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The Moody Blues "Days Of Future Passed" (1967)
The Day Begins/Dawn: Dawn Is A Feeling/The Morning: Another
Morning/Lunch Break: Peak Hour/The Afternoon: Forever Afternoon (A Tuesday?)
aka Tuesday Afternoon/(Evening) Time To Get Away/Evening: The Sun Set/Twilight
Time/The Night: Nights In White Satin
"Cold
hearted orb that rules the night, that ebbs and flows with what we write, is
this album perfection or just a fright? And which of us is really right? And
which is an illusion?"
or
"Just what you want to be you will be in the end"
1)
The Review Begins:
Fittingly for an album about the effects of time on
mankind, the gap between The Moody Blues' first and second records seems like
an aching, unfillable chasm rather than a mere two years (the sort of length
between records that seems quite normal to modern audiences, if not a little on
the short side). When we last left The Moody Blues (for those you reading these
things in order anyway) things were looking very different: this quintet - who were very much led by Denny Laine -
played R and B while clean-shaven, usually be-suited and with their hair length
just the unfashionable side of short. By 1967 this quintet - who have very much
been re-styled overnight as a democracy - played music that defied any label
while wearing a wide variation of beards and moustaches, wore the most exotic
clothes flower power had to offer and had their hair just the fashionable side
of long. Though the 60s music scene was an ever changing world that altered
seemingly by the week, The Moodies had gone through a particularly traumatic
and life-changing dive from heroes (with their UK #1 and worldwide hit 'Go
Now') to zeroes (six more singles were released by the Denny Laine era of the
band - the best any of them made was #22 for 'From The Bottom Of My Heart I
Love You'). Though some of the actual single choices had something to do with
it (most of the good early Moody stuff ended up as album tracks and B-sides
rather than A-sides), a main cause of this failure is probably that The Moody
Blues were simply too rooted to the sounds of 1964 to survive into 1965 and
beyond: of all the R and B cover bands around in the 1960s they were one of the
most faithful - and therefore the most dated sounding once R and B stopped
being the latest 'in sound'. Bassist Clint Warwick was the first to get fed up
and cut his losses, deciding that as the band's only married member with small
children he needed a more stable income; Denny Laine followed soon after,
leaving to take up a promising looking career with Cream drummer Ginger Baker
and various members of The Move (the only other Brummie band of the 1960s whose
record sales matched the Moodies' own). Suddenly a once promising band everyone
was talking about was down to a trio, without their lead guitarist singer and
co-writer, their singles now failing to reach even the bottom end of the charts
as the band clung stubbornly to their R and B roots.
By 1966 The Moody Blues had been reduced to playing
the detested 'cabaret circuit' (a fate worse than disbanding for bands in the
1960s and considered the posh middle-class adult arena that was the anti-thesis
to rock and roll), trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. Luckily for
the remaining members - keyboard player Mike Pinder, flautist Ray Thomas and
drummer Graeme Edge - their ideas for replacements were a masterstroke. Though
a bassist named Rod Davis was the band's first choice (he did play with them
for a few months before leaving when Denny did and later joined The Rockin'
Berries), Ray nominated the only sensible suggestion: a bass player named John
Lodge who'd played with him in Brummie band 'El Riot and The Rebels'. John had
been desperate to be a part of the music scene and had been greatly
disheartened when the Moodies 'supergroup' poached Ray away, breaking up their
band and had been a frustrated student, trying to knuckle down to his studies
when the lure of the Moody songs played on the radio kept reminding him of what
might have been. The band also got lucky with Justin Hayward, the band's sole
non-Midlander, who'd already made a couple of flop singles in 1966 and had been
struggling with his own feelings of disappointment when he heard that Eric
Burdon was putting together a new line-up of The 'New' Animals thanks to an
advert in the Melody Maker. Eric was apologetic when he got Justin's demo tapes
- he'd just hired Dean Restum who had more of the 'heavy' sound he was looking
for - but he recognised Justin's talent and passed his audition tape along to
Mike, an old friend from the two bands' days on tour together (The Animals and
the early Moody Blues were very similar in style back in the day though
Burdon's bunch had the bigger success; oddly both will sound similar again by
the 'psychedelia years' though the New Animals were never as big as they should
have been, Eric cutting his losses and forming the funk band 'War' - of which
there never was a Moody Blues equivalent. Thank goodness). Justin could have
said 'no', he could have pointed out the band's recent lack of success, pointed
out that he had no prior experience of playing R and B, that he didn't sound
anything like Denny Laine and as a blonde Southerner didn't even look like the
rest of the largely brunette band. Thankfully he agreed to give the band a try
- and gave the band a new direction just when they needed one most.
2)
Dawn (There Is A Feeling):
Ironically for a band who'd had their biggest hit
with a song called 'Go Now', The Moody Blues took a very long time to come to
terms with the fact that their R and B days were over. It was, after all, the
style their decreasingly small number of fans associated them with and still
asked for (especially their one big hit). The band soldiered on for most of
1966 with the same style of songs they'd always done and a similar level of
success. Even their first single of 1967 with Justin and John in the band, a
moody Pinder song named 'Life's Not Life' very much in the old style, failed to
chart. Things clearly had to change, with a famous and oft-mentioned turning
point reversing the band's fortunes. The band were backstage at a gig, worrying
over the lacklustre response to their usual setlist, when an audience member
walked in and tore them off a strip. 'I don't make much money but I like to
take my wife out for a treat once a week and tonight I really wasted my money -
you guys are rubbish!' The band could have chosen to chalk this up to
experience, of having merely played one of those occasionally rough gigs even
the best bands have or of their uninvited visitor simply having cloth ears
(It's the 1960s what's wrong with you? By my era's standards this is paradise
and if you think the bands on the cabaret circuit were bad back then what on
earth would you make of them now?) For all we know that same guy enjoyed
telling every band at the same gig backstage the same thing and The Moodies
were the only band who listened? (Nobody can quite remember or agree on where
this gig was by the way - sometimes it's down South, sometimes it's a Midlands
town close to home). Either way, the band didn't reject the comment out of hand
- the one part of the story everyone agrees on is Graeme sighing 'he's right,
you know, that bloke' and the others sadly nodding. Though the critics had been
saying this for years by now, what really stung the band was that they'd been
'found out' for not being 'themselves': the early R and B Moody Blues had only
really sounded good because of Denny's voice and Mike's thumped piano - with
half of that formula now gone, the band seem to have woken up and wondered what
they were doing.
A lesser band would have quit then and there but one
of the band's key strengths had been their resilience: they'd built this band
up the hard way and had spent too long honing it to let it die out (it speaks
volumes that The Moody Blues soldiered on with their band name despite the fact
that it was now a millstone around their necks, restricting them to what people
remembered rather than the present: even 'The Animals' changed their name and
they'd had far more success over a longer period). So they began writing with
new purpose, with a large spurt of songwriting written on tour in October 1966.
