| How did you change the Moody Blues' fortunes from an ailing R&B
outfit who'd just lost their frontman into the best-selling outfit of DAYS
OF FUTURE PASSED in scarcely a year?
JOHN LODGE: In the summer of 1966, Justin, myself, Ray, Graeme and Mike
got together. We knew it couldn't be the Moody Blues of the 'Go Now' period,
so we decided to move to Belgium, in a little town called Mouscron, and
start writing. There were clubs we could play in to earn enough money to
live and, in the meantime, concentrate on writing our own music - what
would become our new stage show. We had been playing Tamla Motown, some
blues songs, James Brown's 'I Don't Mind', Curtis Mayfield's Impressions.
All our influences came from America. We started experimenting with harmony,
which was really important - and this has become the mainstay of the Moody
Blues. We concentrated on counter harmonies that went against the main
melody, and this, I think, came from the Impressions and the Four Tops.
But we were really looking for our own direction.
RAY THOMAS: We were all rock 'n' roll-orientated but Justin was more
folky, so that was the first fusion, really, before DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED
- a marriage of musical styles, a natural progression. We had some songs
we'd intended to record but we couldn't get any studio time to make an
album. You needed a hit record for that, so it was Catch 22.
JL: We came back to England and sent some demos of our new songs off
to Decca, which led to a couple of singles, 'Fly Me High' and then 'Love
And Beauty'. 'Fly Me High' was the first real progression because that
had all the harmonies. It was the turning point.
You also recorded several radio sessions in 1967.
JL: That's right. We'd been up and down the different BBC studios two
or three times a week, recording new songs that they'd play on Radio 1.
The very first recording of 'Nights In White Satin' was done for the BBC,
prior to the album. We suddenly realised what we'd achieved, sitting in
the control room listening to the first recording of 'Nights'. And we were
really excited with the rest of our new stage show.
How did the DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED album come about?
JL: Decca asked if we would record our version of Dvorak's 'New World
Symphony' with an orchestra. When we actually came to record DAYS OF FUTURE
PASSED, we went to Decca and said, can we have lockout time? - ie: we wanted
the studio 24 hours a day so we could set up all our equipment and just
record. In those days, you could only record in strict morning sessions.
They agreed and then we said that instead of using the melodies from Dvorak,
we would use our own songs.
RT: DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED was supposed to be a demonstration album -
they wanted us to play rock 'n' roll and Peter Knight to do Dvorak to play
to their reps to give them an idea of the scope of this new Deramic wall-to-wall
sound. But we thought it would be very bitty, so we asked Peter to stick
his neck out, because we wanted to record our stage act. We never actually
worked with the orchestra. All we did was ship each track to Peter, who
wrote and scored the orchestral bridges. It was all very hippy, you know.
Low lights and incense burning!
How did you come to use a Mellotron?
RT: The company that built them came from the Midlands. Mike had worked
with them, and we bought the first one from Dunlop's social club - no-one
there could actually play it! The Mellotron was a right pig to travel with.
In the States, it broke down more than it worked, but it caused quite a
stir over there. It was a great lump! The trouble was, it was fine here
because our electricity supply is so stable, but in the States, you could
tune everything up in rehearsals and by the time you came to play it, everybody
had gone home and put their electrical appliances on and the Mellotron
went, like, "wooargh!" (laughs), just like having a voltage alternator
on the damn thing. It was all over the shop.
How did Decca react to the LP?
RT: Decca weren't sure what to do. They said, well, it's cost more than
we thought it would cost, so they figured they'd just release it to recoup
some of the money. It was a catalogue of errors on their part.
JL: The record company weren't sure where to market it, because we didn't
have any gaps between the tracks so the disc jockeys couldn't easily play
one track. 'Nights In White Satin' was six minutes long, so that wasn't
going to be a single as far as they could see, especially in America. So
it went against all the rules of 'pop music'. But we weren't trying to
be a pop band, we were trying to legitimise Moody Blues music as an entity
and I think DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED sealed it. It is the cornerstone that
we've built our music on.
