British musician Denny Laine, co-founder of the Moody Blues in the 1960s and then of the Wings with the couple Paul and Linda McCartney, died on Tuesday, December 5, at the age of 79, from “unpredictable and aggressive interstitial pneumonia.” , announced his wife Elizabeth Hines on her husband’s Instagram account.
“I was at his bedside, holding his hand, while I played his favorite Christmas songs that he had sung in recent weeks (…) while being, this past week, in intensive care on an artificial respirator,” he said. -she writes, posting a photo of their couple.
Paul McCartney said on Instagram that he was “very saddened to learn of the death of [his] former band partner” Wings formed with his wife Linda McCartney, after the separation of the legendary Beatles in 1970. Paul McCartney greeted Denny Laine “a exceptional singer and guitarist” and talked about writing their worldwide hit Mull of Kintyre with him in 1977. “We had drifted apart but in recent years we had reconnected and shared our memories,” wrote the 81-year-old British legend.
Les succès « Live and Let Die » et « Band on the Run »
Denny Laine was born in October 1944 in Birmingham, England as Brian Hines, and is known for taking up the guitar at a young age, influenced by Chuck Berry and Django Reinhardt. He founded the Moody Blues in 1964 with pianist Mike Pinder, a progressive and psychedelic rock group still officially active although most of the original members have died. It is he who sings on Go Now, one of the hits of the group that he left in the mid-1960s, after their first album.
He then evolved as a solo artist and with groups such as Electric String Band and Ginger Baker’s Air Force before joining Paul McCartney’s Wings in 1971, whom he had known during his time with the Moody Blues.
Wings’ best-known album, topping the charts in the UK and US, was Band on the Run in 1973. One of their most famous songs is Live and Let Die, composed for the film Self-titled James Bond from 1973, on which he plays bass. The group lasted until 1981, then Denny Laine continued to tour and record solo albums, the last of which, The Blue Musician, in 2008.
Paul McCartney recalled on Instagram the “great memories of [his] time with Denny when the Beatles were on tour with the Moddy Blues”, the group with which Denny Laine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. in 2018.