This in itself marked a major shift: till now the band had always put their
cover songs first (despite some excellent under-rated songs written by Mike and
Denny in the early days) and only Mike had considered himself an 'actual'
writer, with Justin having had only the experience of his flop pair of singles
and John, Graeme and Ray having never
written a tune before. Against all odds, the band turned out to feature four
writers and one poet in drummer Graeme, who surprised everybody by switching
his heavy-handed drumming for a lightness of wordplay. This also happily
coincided with a switch in the band's sound - most notably Mike Pinder's new
purchase of a mellotron. Funnily enough the instrument was also a Midlands
invention, invented by Streetly Electronics as a 'shortcut' for bands on a
budget who couldn't afford a full orchestra, with the instrument working
through rolls of tape looped round to play continuously at the press of a
button. Mike was enough of a local boy to have worked there for a time in the
early days of the band - his old employers were kind enough to sell him a
secondhand model cheap in return for some free publicity. The instrument was
the closest the 1960s ever came to a 'computer' in effect, though everything
was still done in analogue back then - if somebody talked about a 'digital
system' back in 1967 they probably meant the idea of Braille (or another
writing system based on numbers). The 'new' must have toy of 1967, the
signature sound of the mellotron alone transported the Moodies' sound back into
the present day but better yet Mike proved to be the only real musician of the
1960s who understood the instrument and who worked hard to master it. Though
other bands used the instrument as decoration - a bit of colourful icing to add
to the rest of the mix - Pinder was the only musician who understood just how
much texture he could get from the instrument if it weaved in out of the
other's performances, an equal partner in the sound. Even now it's the
signature sound everyone thinks of when they picture the band, with the
mellotron officially consigned to the Moodies' attic ever since Pinder left the
group in 1978. Though there's actually far less mellotron on 'Days Of Future
Passed' compared to later Moodies albums (it's primarily heard on Mike's own
song 'Dawn Is A Feeling' and Justin's 'Nights In White Satin'), where it's
sound is largely replaced by the full orchestra, it makes just enough of an
impression to have impressed most of the people who heard the album the first
time round.
3)
The Morning (More Than Just Another Album):
The Moody Blues released two singles in 1967 using their
new 'formula', but whilst Justin's poppy 'Fly Me High' and Mike's breakthrough
psychedelic song 'Love and Beauty' won the band more respect than their last
few singles, they still hadn't dented the charts. Undeterred, they set about
crafting a whole new stage act from their new material - in stages (back in
1967 most bands played two sets with a break for another act in between: the
band would start with an 'old' set and later play the 'new'' with the mellotron
wheeled out on stage). After a while the band realised that the new material
was becoming more popular (you wonder what the guy who ticked the band off
would have thought of it all - hopefully in some alternate time-stream he came
backstage to tell the band they sounded great!) and the band's old songs got
the push, never to return (not even 'Go Now', despite many a fan request over
the years). Perhaps because of this idea of 'now' and 'then' and the gulf of
years between when the band started and where they had now become, 'time' began
to become a very important element in many of the band's songs. Sadly no one
seem to remember (and no interviewer ever seems to ask) when the band chose to
start turning these loose strands into a 'whole', but somehow somewhere the
band ended up in May 1967 with a full 'concept album' - a setlist than ran for
a full forty-five minutes from the beginning of a day to late at night. Though
the band didn't as yet have the orchestra, and pieces were added and dropped as
the idea developed (frustratingly none of them would ever be recorded, although
'Legend Of A Mind' is one song we know for a fact to be played in this period -
whether as part of the concept or not) the band had a complete album - they
just needed the chance to record it.
Enter another very lucky break for The Moody
Blues.Record label Decca weren't at all keen for the band to make any album -
they were barely prepared to let the band keep releasing singles given the poor
returns on their investment. By this point in mid-1967 the band were officially
£5000 in debt when they were given an ultimatum: record what we tell you to or
'else'. The 'what we tell you' had nothing to do with The Moody Blues: what
Decca really wanted was an album 'demonstration' record which would show off a
new discovery they'd made - a 'new' process of stereo separation that used a
much wider spectrum of sound than they had ever managed before. They even came
up with a new spin-off label, intended initially for the hi-fi buff market to
show off this new technique called 'Deram'. Realising that the market was that
bit specialist, they wanted it to appeal to as many people as possible, so came
up with the idea of having a rock and roll band sound like an orchestra - and
vice versa. Here the story deviates: most people are adamant that the Moody
Blues were hired to make an entire translation of Dvorak's 'New World Symphony'
using rock and roll instruments decorated with strings; other eye-witnesses
claim that the work was meant to be a bit more general, with more of a 'gulf' between
the two sides as a 'history of rock and roll' was heard song by song in between
bursts of classical music. (For what it's worth, my guess - unsubstantiated by
anyone else - is that the band were told to go away and do something general
but someone (Peter Knight?) remarked that as their music was closest to Dvorak
and his actually rather 60s-ish combination of spiritual 'negro' music and
Eastern time signatures, they may as well start there is they really were going
to make a classical crossover record. Despite the similarities though, you can
tell from one listen that the idea would never have worked: apart from Ray's
flute there is no similarity between the two palettes and the switch between
breathy whisper and sudden crescendo - crucial to classical music and especially
Dvoark - sounds stilted and boring when use in rock and roll; my working
hypothesis after writing this many reviews to date is that you can only repeat
something once per five minute song before you lose power). Either way, chances
are nobody had thought about the idea that hard: this was after all only
intended to be a 'demonstration' record made on the cheap that was never
expected to sell many copies. If Decca had really wanted a big seller they'd
have badgered The Rolling Stones or The Who into doing it, bands with much
higher pedigrees at the time than The Moodies had.
4)
Lunch Break: What Is This Album All About?
The Moody Blues hated the idea. In another lucky
break, so did the arranger who had been 'chosen' for them: classical conductor
Peter Knight, who was open enough after working in the rock and roll world to
listen to what the band had to play. The band played him their new setlist:
Clarke - like the rest of the world - had never heard anything like it and said
the band ought to record that instead. He also set to work on his own
orchestrations for the record, arguing that Decca couldn't really complain if they
got both rock and roll and classical music heard together. In an even luckier
break, the producer chosen for the task, Tony Clarke, also thought the 'new
world' idea was stupid. Though producers in the 1960s almost always did what
their record companies asked of them, Clarke was in a unique position: he'd
just been 'fired' by Decca after his own string of losses and was serving out
his notice so had nothing to lose by taking a risk (he'll be around for as long
as The Moody Blues are in their 'first career' and becomes very much an 'extra'
member of the band from here on in end, his importance to the band criminally
under-rated). Oh and another extremely lucky break: despite the fact that all
the early Decca rock and roll records (including 'The Magnificent Moodies'
sound awful (the label notoriously treated rock and roll bands the same they
taped orchestras, which led to the murky sound fellow label acts like The
Rolling Stones made their own but other bands got laughed at) 'Deram's new
system was the 'real deal'. Even the label's rivals, like EMI RCA Pye and
Columbia (who'd all traditionally made better sounding records) couldn't touch
it. Frankly any band who'd been the first to release a record that sounded this
good would have been a minor 'star' - for a group like The Moody Blues who
loved their sounds and took their time constructing them (even when given
limited studio time) it made them heroes.
