Classic Tracks: The Moody Blues ‘Nights In White Satin’ : July 2009
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By the autumn of 1966, the Moody Blues’ best days were apparently behind them. Two years on from scoring a hit with ‘Go Now’, the Birmingham-formed band was dealing with the departures of bass player Clint Warwick and singer-guitarist Denny Laine, while owing Decca Records several thousand pounds in advances. Their fortunes, however, were about to change. After replacing Warwick and Laine with John Lodge and Justin Hayward, the group — which also comprised drummer Graeme Edge, keyboardist Mike Pinder and multi-instrumentalist Ray Thomas — did a total and unexpected about-face, by deserting their R&B roots for classical/progressive rock. A deal with Decca’s experimental new Deram Records label assisted in this regard, as did the commencement of working relationships with A&R executive Hugh Mendl, staff producer Tony Clarke, staff engineer Derek Varnals and conductor/arranger Peter Knight. This resulted in the Moodies adopting a lush, grandiose, orchestrally integrated sound, and the first real fruit of these collaborations was the most successful, influential and enduring album of the band’s career. Orchestral Rock
Drawing inspiration from the Beatles’ recently released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, Days Of Future Passed was another large-scale manifestation of the psychedelic era. Melding rock instrumentation centred on Mike Pinder’s electro-mechanical, polyphonic, Mellotron sample-playback keyboard with the backing of the London Festival Orchestra, the LP is a song-cycle set within the context of a single day. And this includes ‘Nights In White Satin’, Justin Hayward’s haunting tale of unrequited love that, despite taking several years to become a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, is still the group’s most popular number, on the radio and in concert. Nevertheless, there are conflicting theories as to how the entire, conceptual project came to pass. The most prevalent story is that, in the spring of 1967, Decca wanted to show off their new Deramic Stereo Sound (DSS) format — a more symmetrical, realistic alternative to the kind of ‘ping-pong stereo’ that was then still in vogue — by having the Moody Blues record a rock version of Antonin Dvorak’s ‘New World Symphony’. It’s said that Tony Clarke and the band members aborted this idea in favour of working on their own material, with Peter Knight taking care of the orchestral accompaniment, the sections linking all seven songs, and the album’s opening and closing sequences. Then again, according to Derek Varnals, this was never the case. “Between June and August of ’67, Decca Records produced six orchestral albums with the Deramic Sound system. All had ‘night’ in the title,” he recalls. “Strings In The Night, Brass In The Night, Piano In The Night... It was a pretty straightforward theme.” And not one shared by ‘Nights In White Satin’, which had been written a couple of years earlier, after a friend had presented Justin Hayward with some satin bedsheets. ...
Published in SOS July 2009 
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