Knights In White Satin

from Smooth Drive Home by Justie

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“There was a lot of emotion that went into the song,” Justin Hayward 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.
Thanks to louder sound.com -
www.loudersound.com/features/the-story-behind-the-song-nights-in-white-satin-by-the-moody-blues

lyrics

Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I've written
Never meaning to send
Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can't say any more

'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you

Gazing at people, some hand in hand
Just what I'm going through they can't understand
Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend
Just what you want to be, you will be in the end

And I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Oh how I love you

Nights in white satin
Never reaching the end
Letters I've written
Never meaning to send
Beauty I've always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can't say any more

'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you

Oh how I love you
'Cause I love you
Yes I love you
Oh how I love you
Oh how I love you

credits

from Smooth Drive Home, released June 5, 2020

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Justie England, UK

Singer songwriter Justie is from England and has been performing at gigs and concerts plus recording music from his late teenage years. He comes from a musical family and loves pop, rock music and synth instrumentals. His heroes include Jonny Cash, Kate Rusby, John Denver, Genesis, Lady Ga Ga, John Legend, Vangelis, Billy Joel, and Tangerine dream. ... more

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