5)
The Afternoon (Forever Timeless (Recorded On A Tuesday?):
Though there had been concept albums before 'Days Of
Future Passed' ('Sgt Peppers' is the famous one, The Kinks' 'Face To Face' was
the earliest intended psychedelic one and The Beach Boys' 'Shut Down Volume
Two' is technically the first with a collection of songs about cars) and 'Days'
wasn't even the most thoroughly thought out concept album out for Christmas
1967 (that was 'The Who Sell Out', released a mere three weeks after this
record) it was nevertheless enough of a 'new idea' to catch people's
attentions. A record that runs in chronological order from dawn to night, it's
arguably the first concept album that needs to be heard in the intended order
for the idea to 'work'. It helped too that there hadn't been any real
contenders to this record's claim as the first full rock and roll/classical crossover,
although Brian Wilson wasn't exactly a stranger to the concept (yet again we
AAA-era curse the fact that 'Smile' never made it out as intended for yuletide
1966, when it would blown so many people out of the water and pushing bands on
past new limits we might have been still in the rapture of psychedelia now;
also I have my doubts about how successful a cross-over this truly was: you
can't help but feel that fans expecting more Mantovani than Moody Blues would
have been upset with their purchase, given how short many of Peter Knight's
links actually are). Though orchestras don't seem an obvious addition if you
want to make a rock and roll record 'hip', even this was good timing. The
Beatles had been working with bigger and bigger orchestras in the last couple
of years, gaining respect from small portions of the classical world with their
work on 'Yesterday' and 'A Day In The Life'; Leonard Bernstein had also
recently been hailing Brian Wilson as a bigger creative genius than anyone in
the gradually stagnating classical world of the 1960s. The year 1967 was the
year when, more than ever, rock and roll 'grew up' and became more than mere
pop fodder for teenagers, but work written for those of the 1960s to come to
terms with adult life and deeper meanings: if that meant occasionally using the
'sound' of your parent's work then so be it, as long as it was done the 'new'
way, to enhance the 'realness' of the rock and roll world and to shape the mood
rather than dictate it (no one had quite forgiven Elvis for his rock and roll
with strings singles just yet). In other words, 'Days Of Future Passed' was the
perfect album for its times: it was different in an era when being 'different'
was enough to reward you bonus marks, sounded better than possibly any rock and
roll record ever had before, pioneered the use of a concept album and the use
of an orchestra back when both ideas were gloriously new and had two hit
singles to boot. The album was an obvious seller surely: The Moody Blues at
last discovered their true forte as craftsmen studio musicians (where they
could 'perfect' each song for pretty much the first time) and were excited how
good it sounded; Tony Clarke was convinced the band's music had an audience and
Peter Knight, perhaps the world's most open to rock and roll man from the
classical world after George Martin, was certain the record would be a big
seller.
6)
Evening (Time To Send The Album Away):
Decca however were furious: they didn't understand
the record at all and were appalled that their instructions hadn't been
followed. They still thought of rock and roll albums as something pop stars did
to sell extra trash on top of singles and still considered rock and roll as
separate three-minute pop entities. At first they refused to release the album -
only Peter Knight's clout and enthusiasm persuaded them to give it a go,
although the label didn't exactly go to town promoting what they considered a
sure-fire disaster until the radio stations picked up on the two singles from
the album, 'Tuesday Afternoon' and 'Nights In White Satin'. To be fair to the
record label, though, when they eventually decided to go ahead they did things
properly, with a member of their design team coming up with the very
descriptive album title (The Moodies had never bothered to give their set list
a name) and hiring a young artist named Phil Travers to design the bright and
very 1967 album cover (he'll be along for the ride until the Moodies' 1973
split too; this isn't one of his best - actually it's about his worst - but is
at least fitting for the album and the image Decca want to promote). Suddenly,
without really intending any of it, The Moody Blues had been given their
signature sound on a plate - and from here on in the band will become the darlings of the 1960s big
thinkers who considered rock and roll on a par (if not, secretly, rather
superior to) with their parent's classical records.
7)
The Night (Album In White Satin?):
So much for the background and the circumstances,
then, which make for a terrific story with one of the best 'behinds the scenes'
of any AAA album ever made. But how has the actual music stood up today? Well,
this is where I might lose many of you I'm afraid, dear Moody readers. You see,
I'm in two minds about the whole record. The first thing to say it that I'm
always amazed when this record is still talked about as the only Moody Blues
record worth buying; though everyone always sticks the boot into sequel 'In
Search Of The Lost Chord' for being of its time, this is the Justin/John era
album that's dated the most. Though usually for me the more an album sounds
like it belongs in 1967 rather than 2017 the better, 'Days' is the one album
that isn't 'timeless', the record that's so busy throwing in period sounds it
forgets to add in any actual, well, content that later fans can latch on to(admittedly,
that said, the 1980s Moodies albums suffer from this a whole lot more). Now I
'live' in 1967 far more than I do in my own time-zone, so I should be less put
off by the period trappings than most, but like 'Sgt Peppers' this album feels
as if it's spent so long representing a particular point in time that it lacks
the timeless commentary of a 'Revolver' or the eclecticism of a 'White Album'. Future
Moody albums will teach us more about humanity and our relations to our fellow
man than I ever learnt from any other source (be it school, Bible, youth club
or the internet) - but this one just describes events rather than 'feels' or
'learns' them, with a few noble exceptions. Together with the orchestra - which
is meant to 'link' the songs together but just ends up pushing them further and
further apart - this is a curiously detached album which makes it hard for me
to feel anything for and the Moody Blues, though one of the more intelligent
bands on our pages, are one of the most 'feeling' bands of the era, wearing
their hearts on their sleeves. To put it another way, much as I admire this
album from afar, I'm not sure I'd have persevered with the next six records and
fallen for the band so if this had remained their template to the end as it's
also an album hard for me to love.
Those exceptions do of course cast a big shadow and
add a massive amount to the Moodies
canon: John's 'Peak Hour' (the best rocker the band ever did, though it's sadly
slightly clumsily performed here) and Justin's 'Tuesday Afternoon' (the band's
'breakthrough' song with so much of their signature sound, made up of confusion
and searching for direction) and 'Nights In White Satin' (which, admittedly,
has more emotion in five minutes than most albums in fifty - although even this
gorgeous song is nearly wrecked with the tacky orchestra overdubs on the album
version) there's less here to get excited about composition-wise than any other
John/Justin album (at least up till 'Long Distance Voyager'). Unlike most
Moodies fans, I'm not even that keen on the poetry and this is Graeme's most
pretentious, overblown poem of all his works which doesn't hold a candle to his
actual songs and slows things down to a crawl (even if Mike reads it out well -
if they ever do Alan's Album Archives on tape he's my first choice!) Writing
this review has also reminded of just how good and overlooked Mike's
contributions to the album are too, although they're very much the 'scene
setters' rather than songs you keep coming back to.
Though I salute the concept, which is an excellent
idea (trust the first concept album from 1967 to be about time - a concept
that's been knocking on the door the whole decade long, from The Beatles' 'In
My Life' to The Beach Boys' 'When I Grow Up (To Be A Man)' and beyond) , even
this idea is muddled compared to later, similar Moodies concepts: this is,
according to interviews of the time and most reviews since, the sound of a
single working man in his life from dawn till dusk. But if that's true then
this is a very odd man: he's gloriously happy when he wakes up, regrets
becoming an adult as he walks somewhere (presumably to work), has the weirdest
lunch hour ever (it sounds like a drug trip), searches for his soul in the
afternoon, worries about becoming trapped in the evening, watches the sunset
with more fright than a Hammer Horror film soundtrack, appears to walk back
home in the twilight and ends up pouring out his pain for lost loves in the
night. Is this really the same person? If so then I think they should see a
doctor about their mood-swings quick, especially as nothing seems to concretely
happen to set this off. A 'better' concept perhaps may have been to paint this
as the picture of the 60s generation (yes them again) growing old and becoming
increasingly aware of how limited the world around them is ('Peak Hour' is, in
this context, the album's key song as the narrator 'wants to run out and
tell...*them, they've got time'; it's a
very Hollies song actually, in line with their 'drug trip' songs 'Look Through
Any Window' and 'Elevated Observations', suggesting it's an English drug trip
thing American pop stars, more upfront about offering advice to other
people, never really had). However even
this doesn't work: 'The Sun Set' should be the 'trapped' world of the new
repetitive day, the heartbreak of 'Nights In White Satin' should be the
'trigger' for the change of 'Peak Hour' and the album should actually end where
it begins. Even more clumsy is the decision to treat some times of day to one
song and the others to two (making it very hard to track these songs down - in
both the vinyl and CD age there are two cases where songs are banded together)
which for some reason has the song '(Evening) Time To Get Away' appearing in
the afternoon followed by a whole section subtitled 'Evening' (couldn't we have
had two songs for twilight instead?)
