The Moody Blues – Nights In White Satin
About The Song
It’s been a hit three times over, sold millions around the globe, appeared on film soundtracks and inspired more than 60 cover versions. There’s even been a theme park ride named after it. Yet half a century after he wrote it, Justin Hayward still struggles to explain the enduring appeal of the Moody Blues’ most famous song, Nights In White Satin.
“It’s a curious thing,” he says, “because when I listen to the record there’s just this big empty space and those wonderful echoes that we had in the studios at Decca. But there’s a strange power to the song. It gave us a style that suddenly seemed to work for us. I think it identified the Moodies’ sound.”
First released in November 1967, Nights In White Satin was a masterpiece that bridged pop and symphonic prog, with a lyric ripped directly from Hayward’s personal life – it finds him caught between ecstasy and despair, ruing the end of one love affair while embarking on another.
“There was a lot of emotion that went into the song,” he affirms. “I was nineteen or twenty at the time, living in a two-room flat in Bayswater with Graeme [Edge, Moody Blues drummer] and our girlfriends. I came back from a gig one night, around four or five in the morning, when the birds were just twittering, sat on the side of the bed and wrote a couple of verses.
“The only people writing in the Moodies then were [keyboard player] Mike Pinder and myself. He’d been working on a song called Dawn Is A Feeling, which I’d heard him fiddling around with, and I knew the other guys were expecting something from me at rehearsal the next day.”
Searching for some kind of metaphor for his emotional turmoil, Hayward remembered a recent gift he’d been given. “Another girlfriend, who was neither the one that had just dumped me or the one that I was then going with, had given me some white satin sheets. They just happened to be in my suitcase and I was trying them out in this place that Graeme and I lived in. They were very romantic-looking, but totally impractical.”
When Hayward took the bones of the song into rehearsal the next day, his bandmates seemed less than enthusiastic, at least to begin with.
“I played it to the other guys and they were a bit nonplussed,” Hayward recalls. “Then Mike said: ‘Play it again.’ So I did the first line, and he went [mimics the melody refrain] on Mellotron, and that’s the phrase that started to get everybody else interested. Suddenly the others could see what parts they might play on it.”
When reissued in 1972, the single hit number two in the US for two weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 (behind “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash) and hit number one on the Cash Box Top 100, making it the band’s most successful single in the US. It earned a gold certification for sales of over a million US copies (platinum certification was not instituted until 1976). It also hit number one in Canada.