Nights in White Satin

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“Nights in White Satin”
“Nights in White Satin” cover
Single by The Moody Blues
from the album Days of Future Passed
B-side "Cities"
Released 10 November 1967
Recorded 1967
Length 7:38 (album)
3:06 (single edit #1)
4:26 (single edit #2)
Label Deram
Writer(s) Justin Hayward
The Moody Blues singles chronology
"Love and Beauty"
(1967)		 "Nights in White Satin"
(1967)		 "Tuesday Afternoon"
(1967)
Days of Future Passed track listing
Side one
  1. "The Day Begins"
  2. Dawn: "Dawn is a Feeling"
  3. The Morning: "Another Morning"
  4. Lunch Break: "Peak Hour"
Side two
  1. The Afternoon: "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)" / "(Evening) Time to Get Away"
  2. Evening: "The Sunset" / "Twilight Time"
  3. The Night: "Nights in White Satin"

"Nights in White Satin" is a 1967 single by The Moody Blues, first featured on the album Days of Future Passed.

"Nights In White Satin" was not a popular title when first released, mainly due to its length, which at seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds was longer than the norm at that time. There are two edited versions of the song, both stripped of the orchestra and poetry from the LP version. The first version, with the songwriter's credit shown as "Redwave", was a hasty sounding 3:06 edit of the main song with very noticeable chopped parts. For the second edited version (now credited to Justin Hayward), the main track was kept intact, ending at 4:26. Both versions were backed with a non-LP release, "Cities". The song was re-released in 1972 after the success of such longer-running dramatic songs as "Hey Jude" and "Layla", and it charted at #2 on Billboard magazine and #1 on Cash Box in the United States, earning a gold single for sales of a million copies and was also #1 in Canada. The song also holds the dubious distinction of falling off the Hot 100 from the highest position (#17). It was also released in Spanish as Noches de Seda at the same time. Its original release in the United Kingdom reached #19; in the wake of its US success, the song re-charted in the UK in the late 1972 and climbed ten positions higher, to #9. The song was re-released yet again in 1979, and charted for a third time in the UK, at #14.

Band member Justin Hayward wrote the song at age nineteen, and titled the song after a friend gave him a gift of satin bedsheets. The song itself was a tale of a yearning love from afar, which leads many aficionados to term it as a tale of unrequited love endured by Hayward. The London Festival Orchestra provided the musical accompaniment heard throughout, and which reached its climax before and after the song itself and the spoken-word poem. The band and orchestra makes use of the Mellotron keyboard device, which would come to define the "Moody Blues sound".

While largely ignored on its first release, the song has since garnered much critical acclaim, ranking #36 in BBC Radio 2's "Sold on Song Top 100" list.

In the late 1990s, the UK magazine "Record Collector" printed a claim that "Nights In White Satin" had not been written by Justin Hayward at all, but that in fact the Moody Blues' management had simply bought the song outright in 1966 from an Italian group called The Jellyroll and taken credit for it. This spurious claim seems to have arisen from the discovery of a 7" single by The Jellyroll which allegedly carries the words "This is the original version of Nights In White Satin" on the label.

[edit] "Late Lament"

The spoken-word poem, which is heard near the six-minute mark in the song, is called "Late Lament." It was written by drummer Graeme Edge and was read by keyboardist Mike Pinder. On Days of Future Passed, the poem's last five lines bracket the album, appearing also at the end of track 1 ("The Day Begins"). While "Late Lament" has been commonly known as part of "Nights in White Satin" with no separate credit on the original LP, it was given its own listing on the 2-LP compilation This Is The Moody Blues in 1974 and again in 1987 (without its parent song) on another compilation, Prelude. Both compilations feature the track in a slightly different form than on Days Of Future Passed. Both spoken and instrumental tracks are given an echo effect. The orchestral ending is kept intact, but the gong (struck by Mike Pinder) that closes the track from the original LP is completely edited out.

[edit] Cover versions

[edit] External links

Preceded by
"My Ding-a-Ling" by Chuck Berry		 RPM number one single (Canada)
November 11, 1972		 Succeeded by
"Garden Party" by Rick Nelson
Preceded by
"My Ding-a-Ling" by Chuck Berry		 Cash Box Top 100 singles
November 4, 1972		 Succeeded by
"Burning Love"
by Elvis Presley
v • d • e
The Moody Blues
Graeme Edge · Justin Hayward · John Lodge
Denny Laine · Patrick Moraz · Mike Pinder · Ray Thomas · Clint Warwick
Studio albums
Live albums
Compilations