The most disappointing part of the album, though,
has to be the classical/rock and roll crossover. Though Peter Knight liked the
genre better than most - and the album and, most likely, The Moody Blues post
1967 wouldn't have existed without him - he really doesn't know how to
translate rock and roll into classical at all. His links between the albums are
corny, far below the standard set by George Martin over in Abbey Road, and make
even this album's standout feature (a magnificent set of eight Moody melodies)
a curse: it's a wonder curious rock and roll fans who heard 'Nights' on the
radio didn't fling this record across the room when 'The Day Begins' started up
like some low budget lift music, with a sound so slow and cliched. I have a
sneaking suspicion that this record made more curious classical listeners fall
in love with rock and roll than ever did the other way round; while the Moodies
are to some extent meeting in the middle here (only 'Peak Hour' comes close to traditional
rock and roll), Knight isn't doing the same thing: he's gone all out to
extremes. 'The Day Begins' medley of album sounds and the even more horrendous
closing medley 'Late Night Lament' (u-credited on the original sleeve, though
given a separate credit later so Graeme got his name on the album) are probably
my two least favourite 'Moody Blues' songs (only technically featuring Mike
anyway) until the band start having fun with synthesisers. Though 'Days Of
Future Passed' always gets the credit as the best Moody Blues album and the
best hybrid of rock and roll and classical, for me it's the worst: even the
album's best moments sound all the worse for the syrupy strings and hard as
everyone tries the two halves still feel as if they belong in an entirely
different, alien worlds by the end of the record.
8)
Late Lament (Summing Up):
However, at the same time, I can also see why this
record was the success it became, especially in 1967. Though future Moody Blues
records will mean that this album really isn't the best at what it does, this
album was nevertheless the first at doing what it does and at the time of
release really was unique. To some extent it's still unique now: though other
albums (including Justin's guest appearance on Jeff Wayne's 'War Of The
Worlds') will try to marry the two styles together and there are more classical
versions of rock and roll albums out than there probably should be (plus the
other way round; *shudder* I still have nightmares about what Tomita did to
Gustav Holst's glorious 'Planet Suite') still no other album have quite stuck A
to B in the same way this album does. There is something to be said for loving
an album and praising it to the hilt simply because it broke so much new ground
in one go because it doesn't sound like anything else, even if you don't
actually love what it sounds like (to use the analogy of a later Moodies album,
other albums took us further into spasce - but this was the record that got the
furthest in one go, escaping Earth's rootsy R and B gravitational pull).
I stress too that once you forget the Peter Knight
bits and the poetry the actual songs are rarely bad and frequently excellent,
impressively so for four more or less new writers learning a whole new style who
had barely spent any time in a recording studio before this and while some of
the lyrics crash to the ground most of the melodies are out of this world. My
guess is that this album did so well partly because it's the Moodies' prettiest
album - although as a fan of lyrics above pretty much everything else I still
find this album a notch below most of the others. I do love parts of this
album: considering that this line-up of the band had only been together a short
time and had barely spent any time in the studio together before these band
performances are wonderfully tight. I really like the Moodies sound here, when
the orchestra has gone home, which because of time restraints is a shade
simpler and less dense than future records. Pinder's mellotron remains one of
the great unions of man and instrument and Justin Hayward comes out of nowhere
to become one of the greatest fully-formed songwriting voices in the country.
'Tuesday Afternoon' and 'Nights In White Satin' between them are the real
success stories of this project, glorious pieces of work that point towards a
glorious new world which are impressively far above what either writer or band
had done up to here. Even the lesser songs
- Ray is perhaps a shade behind the others for now, although he'll make
up for that and how on the next LP, while John is only halfway there - are
delivered with some excellent band performances, impressive given the limited
budget and studio time.
Better yet all the band are used, with the Moodies a
real democracy after so many nights out on the road so you get a better balance
of mellotron, flute, guitar, bass and drums (occasionally, as with 'Sun Set',
this pioneering combination of instruments will result in songs that sound so
good it doesn't matter how oddly constructed they are as songs). The harmonies
are also gorgeous even this early on: the sea of massed voices between Ray on
'Twilight Time' is one of the best uses of vocals and the crossover between
Mike and Justin on 'Dawn Is A Feeling' is exquisitely handled too (sadly the
band will stop this 'one-on-one' idea, so big a part of their early sound,
after 'Ommm' from their next LP). Certainly 'Days Of Future Passed' is a lot
better than the 'New World Symphony' played by rock and rollers would have been
and there's no denying that the Moody Blues have at last found their 'sound'
here, one that they can deliver better than anyone else. I remain, however,
curious as to why this album remains as loved now as it was back then: other
Moody albums retain their mystery, timelessness and appeal; this one may only
take in a single cycle of a day but is the only one of the 'core seven' that
sounds so stubbornly rooted to its time period. Though greeted as a career
peak, in truth 'Days Of Future Passed' is just a stepping stone towards an even
tighter and more original sound that's coming right around the corner, just as
soon as the band ditch the orchestra and a concept that, while well
intentioned, never quite works. Like many Moody Blues fans I discovered them
through this work first; unlike many Moody Blues fans this record put me right
off trying another of their albums until re-discovering the band through 'Every
Good Boy Deserves Favour', a record that really does live up to The Moody Blues
reputation as the thinking fans' band, a record where thankfully both orchestra
and the cliches have gone.
9)
Postcript (Back To The Future Passed):
Before we move on, a quick guide to what you can
find on the CD re-issue - specifically the 'deluxe' edition released in 2006.
This album is turned into a double-set thanks to the most generous helping of
extra tracks in the series (nineteen in all). There are five alternate versions
of album songs: the superior single take of 'Nights In White Satin', a
different mix of 'Tuesday Afternoon' with a different Justin lead vocal, a near-enough-identical
'Dawn Is A Feeling' (which is at least welcome for cutting out the orchestra),
a superior 'Sun Set' without the orchestra getting in the way (although
ironically the idea worked better here than anywhere else on the album
including - funnily enough - a very Dvorak use of strings) and a slightly more
basic version of 'Twilight Time' that doesn't add much. There are also seven
BBC radio sessions: a fantastic pumped up version of 'Peak Hour', a manic
'Twilight Time' and a slightly faceless 'Nights In White Satin', albeit still
important simply for being the earliest recorded version of the song apart from
the record. In addition there's a funky leftover from the R and B days
exclusive to the set as Justin growls through 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood'
(another link between the Moody Blues and The Animals), rather fluffed versions
of Justin's great A side 'Fly Me High' and even greater B-side 'Leave This Man
Alone' that reveal how much the band were already struggling to re-create their
music on stage and a slightly wonky take on Mike's A side 'Love and Beauty'.
