Justin Hayward remembers one of the first gigs he played with the Moody Blues after he joined the band in the summer of 1966: “A guy came to our dressing room after the show and said ‘You’re the worst band I’ve ever seen in my life. I take the wife out every Tuesday night, spend two pounds and ten shillings and you’re bloody terrible. I just thought someone should tell you.” Many artists would have crawled under a table and curl up in the fetal position and stay there for a while, but not the Moody Blues. Hayward continues: “In the van on the way home that night we all realized that he was right. We weren’t very good. We have been playing music that wasn’t suited to our characters. We were lower middle class English boys singing about life in the deep south of the USA and it just wasn’t honest.”
Like many British bands that started out covering American rock n’ roll and rhythm n’ blues songs in the early 1960s, the Moody Blues were at a crossroad when artists like the Beatles showed the way forward with original material that combined psychedelia, clever arrangements, use of classical and ethnic instruments and studio experimentation. Albums such as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper made you notice if you were an aspiring musician. The Moody Blues made a 180 and purchased a Mellotron.
Mellotronics was a unique musical instrument company. Back in the early 1960s, when the idea of sampling a real instrument and playing it back via electronic gizmos was still in the future, they developed a keyboard instrument based on tape loops. It evolved from an earlier instrument called the Chamberlin. Each key played back a pre-recorded loop a few seconds in length. Samples included instruments like violin or flute, and you could play a solo with single notes or something that resembled an ensemble of instruments if you played a chord. They named the instrument a Mellotron. One of the company’s employees was none other than the Moody Blues’ keyboardist Mike Pinder. He was eager to acquire one but short of funds to pay the steep price of £1,000, an astronomical figure at the time. His luck turned when he received a phone call from one of the company founders, Les Bradley. Pinder recalls: “He had found a suitable instrument at the Dunlop tire factory social blub. I went to see it and just had to have it. At three hundred pounds the instrument was a steal.”
From an early age Pinder had an ear for rich orchestral arrangements: “I grew up listening to the music of Mantovani and the layers of rich and melodious string arrangements that were his trademark.” With the Mellotron Pinder found a way to create his own variations of string movements and other orchestral instruments. His band mates were enthusiastic about this significant upgrade to their sound. Justin Hayward, who wrote many of the band’s most memorable songs, said: “It was wonderful, it just made my songs work.”
The Moody Blues put the Mellotron to use for the first time on the song Love and Beauty. It was released in September 1967, two months ahead of their masterpiece album Days of Future Passed. It is very much in the same vein as many of the songs on the album, but was not included in the original release.
The creativity at that moment in the band’s history was flowing with song ideas. Band members were influenced by everything musical that was going on during that time. Like many others, they were paying attention to the Beatles. Hayward remembers: “The Beatles were our leaders, undoubtedly. They showed us the way. Sgt. Pepper and Strawberry Fields and other songs they did at the time – they gave us the freedom to try anything.” All band members would come together and meet at their home in Esher, sitting around a coffee table. Bass player John Lodge laughed about the tales that coffee table could tell. He recalls: “Each member was really encouraging. We’d sit down at this coffee table and we’d talk and talk and talk, maybe not even about songs. But then somebody would say, ‘I’ve got this song’, and play it and we’d say, ‘Oh, I could do this, I could do that.’ All the Moody Blues songs came together that way.”
Band members came with different talents that complemented each other’s. Flutist Ray Thomas was a Welsh tenor. He could sing a song but he knew nothing about chords or structure. But he’d sing it, and the others would work out a structure around his voice. Drummer Graham Edge also remembers these sessions fondly: “We used to sit around a coffee table, and the songwriter would play the song. Everybody dove in, argued about ideas, put things backwards and forwards. The songwriter picked which ideas he wanted and which he didn’t want. The final authority, even above the producer, is the songwriter. Sometimes when you have a great idea and that songwriter can’t see it, you have to bite your knuckle. Then you spend bloody hours getting it right.”
