Guitarist Denny Laine, co-founder of the Wings with Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues, has died

Member of the group Wings which he founded with Paul and Linda McCartney, the guitarist was also at the origin of the Moody Blues. Denny Laine died at age 79.

British guitarist and singer Denny Laine, co-founder and short-lived member of the Moody Blues in the 1960s and then of the Wings with the McCartney couple after the separation of the Beatles, died Tuesday December 5 at the age of 79, announced his wife Elizabeth Hines. On Denny Laine’s Instagram account, Elizabeth Hines made public the musician’s death from lung disease, a “unpredictable and aggressive interstitial lung disease”.

“I was at his bedside, holding his hand and playing his favorite Christmas songs, the ones he had sung in recent weeks (…) All this week, he had been in intensive care on an artificial respirator”she wrote next to a photo of their couple.

McCartney pays tribute to “an exceptional singer and guitarist”

Paul McCartney said on Instagram that he “very sad to learn of the death of (his) former band partner” Wings formed in 1971 with his wife Linda McCartney, after the separation of the legendary Beatles in 1970. Paul McCartney greeted Denny Laine “an exceptional singer and guitarist” and talked about writing their worldwide hit with him Mull of Kintyre (1977).

“We had grown apart but in recent years we had reconnected and shared our memories”, wrote the 81-year-old British legend. Wings’ best-known album, topping the charts in the UK and US, was Band on the Run in 1973. Denny Laine was a member of the group until its breakup in 1981.

Denny Laine was born in October 1944 in Birmingham, England, under the name Brian Hines, and was known for having taken up the guitar at an early 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 still officially active although most of the original members have died.

Paul McCartney spoke on Instagram about “great memories of (his) time with Denny when the Beatles were touring with the Moody Blues”, whom Laine left in 1965 after the group’s first album. “His most brilliant performance is undoubtedly Go Now”, song by Larry Banks and Milton Bennett made famous by the Moody Blues in 1964, says the ex-Beatle.

Danny Laine had produced around fifteen solo albums, mainly in the 1980s and 1990s.