Better, if you don't have them, are the original versions of five songs
collected from three separate singles released across 1967: as well as the
excellent 'Fly Me High' 'Love and Beauty' and 'Leave This Man Alone' (classics
all) are the fun farewell to the R and B era on Mike's 'Really Haven't Got The
Time' and the curiously sour 'Cities', a depressing Justin Hayward protest song
about the industrial revolution which made for an odd companion with 'Nights In
White Satin'. Finally there are two outtakes, not actually recorded for the
album but in the earlier sessions for these intended singles and first released
on the 'Live+5' concert/outtakes set in 1977. Justin's 'LOng Summer Days' is
another step in the right direction, with the feel of the 1967 Moodies played
against the instruments of 1966 and another very Beatley tune. Mike's 'Please
Think About It' meanwhile marks another fond farewell to R and B, which was
probably rightly shelved in favour of the more progressive 'Love and Beauty'
though it would have made a respectable B-side. Sadly what the CD doesn't
include is the original mix of the album, as the master-tapes had deteriorated
nearly beyond repair as early as the 1970s (Decca really didn't like this album
did they?); the version in print since 1972 (when America fell in love with The
Moody Blues big time and 'Nights' finally got to #1)is actual a 'reproduction',
bounced across from the 'old' tapes at the last possible minute and subtly
remixed in many different ways. This is probably the source of the 'Dawn Is A
Feeling' and 'Twilight Time' above though all songs were different, with more
abrupt gaps between band and orchestra, a full twenty seconds extra linking
work into 'Peak Hour', a final chorus repeat of 'Evening' and a full harmony
section that originally sang along with John for the second half of the song
and a bizarre-sounding mis-synchronisation between orchestra and band at the
end of 'Nights In White Satin'. Though the master-tapes are missing the whole
album could, of course, have been sourced from a well-kept vinyl edition: there
isn't exactly a shortage to choose from given how many copies this album sold.
Even so, this is the album that 'cleaned up' the best in the CD age and
strangely has a much 'warmer' tone to my ears despite being reproduced
digitally.
'The Day Begins', with a struck gong that takes an
absolute age to fade into the actual track (a full thirty-five seconds on my
copy). Sadly it doesn't mean that breakfast is ready, just a lot more tossing
and turning before the album finally 'wakes up' with a full six minutes of
orchestral versions of the melody lines to come and a poem spoken in RBM
(Received Brummie Pronunciation). These signature lines are taken, in order,
from 'Dawn Is A Feeling' up to 1:30 (which sounds rather good, if a bit too
much like film music), 'Another Morning' up to 2:15 (which sounds trite), a
quick burst of 'Tuesday Afternoon' up to 2:43 (which sounds a bit sickly) and a
sudden left-turn into 'Nights In White Satin' up to 4:05 (which sounds like an
old friend being hit over the head with a series of violins and treacle).
Perhaps thankfully, we get to skip 'Peak Hour' 'Evening' 'The Sun Set' and
'Twilight Time'. We do however get that poem, the one which most Moodies fans
can recite backwards ('thgin eht selur taht bro wolley ho') about the sun
coming up. Written without the slight tongue-in-cheekness of Graeme's future
'poetry' (which will be more self-deprecating on later albums thanks to
screams, sound effects and being followed by 'Ride My See-Saw') it's all a bit
too pompous: the sun is a 'yellow orb that rules the night', the sun 'pinpricks
holes in a colourless sky', night time 'brings the fear of solitude' while
'Brave Helios' (the ancient Greek God of the sun) makes the sun's rays rise by
'waking' his 'steeds' (trivia note for you: Ray's nickname amongst his grandparents
was 'our little Ray of sunshine' - is that where this album's obsession with
sun comes from?) Though acceptable in the anything-goes spirit of 1967, this
poem would have been laughed out of town in any other year for taking itself so
seriously. The trouble, too, is that so much more could have been done to tie
this into the album: the twist that 'Nights In White Satin' is about 'the fear
of solitude' will have come as a surprise to everyone who knew the hit single
version before the record and fits an analysis of its words quite well, but
it's a single thrown away line in this poem, not a full verse. Similarly the
'sun' goes on this album from a symbol of inspiration to a scary beast who can
bring about darkness on a whim between 'Dawn Is A Feeling' and 'The Sun Set',
but the progression here is only hinted at. Also, Graeme's rhyming scheme is a
little, well, lopsided: it runs AAAABCCDDEE (assuming 'solitude' and
'interlude' actually counts as a rhyme)FF. I have never come across a poetry
form like it. This would not matter if the poem worked word-perfectly (rock and
roll is the world's greatest art form because it breaks so many constricting
rules - and one reason why the segues between two very different worlds on this
album don't quite come off) but even before working this out I've always had
the sense that the piece was lopsided somewhere. The problem is the line 'which
is an illusion?' which in context if the cleverest line of the lot (it is
remarkably hard to tell when darkness ends and morning begins when you're
writing reviews at 5AM watching the sun come up) but ends up sending the whole
structure out of whack. On the plus side, though Mike's gravelly dark voice has
never sounded better - these poems sound better coming out of his mouth than Graeme's
when the drummer 're-claims' his own works on future albums.
While Mike is forever labelled after this album's as
the band's 'spiritual' member - and if you're feeling unkind Graeme as its most
pretentious - Ray is sadly lumbered with the idea of being 'the cute, childish
one' as early as his first ever song 'Another Morning'. In time Ray will become
perhaps the most interesting of all the band's writers, with songs like 'And
The Tide Rushes In' and 'For My lady' amongst the most complex and adventurous
of the band's entire output. But alas he often ends up being pigeonholed as the
writer of 'music hall ditties' like this one, which feature a silly clipped
rhyming scheme (actually very hard to write) and a trite nursery rhyme riff.
What's particularly grating about 'Another Morning' is that there is a fab song
here waiting to break free: the middle eight where 'time seems to stand quite still'
and the narrator stops telling us about the children prancing around him and
thinks back to how many things have changed since he was one of them is a
gorgeous moment. Suddenly this has stopped being a descriptive song and become
an emotional one, tapping into another common form of drug trip awareness,
petulance about growing up and becoming an adult ('Yesterday's dreams are
tomorrow's sighs' is one of the best lines at summing up a whole genre of
flower-power 'I sold out my childish self' era song heard in works by John
Lennon and Syd Barrett; one of the side effects of taking hallucinogenic drugs
is that you remember memories that are long-buried). However it's a fleeting
moment in a three minute song that has so much of interest and intelligence to
import to us but would much rather go back to playing and describing other
children having fun, cutting Ray off just as he's going somewhere really good
with this song. 'Nice To Be Here' from 1971's Moody record 'EGBDF', will return
to a similar idea, sadly losing the sense of impending doom in adulthood but
gaining a guitar solo played by a rabbit on a banjo with only one string.