The first song to be recorded for Days of Future Passed and the one that closes the album, is one of the band’s masterpieces and probably their best-known song. Justin Hayward wrote it after a breakup, sitting on a bed covered with white satin sheets. Years later he recalled that moment: “It was in early 1967, and I’d just come home from a gig. I was living in a one-room flat. I sat on the side of the bed with my old 12-string guitar and that just sort of came out. I’m still writing letters that I don’t send, I’m just looking in my email drafts now.“
Hayward knew a good song when he came up with one, and wasted no time bringing it to the rest of the band: “I took it to the rehearsal room the next day and played it for them and they were like, ‘It’s alright…’ But then Mike said, ‘Play it again,’ so I did, and he played ‘da da da-da-da-da-daaa’ on the Mellotron. Then everybody went, ‘Oh, that’s good!’ Once he delivered that phrase, which is really quite important, the song started working for them.”
There are many reasons to love Night In White Satin, one of them the brilliant vocal harmonies. Hayward provides the details: “A natural strength we had. Ray’s voice on the bottom, then Graeme, then me, then John on top.” Derek Varnals, sound engineer on the album, provided additional details on why the harmonies sound so effective on this track: “By the time we began recording the vocals, the reverb wasn’t exactly dominating the track, but it was becoming a feature. The high sound of John’s backing vocals was an octave above everything else, so I just pushed up the reverb, attempted to blend it, and the overall effect was quite dramatic. Obviously, we couldn’t do the same to the lead vocal, which had to tell the story, or to the flute — that would have lost definition, and we still had to present the music.”
It took the Moody Blues three and a half hours to complete the recording of Nights In White Satin. Producer Tony Clarke recalls that, “By the end, the control room was packed. It was the first time in my life I thought something was a stone-cold hit.” Graham Edge talked about another aspect of the song greatness – its emotional impact: “What I enjoy about Jus’ work is the depth of emotion, the soul, and the obvious effort that has been put into writing the song. I still love ‘Nights.’ As soon as we start that song, a wave of electricity belts from the audience across the stage. We get the feeling that the song means so much to so many that we give it everything we can.”
None of the songs on Days of Future Passed were recorded with band and orchestra together. This is surprising to many listeners, given how well the two entities mesh together. It is especially evident on Nights In White Satin. Derek Varnals was assigned to also record the orchestra that came to overdub the orchestral arrangement for the track. He remembers the challenge of recording the long stretch from the middle of the song to the grand finale. Arranger Peter Knight, who wrote all the wonderful orchestral arrangements for the album, conducted the orchestra while listening to the band’s recording, already mixed down to two tracks of the four‑track tape. Varnals: “There was never any plan to have an orchestra on that song. Peter Knight just wrote the little descending woodwind piece before ‘Nights in White Satin’ comes in, and then he decided it would be hard to pick up the end of the song without having an orchestra over the last verse and chorus.”
The song is an early showcase for the Mellotron. Mike Pinder extracts from the instrument a beautiful sound in a great performance that must have influenced many forward-looking artists who were paying attention. Derek Varnals on recording the Mellotron: “It was completely new to me, and so I’d just decided to treat it like a keyboard instrument that sounded like strings. The job was to make it sound as sweet and smooth as possible, but of course some of that’s down to the player. The Mellotron’s attack gives it a percussive quality that strings don’t have, but Mike developed the technique of hitting a chord and then using the swell pedal to bring it up a split second later to avoid that attack. Of course, he couldn’t hold a chord for very long, because he’d be running out of tape, and he also had to anticipate by half a beat, a bit like playing a church organ where the sound doesn’t come out straight away.”
Here is the closing sequence from the album, including Nights In White Satin in all its glory, followed by the poem Late Lament:
The song, too long to fit the radio format for hit songs, was not a major hit on its release as a single two weeks ahead of the album. John Lodge explains: “In those days, a record had to be like two minutes and 30 seconds long. Nights In White Satin, without the orchestra was four and a half minutes. And with the orchestra, it was six minutes. No one would play it.” This was England, but in the United States FM radio started to get traction, and college radio was independent and popular among youth exploring music of the challenging type. Lodge continues: “College radio wanted to broadcast longer songs, however long they were. And in stereo. It was an era, to be honest, of what they termed in America as bubblegum music. Teenybopper music. But bands like the Moody Blues, we realized that real music, which is what we were trying to create, was gonna last forever.”
