slide Zone, for the sound of a band discovering the synthesiser and, briefly, sounding excited about it. Then listen to One Step into the Light knowing it is the last thing Mike Pinder sang with the Moody Blues, and the record acquires a poignancy it has not earned but has anyway.

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