Thankfully up next is 'Peak Hour', a song that you
don't have to make any allowances for at all. Though the Peter Knight introduction
is his weakest (and sounds lifted wholesale from 'Hancock's Half Hour' - the
show only ever had eight incidental themes in the radio series and this one is
'All Back To Tony's (Fast)') and frustratingly the longest, the band
performance when you get there is worth the wait. Mike swaps his usual
mellotron streaks for simple stabbed chords of the sort he'd normally play in
the piano, John finds a killer bass groove that's all over the shop but sounds
as if it's always wrapping itself round the song like a big ribbon and Graeme's
drumming is perfectly suited to this eccentric mini-masterpiece (though
occasionally compared to Ringo's 'sensible shoes' style of drumming, he's
actually closer in style to Keith Moon though the Moodies' songs give him less chance
to strut his stuff that way than Moony got with The Who). Even the grating
vocals work in context - this is an adrenalin rush set in a limited timeframe
so of course it's going to sound messy. As with so many early Lodge songs, the
lyrics aren't quite up to the music yet but do work in a surreal, obtuse way.
Though at face value Lodge's narrator is a worker enjoying a lunch break and
laughing at the people around him rushing around their busy lives, this too
sounds like a drug trip with the manic energy of the worldly rush of the verses
slowing down only for the gloriously slow middle eight ('It makes me want to
run out and tell them they've got time!') Lodge is clearly having a go at the
way the world is run ('Minds are subject to what should be done, problem solved
time cannot be run') because, for whatever reason, he's discovered what seems
for him to be another better way based on creativity and freedom. Of all the
band in this era, he's the one who perhaps longed for success the most: the
'founding three' had enjoyed the fame and a modicum of respect, while Justin
had made at least some head way with his own flop singles. John, though, has
watched his school-friend have the success he'd always dreamed of and come
closest of all the five of facing the prospect of taking up a 'real job'. For
me, 'Peak Hour' - like 'Ride My See-Saw' to come the following year - is his
thrill at suddenly finding that his life won't be as boring and grey as he'd
always imagined. Even here, when The Moodies are still very much finding their
feet, he can't contain the joy he feels at the pure limitlessness of his
future. Fittingly, for a song that sounds partly written about the band and
what it means to him, the Moodies turn in a cracking performance that's
arguably one of their very best and just the right side of primitive. Though
the concert versions of this song will be better yet (see 'Live+5'
especially)'Peak Hour' remains an under-rated peak of the record and of the
band's career as a whole.
Meanwhile, on side two, it's 'Tuesday Afternoon'.
Assuming, for the moment, that the band didn't come up with every single time
of day independently and that they vaguely discussed who got what, it would
seem that Justin got the short straw. Who wants to write a song about an afternoon?
Nothing happens, as a rule in afternoons - that's why the Spanish take siestas
and concerts are nearly always played at night. However the glorious twist of
this classic song is that Justin makes it clear that you can experience the
glorious small moments that shape your life any time of the day - and any time
of the week (the added fact that its a 'Tuesday' - the most ignored of the
weekdays - is a neat touch). Though fans have come to know this song as
'Tuesday Afternoon' thanks to the power-pop chorus which repeats this line a
lot and the name printed on the label of the single, the 'official' album name
is 'Forever Afternoon (A Tuesday?)' This is an interesting deviation which
perhaps hints at what the band were really after in this song: in the context
of the album the morning brings routine and rules and the night brings solitude
and loneliness, but the middle of the day - when the jobs and chores are done
and the night hasn't yet arrived - can be anything. Justin uses a clever trick
that will become one of his trademarks for the first time here, the sudden
switch of gears just as you've settled into one mode of thought ('Question' is
perhaps the most obvious example) which makes the song so much deeper than it
could have been. The choruses are happy and free, Justin's narrator like Mike's
and John's calling the world to 'see the beauty of' what he's seeing now that
he's escapes the restrictions of ordinary life. But the verses take us
somewhere very different: 'I'm just beginning to see...' Justin sings, while
later 'The trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why'. It's tempting
to see this as another 'drug' song (a closeness to nature is another common
side effect of hallucinogens) but like all the best drugs songs its not just
about the technicolour world you're stepping into but the monochrome one you're
leaving behind. Another sterling band performance, particularly Mike's
double-time work on the saddest heartstring-tugging mellotron part you'll ever
hear, twinned with a bouncy piano riff, also suggests another possible meaning
behind the elliptic lyrics. This, more than any other track, has the band
caught between their 'old' set and their 'new' one; the charming instrumental,
where Justin soars on the word 'si-i-i-i-i-i-i-i'gh for what seems a glorious
eternity and then the music hits in, is pure R and B for instance, whatever the
trippy surroundings. Ray's perfectly timed flute solo also roots this song,
even as its ending and the 'trip' sounds as if its fading away. This may only
be a single non-eventful Tuesday Afternoon for most people but for the narrator
it's a moment he's going to remember all his life long. I'd love to think that
the moment in time it captures is actually the moment when Justin first
realised what a great band The Moody Blues could be and is really about their
renaissance as much as the world at large's. Whatever the inspiration for it,
though, 'Tuesday Afternoon' is a classic singalong single that's the first to
offer all the great Moody hallmarks (vocals, riff, production, worry and joy)
which also works very well in the context of the album.
Alas 'Evening (Time To Get Away)' also starts a less
favourable band tradition: the John Lodge ballad sung largely in falsetto
that's at least half the speed of every other song on the album. Though the
main riff (bah-bah be doodle doodle doo') is a great one, the rest of the song
lacks the same standard of melody as the rest of the album. The lyrics also
sound less inspired than most of the album, so much so that I've often wondered
if this song was pieces together at the ;last minute when the band realised a)
there was a whole 'evening' slot on the record they hadn't filled yet and b)
John, still a newbie as a writer, was a song down on the others. If that's true
then I sympathise: if Mike's 'Sun Set' and Justin's 'Nights In White Satin'
were really in place then this is a pretty neat attempt at doing what those
songs talk about (loss and unfulfilled potential) in a very different way (pure
melodrama). John may well be talking about his 'other' self here - the one the
Moodies didn't rescue in another time stream - where 'toiling has brought too
many tears' and where working and money is the only way 'to have those things'.
This can be summed up by the quick and rather mumbled line 'Turn round all
those past years!' as John tries to tell his younger self not to worry - and
not to work so hard at something that doesn't 'matter'. Had the song stopped at
the verses it might have been another keeper, but this song is oddly constructed:
the chorus is a single line tagged on the end of some verses but not others and
we get the same middle eight twice which doesn't really fit at all ('Live all
you people, you can't see where you're at'). This sounds to me like a leftover
bit from 'Peak Hour' about the joys of having discovered a 'new' life; this
song is more about the narrator's aggravation once the drugs/ moment of
inspiration have worn off and he realises he's as trapped as everyone else.
There's also a curious divide between what 'evening' means, which is another
reason this song has always seemed rushed to me: in the verses John is still
busy working even though it's evening - the downside, perhaps, of having goofed
off all lunch hour - and yet the chorus plainly tells us that it's 'evening -
time to get away'. This could of course be two separate parts of an evening,
with Lodge going home mid-way through the evening, but that's not made clear
and, anyway, the album's back sleeve still thinks it's the afternoon!
