Mesmerizing…

It’s even better with headphones on.

Agree!

I saw them in the early 90s with a 50 piece orchestra in Orlando, Fl. Probably one of the absolute best concerts I've ever been to, I've been to many!!!

Breathe deep the gathering gloom. Watch lights fade from every room.....

Yes, they are! The Moody Blues have been my favorite group over the years, but I have many others, too! Thanks, All American! I hope your vacation has been all you wanted it to be and even more!

From Louder: 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.” 👉 Shaped by producer Tony Clarke and arranger/conductor Peter Knight, Nights In White Satin became a sumptuous epic in the studio. It formed the centrepiece of the Moodies’ second album, Days Of Future Passed, a dawn-to-darkness song cycle that made full use of the Mellotron’s ability to simulate an orchestra. Topped off by a spoken-word poem, Late Lament, Hayward’s song clocked in at nearly seven and a half minutes. Nights was duly edited down as a single, although not everyone at Deram, Decca’s new subsidiary label, was convinced of its worth. — ROB HUGHES [article continues]

The most beautiful performance of this song.🎵💙

Lots of drama in that song. Bought the album back then but never thought their stuff would reach classic status considering who they were competing against: Stones, Zeplin, Hendrix, Joplin etc. 😉

Indeed… My fav Moody Blues selection…

Justin Hayward