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Watching Lights Fade From Every Room: “Nights In White Satin” by The Moody Blues

By Marcello Carlin



There are three more songs to go in this exceptionally troubled year of 1972, and the first of these was, at the time, already five years old. By 1972 the Moody Blues were one of the biggest bands in the world, not least in the States where they were eagerly embraced as the nearest thing to the Beatles still extant (or at least until Dark Side Of The Moon was released).

But that in itself doesn’t explain the second and greater coming of “Nights In White Satin,” a song which at the time of its initial release as a single stopped at #103 on Billboard, taken from an album which, again at the time, barely scraped into the top thirty. Why the renewed call for its disturbed sirens? Its reappearance in the British charts – as a single it originally peaked at #19 in 1968 – was easily explicable as another symptom of a music scene which, though bolstered by glam rock, was still in a pretty collapsible state, so much so that most of the non-glam hits of 1972 were reissued oldies, or well-behaved cover versions.

The answer appears to be that a radio DJ in Washington, DC, used the song as the playout music for his show; listeners wanted to know what it was and the interest gradually spread to other stations. Hence its resurgence. But what did “Nights In White Satin” have to say to the disturbing sirens of an autumn 1972 audience?

Justin Hayward says he wrote the song aged nineteen, inspired by his girlfriend at the time who gave him a present of satin bedsheets. In truth “Nights” is the type of song expressing the type of sentiment only a teenager would express. Hayward sings it in his characteristic tones, akin to a vaguely disappointed choirboy. It could have been in the repertoire of the Wilde Three, the group with Marty and Joyce Wilde of which Hayward was the third member; even the old Moody Blues, with Denny Laine, could have performed it without the art trimmings.

But in its original context “Nights” represented part of the big coda to Days Of Future Passed, an album allegedly recorded to test the efficacy of Decca’s new “Deramic Sound System” stereo technology; claims that Decca/Deram originally approached the band to record a “rock” version of Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 have little evidential basis of fact. The album mimics the passing of a day and in its slow, electronically-washed progressions and underlying aura of desperate uncertainty it is the direct forerunner of New Order’s first album, Movement, fourteen autumns later. Billed as a collaboration between the group and Peter Knight’s arrangements for the London Festival Orchestra, the record actually alternates between the two until the finale, with Mike Pinder’s Mellotron providing the “strings” otherwise.

The version most commonly revived on radio and compilations is the orchestra-free mix, with just Pinder’s Mellotron and Ray Thomas’ flute providing extra instrumental cover. But to appreciate the song fully, one has to experience it in its original, intended setting. Beginning with a brief orchestral flourish from Knight, the song patiently fades in and proceeds as you would expect until the final verse, when the orchestra dramatically reappears, and the effect is as though colour and drama have been admitted into the grey West Hampstead Decca recording studios. The 1968-anticipating orchestral maximalism blends thrillingly with Hayward’s pop nous.

The song builds to a satisfactory climax, then ends. But on the album, the most extraordinary thing happens – there is a prolonged, brash and bright exclamation of orchestral strings and brass which sounds uncannily familiar. Pinder solemnly reads a poem, of sorts, taking great care to mask his Erdington diphthongs, before softly striking a gong of closure eight autumns before “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But I think of this “Late Lament” and wonder about eleven-year-old Anne Dudley, or eighteen-year-old Trevor Horn, or the nine-year-old Martin Fry, and how permanently some inspirations cling to determined minds. I will not comment on the attendant irony of what kept the single at number two.

Date Record Made Number Two: 4 November 1972
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2
Record At Number One: “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash
UK Chart Position: 9 (in 1972)

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