'The Sun Set' may not be the most immediately
likeable song on the album, but it is the track I have found myself slowly
returning to more than some of the others down years. Another song of Mike's,
it's quite unlike anything the band will ever do again and the one song on the
album that uses the orchestra well as an extra burst of noise rather than as an
alien landscape. Though the Moody Blues often get lumbered in with all the
'sitar crowd', it's actually only this track and the next album's 'Omm' that go
anywhere near this direction and this is all the more impressive given that
everything here is played on the Moodies' own instruments, with some odd
detuned Edge drums, Thomas' playful flute and Pinder's majestic ice-cold
mellotron doing much of the work. Lyrically, it's a return to 'Dawn Is The
Feeling' and the idea of the sun as the life-giver, now retreating out of view.
However though the shadows fall over our own planet, mankind's eyes are
directed upwards because of all the stars as if reminded what a small speck
Earth is in a much bigger universe than we can understand. As with 'Peak Hour'
Mike announces that 'I can see it all from this great height' as if his drug
trip/moment of sudden inspiration has now caused him to hover above the Earth
and this moment is met by a sudden switch to an uncomfortable minor key as his
promise that 'the world still goes on through the ni-i-i-i-i-i-ght' is
delivered more like a threat. It's an odd little song this one - I'm not surely
I'd ever want to hear it outside the context of the album (though bizarrely
it's the one non-Hayward song that lasted longest in the band's set lists from
this album) and the curious funeral march tempo and lack of melody may put you
off the song more than the other more melodic tracks here. The sudden switch back
from psychedelia to pompous classical arrangement, with Peter Knight
over-egging everything the band have just under-stated so well, is also enough
to put you off this song for life. However, it's the song on the album that
makes best use of all the themes that have come before, with throwbacks to
'Dawn Is A Feeling' 'Tuesday Morning' and 'Peak Hour' all woven together in
true concept style.
In a way we don't need Ray's 'Twilight Time', a
second song about the cold-hearted orb in the sky fading away and there's
little lyrically that wasn't already said in 'The Sun Set'. However it's a much
better constructed song than 'Another Morning', with a particularly good urgent
riff, and another cracking band performances that elevates it above the
ordinary. Pinder is enjoying turning his usual R and B plodding style on its
head as the one earthly link in a suddenly much scarier world, while Ray's
childish glee matches with Justin's terrified 'aaahs' to make a highly
memorable sound. The lyrics find Ray once again in 'storytime' element,
delivering a second 'Penny Lane' while the rest of the band are working on
their own 'Strawberry Fields', and lots of random images are thrown together:
'An aerial display by the firefly brigade' 'building castles in the air' and
'bats taking to wing like puppets on strings'. At face image this is more like
a documentary than a song and most of the lines are descriptions, not emotions
-if David Attenborough ever decides to a series about 'English wildlife at
night' this song is only missing the badgers and hedgehogs. And yet the music
is clearly trying to make us scared out of our wits, with the song on the album
that is most closely related to what trendy 60s music-lovers would have
referred to as 'a bad trip'. The song's central hook is an ambiguous 'See what
tomorrow brings', but the emphasis on this line - and the way it hovers in the
air before crashing downwards the way Ray sings it - makes you re-evaluate
everything you've just heard. With the sun gone it's time for the creatures of
the Earth to make their own lights and live by their own dreams - so why don't
we? Twilight time, traditional a 'magical' time of day when witches comes out
to 'rule' over mankind should be 'our' time free to do what we want away from
work. Alas, while the bats and nightingales find time to play, man's colourful
fantasies of what he will do when he gets home keep 'disappearing from view'.
As before, I have mixed feelings for this song, which is another song that
doesn't work out that well out of context and rather runs out of ideas by the
middle. However the sheer joy in the room as The Moodies go somewhere they've
never been before is palpable and even Peter Knight is more on the ball than
usual across the album with his orchestral 'links'.
And onto 'Nights In White Satin'. Amazingly, this
song was one of the first Justin had written, back when he was a teenager
living in a bedsit in Swindon (chances are the rest of the 'time' album was
written around it because the band realised what a great song it could be -
it's a wonder, actually, that he didn't try it first on his solo singles and
suggests Justin was waiting for a 'bigger' and higher profile opportunity to
release it). Unlike some Justin songs, which are so exquisitely crafted and
articulate they sound as if a lot of time was spent on them, 'Nights' sounds as
if it came out in one sudden surge of emotion. Justin rarely talks about his
past but the fact that he's written so many songs around similar themes of loss
and longing, almost all about past loves of his life who 'got away' (see the
Blue Jays' 'Who You Are Now?' and the Moodies' own 'I now You're Out There
Somewhere' for starters) suggests that there is at least a kernel of truth in
this song. The opening line ('Nights In White Satin, never reaching the end')
is set in a golden past, but as early as the second line Justin is back in the
present, struggling to work out why the relationship struggled to work out,
surrounded by 'letters I've written, never meaning to send'. The next lines
hint that Justin is only now realising just how special that time in his life
is ('Beauty I'd always missed with these eyes before') and though the song
tries so hard to be quiet and polite and nicely brought up, he can't hold it in
anymore as the song builds up to an orgasmic release of 'and I love you',
over-used lines which have never sounded more 'real'. The second verse has
Justin's narrator now caught in pangs of anxiety - everyone else he sees in the
free 60s world is in a 'couple', some 'hand in hand' and he's never felt more
isolated as 'just what I'm going through they can't understand'. Actually the
song's success rate has long hinted that there are more of 'us' than there are
of 'them' - the song's power comes from its ability to tap into a largely
universal feeling and make it sound like a personal experience. Although the
album this song inspired is in many ways the band's most pre-planned and
written to order, 'Nights' succeeds because it isn't written to order: it's
power lies in how simply it manages to put into words the overwhelming fear and
desperation of having left a love disappear out of your life. Even though
Justin softens the pill with the comforting through 'Just what you want to be
you will be in the end', it's still not enough to dispel the feeling of doom
which swells up and chokes him several times across the song.
Though there are other great Justin Hayward
performances out there, this is still one of his very best and you can tell
from the vocal how much this song still means to Justin, even if he was already
with the girlfriend who would become his wife in 1970. He was also very much
'right' to leave the song until he had a backing band who could do the song
justice and all the Moodies excel on this one. John's sad and simple bass lines
desperately try to gee Justin up and on, but his action on behalf of the 'some
try to tell me' brigade fall on deaf ears. Ray turns in the flute solo of the
century, the calm in the storm after all that battering sea of emotion,
mirroring the narrator's attempts to live out his life as normally as he can,
but still hinting at the desperation within. Graeme's breakthrough on the drums
comes as he realises that he will get more effect from only whalloping the
drums for half the song, not through all of it and the rest of the song
features some pretty natty cymbal work that builds and builds over the course of the song. Best
of all, though, is Pinder's mellotron, a sad and aching sound that manages to
express so much of what Justin's narrator is stumbling to say, drifting sad and
lonely across a world that seems to have found its way and see-sawing violently
against what everyone else in the band is playing. Even today the sound of his
mellotron is striking despite the many copycat versions of it there were around
in the rest of the 1960s - at the time, when only The Beatles and The Monkees
had got round to using the sound and both in very different ways, it must have sounded breath-taking. Though
Justin deserves his credit for writing the song, this is a band performance and
a song that clearly united everyone in the group who were knocked out by its
potential. In the context of the run of what the band had done up till now this
song really sounded as if it came out of nowhere. So much so that for a long
time a rumour went round that Justin hadn't really written this song at all,
but that Decca had paid a fortune to launch the band with it after discovering
the song sung in Italian by a band named 'Jelly Roll'. A copy of the single,
which didn't sell that well, was even 'found' by some of the treasure-hunter
music papers after a scoop and the cheeky so and sos had even written 'this is
the original version of Nights In White Satin' on the label, apparently as a
joke. However as you might have guessed, this wasn't actually true (otherwise
the single would hardly have displayed the fact that it was the 'original' version
of a song no one knew would be covered or such a hit): the record company
simply meant that this was the 'original Italian version', after one of their
Italian rivals quickly pounced on the song and did their own version. The fact
that the song created such a fuss and - briefly - took in so many people is
though a testament at what a giant leap forward this song is. Even after nearly
a century of hearing this song nearly continually 'Nights In White Satin' has
still retained it's magic, with a superb band performance of a gorgeous aching
melody that goes so well with its carefully chosen words. 'Nights' was a big
hit for a reason (although believe it or not the song only peaked at #19 on
first release, the band's stock had fallen so low; it did rather better on
re-issues in 1972 and 1979, proof of how 'timeless', rather than 1967-centred,
this beautiful song is.
