The Moody Blues – Nights In White Satin

It stalled at No.103 in America, went to No.1 in the Netherlands, and four years later a late-night DJ in Seattle brought it back to No.2.

No.103. That was as high as Nights in White Satin reached in America in 1968, short even of the Hot 100. In Britain it got to No.19. In the Netherlands and French-speaking Belgium it went to No.1, which is why the Moody Blues were in a German television studio that year playing it. Four years later, with no promotion behind it, the same record climbed to No.2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold a million copies in the United States. A song by a band that had nearly broken up became their signature twice, once in Europe and once in America.

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By the autumn of 1966 the band had almost nothing left. The management behind their 1964 hit Go Now had vanished along with the money, Mike Pinder later said, and singer Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick quit. Pinder, drummer Graeme Edge and flute player Ray Thomas brought in Justin Hayward and John Lodge and started again. Hayward was 19. He came home from a gig one night, sat on the side of his bed with a 12-string guitar, and wrote the two verses in one go, at the end of one love affair and the start of another. The title came from a gift of white satin bedsheets from a girlfriend.

The band’s first reaction was mostly indifference. Then Pinder, who had just acquired a Mellotron, asked Hayward to play it again and added the keyboard phrase that runs through the record, and the song came together. They cut it on October 8, 1967, at Decca’s studios in West Hampstead, with Tony Clarke producing and Hayward playing a 12-string he had been given by Lonnie Donegan. The strings in the body of the song are Pinder’s Mellotron. It became the closing piece of Days of Future Passed, an album that began as Decca’s plan for a rock version of Dvořák’s New World Symphony to show off its new stereo sound. Arranger Peter Knight agreed to back the band’s own day-in-a-life song cycle instead. The London Festival Orchestra credited on the sleeve was a group of session players under Knight, and Edge’s poem Late Lament, which ends the album version, was recited by Pinder lying flat on his back in the studio.

The Long Way to No.2

Deram released the single in Britain in November 1967 in an edited version of barely three minutes, backed with Cities. Europe took to it first, and this Beat-Club performance comes from that run, the five members in Radio Bremen’s studio while the record was climbing the continental charts. America did not take to it until 1972. Edge later traced the revival to a regional breakout in Seattle, where a late-shift DJ kept playing the long record, and from there it spread to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hayward said the label’s promotion was all going to the band’s new album, Seventh Sojourn, and that the old single climbed on its own. It held No.2 on the Hot 100 for two weeks, stuck behind Johnny Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now, while Cash Box and Canada’s RPM chart put it at No.1. Britain sent it back to No.9 that year, and again to No.14 in 1979.

The record has outlived every chart run. The 1972 single entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999, and the song has been covered by artists from Giorgio Moroder to Bettye LaVette, whose version Hayward has said moved him to tears. Hayward himself has described it as a record with almost nothing on it but a lot of echo. That may be the point. It was written in one sitting by the band’s newest member and met with shrugs, and it kept being rescued by people who asked to hear it again: Pinder in the rehearsal room, Knight at Decca, a disc jockey in Seattle five years later.