British musician Denny Laine, co-founder of the Moody Blues in the 1960s and then the Wings with couple Paul and Linda McCartney, died on Tuesday, December 5, at the age of 79 from “unpredictable and aggressive interstitial pneumonia.” His wife Elizabeth Hines made the announcement on her husband’s Instagram account.
“I was at his bedside holding his hand while playing his favorite Christmas songs that he had been singing for the last few weeks (…) while he was in the intensive care unit on a ventilator last week,” she writes in a post of a photo their couple.
Paul McCartney said on Instagram that he was “very sad to learn of the death.” [son] former partner of the group “Wings”, which was founded with his wife Linda McCartney after the legendary Beatles split up in 1970. Paul McCartney praised Denny Laine as “an extraordinary singer and guitarist” and spoke of writing their global hit Mull of Kintyre with him in 1977. “We had grown apart, but in recent years we had reconnected with each other and our… Memories shared,” wrote the 81-year-old British legend.
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The hits “Live and Let Die” and “Band on the Run”
Denny Laine was born in Birmingham, England in October 1944 as Brian Hines and is known for playing guitar from a young age, influenced by Chuck Berry and Django Reinhardt. In 1964, he founded the Moody Blues with pianist Mike Pinder, a progressive and psychedelic rock group that is officially still active, although most of the original members have died. It is he who sings on Go Now, one of the hits of the group, which he left in the mid-1960s after their first album.
He then continued to develop 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 knew during his time with the Moody Blues.
Wings’ best-known album, which topped the charts in the UK and US, was 1973’s “Band on the Run”. One of their most famous songs is “Live and Let Die”, composed for the self-titled film “James Bond”. Year 1973 he plays bass. The group lasted until 1981, when Denny Laine continued to tour and record solo albums, the last of which, The Blue Musician, in 2008.
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Paul McCartney spoke on Instagram about the “great memories [son] era with Denny, when the Beatles toured with the Moddy Blues,” a group with which Denny Laine was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.