However there's a reason you should hang on to your
Moodies compilations even if you buy up all these original albums, because 'Nights'
is just part of the album's final track as heard on the LP. Though Peter Knight
tries hard, his overblown version of the 'Nights' theme is hideous Hollywood
music, far removed from the sincerity and the moment when the song comes
crashing down on a parped brass note may well be the most misguided moment on
the entire record. The song has already peaked, with Pinder's mellotron going
places the orchestras never could - it doesn't need a sequel. Knight does,
however, pick out a much stronger melody all round on the unbilled finale of
the album fans have come to call 'Late Night Lament', painted with neat small
brushstrokes rather than half a pound of oil paints. The poem itself is again
by Edge and similar in style to 'The Day Begins', enunciated nicely by Pinder.
Though clever in the way it slightly re-works the original (contrasting the
lights entering the room with the light fading) and an improvement solely in
the way it considers how different age groups re-act to the process
(bedsitters, like Justin in 'Nights', fear that their lives will be the same
and leave them forever trapped; OAPs 'wish they were young' - a remarkably
unfashionable idea at the time) the choice of words is still a little flowery
and the opening incantation to 'breathe deep the gathering gloom' seems out of
place here at the end of the album (ditto the final lines about an 'illusion' actually,
which is a theme the band never really got to the bottom of). As with 'The Day
Begins', the Moodies have bitten off rather more than they can chew, though
they deserve perhaps credit for trying the impossible. I still prefer to hear
'Nights' on a single, though, where it makes for a far more fitting finale on
it's own.
Overall, then, 'Days Of Future Passed' is a curious
hybrid of ideas that come off all too well and others that now sound
horrifically dated and ill-conceived (I'd love to know what the band's
re-actions were when Peter first played them his intended ideas - 'Erm, we were
considering something a little less...fruity'). However it speaks volumes that
it's the so-called respectable classical world that goes a bit too OTT at
times, while the rock and rollers are very well behaved. Now that the days of
future has passed, we know that The Moody Blues will go on to have a career
that fulfils pretty much all the promise displayed on this album (though
'Nights' remains a pretty unbeatable song for the rest of the band's career).
As a result there are better, greater, stronger albums in their catalogue with
this album very much the weakest album of the 'core seven' to my tastes. Then
again, no other Moodies album would have been able to cover so much ground if
this album hadn't tried to do something this brave and pioneering and been so
tremendously successful for around half the record. 'Days' is a success if only
because it took so many risks and worked so hard to reverse the fortunes of a
band who seemed to have come to the end of the road and the circumstances
behind the making of it are part of a great story full of whacking coincidences
and lucky developments that make it seem as if fate had always intended it to
be this way (with one month making up for two years of serious bad luck and
lost opportunities). There's a wonderful story that Ray and Mike met up for the
first time in years around a decade ago and the first words out of Pinder's
mouth was 'can you believe we actually did it? Two unknowns from Birmingham?'
'Future Passed' is the moment when the Moodies went from zeroes back to heroes
and is a record that cast a long shadow over the rest of their career. Be
warned though: this is far from the band's best, however many rapturous reviews
and gushing comments always make out. It is, instead, the important first step on
a dazzling career that will go to places this record can only dream of.
A Now
Complete List Of Moody Blues Related Articles At Alan’s Album Archives:
'The Magnificent Moodies' (1965)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-moody-blues-magnificent-moodies.html
'Days Of Future Passed' (1967)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-moody-blues-days-of-future-passed.html
'In Search Of The Lost Chord' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-22-moody-blues-in-search-of-lost.html
'On The Threshold Of A Dream' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/news-views-and-music-issue-53-moody.html
'To Our Children's Children's Children' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-32-moody-blues-to-our-childrens.html
'In Search Of The Lost Chord' (1968) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-22-moody-blues-in-search-of-lost.html
'On The Threshold Of A Dream' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2010/02/news-views-and-music-issue-53-moody.html
'To Our Children's Children's Children' (1969) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-32-moody-blues-to-our-childrens.html
‘A Question Of Balance’
(1970)
http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-moody-blues-question-of-balance-1970.html
'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-49moody-blues-every-good-boy.html
'Seventh Sojourn' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-53-moody-blues-seventh-sojourn.html
'Blue Jays' (Hayward/Lodge) (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-38-blue-jays.html
'Songwriter' (Hayward) (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-112-justin.html
'Every Good Boy Deserves Favour' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-49moody-blues-every-good-boy.html
'Seventh Sojourn' (1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/review-53-moody-blues-seventh-sojourn.html
'Blue Jays' (Hayward/Lodge) (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/news-views-and-music-issue-38-blue-jays.html
'Songwriter' (Hayward) (1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/news-views-and-music-issue-112-justin.html
‘Octave’ (1978) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/moody-blues-octave-1978-album-review_13.html
'Long Distance Voyager'
(1981) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-moody-blues-long-distance-voyager.html
'The Present' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-98-moody.html
'The Present' (1983) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/news-views-and-music-issue-98-moody.html
'The Other Side Of This
Life' (1986) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-moody-blues-other-side-of-life-1986.html
'Sur La Mer' (1988) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-moody-blues-sur-la-mer-1988.html
‘Keys To The Kingdom’
(1991) https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-moody-blues-keys-to-kingdom-1991.html
'Strange Times' (1999) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-moody-blues-strange-times-1999.html
‘December’(2003) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-moody-blues-december-2003.html
‘December’(2003) http://www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-moody-blues-december-2003.html
Surviving TV Clips
1964-2015: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-moody-blues-surviving-tv-clips-1964.html
The Best Unreleased
Recordings 1961-2009: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-moody-blues-unreleased-recordings.html
Non-Album Recordings Part
One 1964-1967: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-moody-blues-non-album-recordings.html
Non-Album Recordings Part
Two 1968-2009: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-moody-blues-non-album-recordings_11.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part One 1969-1977: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-moody-blues-livesolocompilation.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Two: 1979-2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-moody-blues-livesolocompilation_25.html
Essay: Why Being A Moodies Fan Means You Can Never Go Home https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/moody-blues-essay-why-being-moodies-fan.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Two: 1979-2015 http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-moody-blues-livesolocompilation_25.html
Essay: Why Being A Moodies Fan Means You Can Never Go Home https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/04/moody-blues-essay-why-being-moodies-fan.html
Landmark Concerts and
Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-moody-blues-five-landmark-concerts.html