That poem and another that opens the album titled Morning Glory, were written by Graham Edge. Not many bands have a drummer who writes poems. He recalls: “We were recording Days Of Future Passed, and we were gigging as well at the time. I was driving with the roadie on the way to a gig, and I wrote ‘Cold Hearted Orb’ and all of that, on a pack of cigarettes. Next time we were in the studio, I just said, ‘What about this?’ They all said, ‘Great’. That’s what made the overtures happen.” The poem was split in two parts, Morning Glory and Late Lament, both narrated by Mike Pinder, lying on his back in the dark with the rest of the band, quite stoned, surrounding him. Justin Hayward remembers: “He had such a beautiful voice, charming voice – mesmerizing. He could persuade me to do anything with that voice of his. His voice doing the poetry really made the whole piece feel complete.”
Nights In White Satin was recorded before the rest of the album. Decca’s executive producer Hugh Mendl heard the song and had the idea of a crossover between the label’s popular music output and its well-established classical music arm. The label also had a new stereo mix technique called Decca Panoramic Sound, shortened to Deramic, that promised sonic depth even when played on single speakers: “Wrap-around sound, from side-to-side, back-to-back, wherever you are”. The label planned six easy-listening recordings to highlight this sound technique in 1967. Mendl thought, “Why not collaborate with a pop band and create a budget-price demonstration record that showed off the band and the label’s supreme sound?” His original idea was to have Decca Studio’s in-house musicians, the London Festival Orchestra, perform Dvořák’s Symphony No.9, ‘From The New World’ together with the Moody Blues, in what would draw both young pop fans and the label’s traditional classical music audience. A true crossover record.
But the band had other ideas about what this album should be. Ray Thomas sheds more light into what ensued: “Days of Future Passed was supposed to be a demonstration album – they wanted us to play rock ‘n’ roll and Peter Knight to do Dvorak to play, to their reps to give them an idea of the scope of this new Deramic wall-to-wall sound. But we thought it would be very bitty, so we asked Peter to stick his neck out, because we wanted to record our stage act. We never actually worked with the orchestra. All we did was ship each track to Peter, who wrote and scored the orchestral bridges.”
The band had already developed a stage act around the 24 hours of the day and had a number of songs ready for recording at that point. For the orchestral arrangements, producer Tony Clarke brought arranger Peter Knight. Derek Varnals recalls: “It was decided we would use Peter Knight because we’d done a similar project with him already, whereby we had layered orchestra onto a rhythm section for ‘Western Heritage’ in 1965, an album that was inspired by the 1962 film How the West Was Won. It had all the typical cowboy songs that would appeal to America, and it was also kind of a continuous play — an episodic kind of thing.”
At that point in his career Knight was known for his work as orchestral director in the West End and for Granada TV. He had a few credits on pop albums, including Petula Clark, Sammy Davis Jr and the first Scott Walker album. But he had a keen eye on the developing scene of pop and rock music in the mid-1960s, and he loved artists like the Beatles and the Kinks. He went to see the Moody Blues play a live club show and chatted with Justin Hayward, telling him: “Justy, I don’t think you’re gonna get the two musics to merge together. But I really like your songs. How about we approach Hugh Mendl and we suggest that we do it the other way round?’” It was decided to record a concept album about a day in the life of an every-man that would be called Days Of Future Passed. The band would record their own parts, with the orchestra overdubbing Peter Knight’s arrangements later.
