The Moody Blues have sold in excess of 70 million albums worldwide and have been awarded 14 platinum and gold discs. As of 2011 they remain active with one member from the original band from 1964 and two more from the 1967 lineup.
The Moody Blues formed on 4 May 1964, in Erdington, Birmingham, England. Ray Thomas, John Lodge, and Michael Pinder had been members of El Riot & the Rebels. They disbanded when Lodge, the youngest member, went to technical college and Michael Pinder joined the army. Michael Pinder then rejoined Thomas to form the Krew Cats. The pair recruited guitarist/vocalist Denny Laine, band manager-turned-drummer Graeme Edge, and bassist Clint Warwick. The five appeared as the Moody Blues for the first time in Birmingham in 1964.
The name developed from a hoped-for sponsorship from the M&B Brewery which failed to materialise, the band calling themselves both "The M B's" and "The M B Five" and was also a subtle reference to the Duke Ellington song, "Mood Indigo".
Although they're best known today for their lush, lyrically and musically profound (some would say bombastic) psychedelic-era albums, the Moody Blues started out as one of the better R&B-based combos of the British Invasion. A major tour was quickly booked, and the band landed an engagement at the Marquee Club, which resulted in a contract with England's Decca Records less than six months after their formation.
The group's first single, "Steal Your Heart Away," released in September of 1964, didn't touch the British charts. But their second single, "Go Now," released in November of 1964 -- a cover of a nearly identical American single by R&B singer Bessie Banks, heavily featuring Laine's mournful lead vocal -- fulfilled every expectation and more, reaching number one in England and earning them a berth in some of the nation's top performing venues (including the New Musical Express Poll Winners Concert, appearing with some of the top acts of the period); its number ten chart placement in America also earned them a place as a support act for the Beatles on one tour, and the release of a follow-up LP (Magnificent Moodies in England, Go Now in America) on both sides of the Atlantic.
"Nights in White Satin" is a 1967 single written by Justin Hayward and first featured on the album Days of Future Passed.
When first released in 1967, the song reached # 19 on the UK singles chart, a position that might have been higher were it not for its seven-plus minute length. 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 the highest complete Hot 100 disappearance from the pre-digital download era, vanishing entirely from the chart after falling to #17. In the wake of its US success, the song re-charted in the UK in late 1972 and climbed to #9. The song was re-released yet again in 1979, and charted for a third time in the UK, at #14.
There are two single versions of the song, both stripped of the orchestral and "Late Lament" poetry sections of the LP version.
Band member Justin Hayward wrote the song at age nineteen in Swindon, 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 orchestral accompaniment for the introduction, the final rendition of the chorus, and the "final lament" section, all of this in the original album version.
" The above text is a mashup from Wikipedia."
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