Was DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED influenced by The Beatles' Sgt Pepper?
RT: Well, they didn't see Sgt Pepper as that much of a concept. That
was more like a show. Ours was more like a rock symphony.
Do you have any particular memories of 'Nights In White Satin'?
RT: What really freaked us out was how well the vocal backing and strings
sounded - it was a bit goose-bumpy and quite moving. The first time we
heard 'Nights' completed was very emotional.
GRAEME EDGE: I think it was only Take 2. But the first inclination of
something extraordinary was when we recorded the song for a BBC show. There's
just a magic when that happens - though it took a long time to take off
in America. Do you know about the guy in Seattle? The first time 'Nights'
came out, it got to about 29 in the charts in Britain. We were about the
[sic] release another single, 'Voices In The Sky', when the American record
company got in touch and said, hold off a minute, you've got a 'breakout'
- a local city hit. It was going absolutely crazy in Seattle and had started
to spread. Many years later, we discovered the DJ who started it all. He
was on 12 till 4am - the graveyard shift. He told us that he wanted to
go smoke his bong, so he went down the authorised playlist and picked the
longest record he was allowed to play - 'Nights In White Satin'.
What was the song about?
JUSTIN HAYWARD: Somebody had actually given me some white satin sheets!
It was just a phrase and they were totally useless, especially if you [sic]
a decent growth of beard like I have. Dreadful things, satin sheets. In
America, they said 'Nights' would never sell. It was long and very slow.
But I agreed with them at the time. They put out 'Tuesday Afternoon' first,
which was a big hit there. But then they followed it with 'Nights', which
turned into an even bigger hit. They said in America that nobody could
dance to it, which was one of the stupidest comments anyone's ever said.
Actually, everyone can dance to 'Nights' because I noticed in 'Rolling
stone' that it was up among the top five Proms songs - and everybody dances
to that.
Graeme, when was the first time you acknowledged your fascination
with poetry in the Moody Blues' music?
GE: While we were making DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED, the morning section
seemed a bit empty, so I wrote what eventually became Morning Glory and
Late Lament. To avoid being distracted, I sat in our Volkswagon van and
wrote it on the inside of a torn-open Players 20 cigarette packet. I tried
to write some words for someone else to put music to, as a song, but poetry
has a rhyhtm and metre which is difficult to turn into a song. So our producer
Tony Clarke said, well, that's great the way it is. Just put it down as
a poem.
Where did the album title come from?
JL: The title came independently from Decca but the wonderful thing
was that our live set was literally a day in the life in loose terms -
exactly the same theme. One of those beautiful coincidences. Peter Knight
was a beautiful arranger, and Decca owned the name of the London Festival
Orchestra - it was really a studio orchestra. We were so excited about
this album. It was recorded in stereo and we had a playback. We put some
speakers up in the studio and invite [sic] our friends and the people
from Decca down. We turned the lights out and played DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED
from the beginning to the end. It was like a concert in the dark. Then
it finished, the lights went on and you could see a smile on everyone's
face as though something magic had happened. I can still get that feeling
now. We knew it was right - I'm not talking about commercial success, I'm
talking about what the Moody Blues wanted, a culmination of what we'd done
for a year.
Note: the Moody Blues second album- their first with a new
line-up - mixed the harmony-based psychedelia of their own songs with orchestral
interludes, finishing with one of the all-time rock classics, 'Nights In
White Satin'. Originally intended as a budget-priced demonstration album
for Decca's new Deramic Sound System, DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED established
the MOODY BLUES on the world stage.
Special thanks to: Wyn Mather at Threshold, Bill Levenson, Matthieu
Lauriot-Prevost, David Costa, Phil Smee.
Digitally remastered by Steve Fallone at PolyGram Studios.
Sleevenotes and interview by John Reed. Cover painting by David Anstey. |