Those orchestral parts are what makes this album so unique in the history of pop and rock music. Peter Knight did a wonderful job in creating new melodies and weave them in and out to complement the band’s songs. There may be very little left from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, but you can hear traces of Gershwin, Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn and Holst. The orchestral overdubs for the complete album, amazingly, were recorded in a single day. Here is the sequence that opens the album, The Day Begins. The orchestra shines here, playing a medley of the album’s songs, and you can also hear the opening poem Morning Glory:
A few more favorites from the album: Dawn Is A Feeling, written by Mike Pinder. He later said of the song: “It was flower-power-influenced. The ‘smell of grass’ was lying in a field. I liked the sentiment of it, and it took five minutes to write.” The orchestral opening leads brilliantly into the song, a fantastic feat by Knight, hearing the song for the first time after its recording was complete.
The ‘Evening’ Sequence includes two songs that are Graham Edge’s favorites on this album. He says: “’The Sun Set’ — I like the desert feel to that one. It all sort of feels like Lawrence of Arabia. And ‘Twilight Time’ — I always enjoyed that one too, because I like that sort of rock & roll phrase. I’ve always liked that.”
Days of Future Passed was released with a colorful front cover courtesy of David Anstey, who worked as a graphic designer for Decca. Hayward remembers: “Days Of Future Passed is when we realized, ‘Hey, record artwork is really important.’ We had a meeting in the pub to tell him what our songs were about, but had no say in what was going on the cover. Looking at it, there’s some smudges and stuff and a funny interpretation that was a rather odd thing that the Decca art department did, where it was kind of meant to be psychedelic.” The band were also introduced to another artist from Decca’s art department, Phil Travers. He met up with the band and took out a sketchpad and said, “What about, if you ever get to do it again, we do something like this?” That was a faithful meeting for both parties, for Travers would go on to create the fantastic front covers of their next six albums. That story is told here:
After its release in Britain on November 11 1967, reviews were quite favorable. DISC & Music Echo wrote: “This is a brave and worthwhile venture, blending one of the country’s most interesting groups with an orchestra to provide a rich stimulating album that sets out with an idea. That idea is to paint out a picture of a day.” Other reviews complemented the beautiful melodies and lush orchestral work. A music fan wrote in a letter to the editors in New Musical Express in January 1968: “I would like to congratulate the Moody Blues who, forsaking attempts to make commercial records, have managed to produce a tremendously progressive LP. Together with the London Festival Orchestra they have done a beautiful job by both popular and classical standards.”
Rolling Stone magazine spoiled the party after the album was released in the US. This was not the first time it trashed an album that broke standard conventions with classical influences: “The London Festival Orchestra is generally used between tracks to play Hollyridge Strings changes on the rock compositions on the album. The whole execution of the album is so perverse that the only real surprise is the discovery that between the movie soundtrack slush there is some quite palatable rock which makes no compromises.” To each their own.
In contrast, luminary progressive rock artists were able to hear the early demonstration of what the genre would be famous for: orchestral textures, recurring thematic material, spoken poetry, a continuous album-length narrative. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull: “I remember the first thing I heard that I would have thought was a concept album in contemporary terms was the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed. I remember listening to that and going, ‘Wow, this is kinda serious stuff.’” As a flute player, the artistry of Ray Thomas was an eye opener to Anderson: “Ray Thomas was really the first rock musician flautist to bring the instrument to the public domain on that scale. I was about a year behind but my roots were blues and more aggressive rock so probably received more attention.”
Steve Hackett of Genesis was another fan of the album and the use of Mellotron: “I realized that Nights In White Satin had a strong influence on King Crimson’s Epitaph, another Mellotron-driven tune of distinction. In Genesis we were all very taken with the Mellotron with its spooky Frankenstein’s Monster of a sound assembled from disembodied parts. To have the sound of an orchestra at your fingertips was heady stuff indeed and took the sound palate on to a whole new level.”
To close, here is a quote by John Lodge that summarizes well the lasting impact of that classic album: “It would be brilliant if people who listen to Days of Future Passed 50 years from now could get the same satisfaction you get listening to classical music from composers like Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. The music has got to transcend you — and if you find the right classical music, it will also transport you somewhere else.”
Sources:
Prog magazine, Issue 135 (December 2022) cover story