R.I.P. Denny Laine, co-founder of The Moody Blues and Wings

Denny Laine—guitarist and founding member of both The Moody Blues and Paul McCartney’s Wings—died today following a battle with Interstitial Lung Disease. He was 79.

Laine’s wife Elizabeth Hines broke the news today in an Instagram post. “I was at his bedside, holding his hand as I played his favorite Christmas songs for him,” she wrote. “My world will never be the same. Denny was an amazingly wonderful person, so loving and sweet to me. He made my days colorful, fun and full of life-just like him.”

Born Brian Frederick Hines, Laine grew up in Birmingham, England and started playing guitar as a young boy. While he would go on to form a band called Denny Laine and the Diplomats with future Electric Light Orchestra drummer Bev Bevan in his teens, he didn’t find real success until slightly later. That was when he joined local artists Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder in a band that would eventually become The Moody Blues.

While The Moody Blues initially dabbled in both blues covers and pop, it was their 1964 cover of Bessie Banks’ “Go Now,” featuring Laine on lead vocals and guitar, that brought them into the mainstream. The song blazed up charts worldwide and even hit number one in England.

Despite the song’s success, Laine left the band shortly after due to conflicts with their record label. (“Like every other band, we got ripped off,” he told North Coast Music Beat in 2019. “We got the fame, but we didn’t get the money.”) Still, it seems like Laine didn’t harbor any negative feelings toward the band. “If it hadn’t been for Mike and Ray talking me into getting into their band, I could’ve been stuck in Birmingham and not done anything, so I’m grateful for that,” he told Billboard in 2017.

After leaving the band, Laine went on to form Wings with Paul McCartney, who he had met when The Moody Blues opened for The Beatles in the ’60s. “[McCartney] was impressed with seeing me trying to do something different onstage with my Electric String Band, and because we became friends, that inspired him to call me because he wanted to do something new and different… and Wings was formed,” Laine told Mass Live of the band’s genesis.

With Wings, Laine went on to write and record classic tracks such as “Live And Let Die,” “Band On The Run,” “Silly Love Songs,” and “Jet.” “Me and Paul, we had the same influences musically and had known each other since the ’60s,” Laine told Billboard of their partnership earlier this year. “It was just easy. It was easy to get a good groove on each other’s songs.”

After Wings split in 1981, Laine worked with McCartney on a couple more solo albums before releasing his own solo albums and touring in the years following. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his work with The Moody Blues in 2018 after initially being left out as an inductee.