Denny Laine performs in January 2019 on the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles, Ailing. Laine, a British singer, songwriter and guitarist who carried out in an early, pop-oriented model of the Moody Blues and was later Paul McCartney’s longtime sideman within the ex-Beatle’s solo band Wings, died Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023.
Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP file picture
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Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP file picture
Denny Laine performs in January 2019 on the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles, Ailing. Laine, a British singer, songwriter and guitarist who carried out in an early, pop-oriented model of the Moody Blues and was later Paul McCartney’s longtime sideman within the ex-Beatle’s solo band Wings, died Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023.
Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP file picture
NEW YORK — Denny Laine, a British singer, songwriter and guitarist who carried out in an early, pop-oriented model of the Moody Blues and was later Paul McCartney’s longtime sideman within the ex-Beatle’s solo band Wings, has died at age 79.
Laine, inducted 5 years in the past into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame as a member of the Moody Blues, died Tuesday in Naples, Fla. The trigger was interstitial lung illness, in accordance with an announcement on Laine’s Instagram web page by his spouse, Elizabeth Hines.
His loss of life comes virtually precisely 50 years after the discharge of McCartney’s acclaimed ”Band On the Run” album, on which Laine performed guitar and offered backing vocals. On Tuesday, McCartney posted a tribute to Laine on Instagram, calling him a ”nice expertise with a superb humorousness.”
”We had drifted aside however lately managed to reestablish our friendship and share recollections of our instances collectively,” McCartney wrote.
Laine was born Brian Frederick Arthur Hines, and altered his skilled identify in his early teenagers, partly in homage to the singer Frankie Laine.
In 1964, across the time he turned 20, he joined Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder in forming the Moody Blues and sang lead on the group’s breakthrough hit, ”Go Now.” However the Moody Blues struggled to match their preliminary success, and by 1967 Laine had left, changed by Justin Hayward. The Moody Blues then turned to the formidable, classically influenced sounds of ”Nights in White Satin” and different songs.
Laine labored as a solo artist and with such group’s as Electrical String Band and Ginger Baker’s Air Power earlier than he was introduced into Wings by McCartney, whom he had identified throughout his time with the Moody Blues.
Based in 1971, the 12 months after the Beatles broke up, Wings went by numerous personnel adjustments over the next decade, with Laine, McCartney and McCartney’s spouse, Linda. the one ones remaining all through. The band’s No. 1 singles, most of them written by McCartney, included ”My Love,” ”Hearken to What the Man Mentioned” and the title observe to ”Band On the Run.” Laine helped write the million-selling ”Mull of Kintyre.”
McCartney disbanded Wings quickly after Laine left within the early Nineteen Eighties, however Laine contributed to McCartney’s ”Tug of Warfare” and ”Pipes of Peace” albums and added backing vocals to ”All These Years In the past,” George Harrison’s tribute to the late John Lennon.
Laine continued to tour and document lately, his albums together with ”The Blue Musician.”