The story of the Nights In White Satin

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”

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 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.

The single had already peaked at No.19 in the UK when it topped the French chart in February 1968. And while it may not have been the huge hit the label had hoped for at home, it was the Moodies’ biggest success since reaching No.1 with the very different Go Now nearly three years earlier. Crucially, too, it marked the band’s transition from R&B also-rans to torch-pop trailblazers, at a junction in time when psychedelia was splintering off into exciting new directions.

As the Moodies’ reputation grew, so did that of their most iconic song. Nights In White Satin was reissued in 1972, making the Top 10 at home and reaching No.2 on the US Billboard chart. Seven years later, having by then been covered by such disparate artists as Eric Burdon, Percy Faith, Giorgio Moroder and Californian punks The Dickies, the single charted again in Britain.

The song continues to enjoy a prolonged afterlife.