McCartney Times

By Jimmy Geurts Entertainment reporter

A musician who performed on the enormous Wings Over the World Tour with Paul McCartney will soon play a considerably more intimate show in Sarasota.Denny Laine will perform Sunday at The Blue Rooster with The Cryers. Tickets are $20 for rear seating or $40 for front seats and a meet-and-greet.Laine played in Wings and penned songs including “Mull of Kintyre,” the then-best-selling single ever in the U.K. He was also one of the founding members of The Moody Blues, singing their hit “Go Now.”He talked about both groups as well as his current tour in an interview. Here are excerpts.What is the setlist like for one of your shows?I do stuff from my first Moody Blues album I was on. I also do some of Wings’ more well-known hits. I do a lot of songs that I did with Wings where I was the singer, where I was the main vocalist, stuff I’d written or written with Paul. Then I do some material from my solo albums. It’s a mixture, really.What was your time in The Moody Blues and ’60s London like?It was a very fun competition. You’d bump into people at the motorway cafe like Jeff Beck Group, Rod Stewart, people like that were all in bands at that time. Then we played places like The Cavern Club where the Beatles would’ve been there the night before. Everybody was on the same circuit.Eventually we ended up signing with (Beatles manager Brian) Epstein and we were under his stable, then we did a lot of touring with their people. So the second Beatles tour, we were on last because we were friends of theirs and we would go out and tour with them. It was good fun. It was a bit like that, everybody knew everybody. Then we’d do a place called the Marquee Club where The Yardbirds would be on, Eric Clapton was in that band at that time. We all got to know each other. We toured with the Stones, their tour was the first big tour we ever did, and that’s when “Go Now” went up the charts because we were playing live.

Source: Denny Laine talks Wings, Moody Blues before Blue Rooster show