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The moment everything shifted for John Lodge and his bandmates in the Moody Blues occurred one evening at the Fiesta club in Stockton. Lodge and Justin Hayward were new to the band, with Lodge handling bass and Hayward on lead guitar. They had been scheduled for a lucrative series of variety performances across the north of England. The Moodies were performing a variety-style performance, mixing rhythm and blues with comedy numbers, all while dressed in blue suits. They had scored a big hit a few years earlier with "Go Now," but by 1966, their image and sound seemed passé.

Following the performance, Hayward recalled in a previous conversation, a man approached the dressing room to speak with the group. "Usually, people would comment something like, 'Oh, you're great.' But he said, 'I just thought I'd tell you, you're the worst fucking band I've seen in my life. You're terrible. And somebody's got to tell you.'" Hayward and vocalist Ray Thomas were brought to tears, and later on, as their van drove back from the location, drummer Graeme Edge chimed in from the rear: "He's right. We're awful."

The next day, the Moodies vowed to abandon the outfits, the act, and the old ways, and transform themselves. In this process, they emerged as British rock's least appreciated band: trailblazers of a unique sound, steady chart-toppers across multiple decades in the US, and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees who played at prestige locations on both sides of the ocean until their career ended in 2018 with a Las Vegas engagement.

And John Lodge, who has died at the age of 82, was key to that enduring achievement, as bassist, vocalist, and composer. With Days of Future Passed in 1967, the Moody Blues didn't just embrace the new experimental fashions but integrated them and propelled past them in a single leap: a prior year, they had been a variety act, and now they were developing the components that would form a fresh category: progressive rock.

It's not as if the Moodies were terribly inclined to 20-minute epics with complex rhythms. They composed what were, at core, pop songs, but wrapped them in beautiful arrangements, with lush vocal blends and rich instrumentation (the defining sound in "Nights in White Satin," their "legacy" song, isn't the guitar: it's the flute). They understood the capabilities of the studio in a way not many of their peers did. And in a group filled with talented songwriters, Lodge more than held his own.

"Ride My See-Saw," from 1968's "In Search of the Lost Chord," highlighted Lodge's skills: you can detect the rhythm and blues roots in the rhythm section and Hayward's choppy playing, but the vocals are layered so intricately the song becomes nearly hymnal. It's very much of its time, but also completely fantastic – the experience of pop changing in the moment, in the studio. (There's a performance recording from 1969 that's electrifying: this group really could rock.)

Lodge had decided to be a bassist because he loved keyboard players. As he explained in a 2023 interview: "Back when I was at school, there was a cafe right by my school with a Rock-Ola jukebox. Every midday, I used to skip and instead of having a meal at school, I'd go to the cafe, drink a cup of espresso and put a token in the machine and play whatever my favorite record was. I understood that what I truly enjoyed about rock music is the left hand on the piano, the driving force. I recognized that the artists I was listening to were figures like Fats, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, and I realised the bass part, the boogie piano, was the heart of the genre ... There were no basses in Birmingham at the time. When the instrument eventually came to town, it showed up in a store called the shop. Every weekend, all the aspiring players would go there and play their instruments and pick up something new from others. And one day, I went there and I spotted 'Direct from the USA, Sunburst Precision Bass' in the window. So I went back and asked to my father, could you help me purchase this bass? And we went returned to the store, I bought it, and it's been with me ever since."

By 1972, the Moodies were truly huge, and influenced by their propensity for abstract but faintly deep-seeming words, fans began thinking they had greater wisdom than they really did, a situation that inspired what became Lodge's defining song for the Moodies, "I'm Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)." The track, which reached number twelve in the US as a release, saw Lodge rejecting any kind of knowledge: "And if you want the shift to affect you / And you're the only other person to know, don't tell me / I'm just a singer in a rock and roll band."

The 1973 concert series to promote "the album Seventh Sojourn" saw the Moody Blues experiencing a way of life more commonly linked with other rock giants. As Lodge recalled in the album commentary for a new edition of the album: "We had our personal Boeing 707 which was decked out with a lounge area and a hearth. There were a couple of bedrooms, some twenty individual TVs, audio systems everywhere, and we had our own attendant and our name written on the exterior of the aircraft. I had a quite hollow feeling knowing that things had become this over-the-top."

The next year, the band went on break for four years. It was probably a wise move, because as a critic commented in ZigZag in January 1976, just as the punk movement was stirring, "The Moodies make records which sell to middle-class fashionable young couples residing in the suburban areas who understand and care as much regarding the genre as Batman."

When they came back in 1978, with the "Octave" album, it wasn't exactly the Clash, but the record's opener, Lodge's "Steppin' in a Slide Zone," showed that the Moody Blues could adjust to changing trends without losing their essential Moodiness – the multitracked singing and distinctive instrumentation were remained in place, but "Steppin' in a Slide Zone" had an sharpness that feels quite of that era, precise and tight and tense. In case listeners was put off, Lodge's "Survival" from that same record had orchestras to go with the synths, and the gentleness that was one of the band's great traits.

However although they were the remarkable enduring acts and major successes of the psychedelic era's peak period – perhaps only a Beatle had more success for a longer time – the Moody Blues never occupied a central place in culture. But they did carve out their own niche, and that was more than enough for the multitudes of people who continued loving them.

And Lodge did not took music casually. He always viewed in it the possibility for something beyond entertainment. In that recent conversation, he was questioned what "psychedelic" signified to him, and answered perfectly: "My wish is your imagination will delve into the music and lead you wherever the music takes you. It's not just about joining in, it's listening. It can be one note and that carries you somewhere. And I believe if you can conjure up experiences and narratives in your mind where the melody takes you, to me that's mind-expanding. You have to listen to music, not just hear them."