When was nights in white satin recorded

Hayward: Graeme and I were sharing two rooms with our girlfriends in Bayswater, and we came back very late at night. They were all asleep, and I sat on the side of the bed with my old string I was renovating for Lonnie Donegan, and I wrote the basic two verses.

One part of it was that I lived out of a suitcase then, I never had any possessions, and a previous girlfriend had bought me some white satin sheets. I was at the end of one big love affair and the beginning of another, and there was a lot of random thoughts by a year-old boy. I did write letters, never meaning to send. Nice acoustics, normally. Hayward: We had a rehearsal room near where Mike lived in Barnes, and I played it to the guys. Then Mike added his Mellotron riff, and suddenly the others were interested.

When we went into the control room and listened to it, it was mesmerising. It was a time when we all felt we were floating on air. The energy was flying all over the place.

Hayward: We had a huge slice of luck when Decca asked us to do a demonstration record for the Deramic Stereo System, so their consumer division could sell stereos. Peter Knight, who was supposed to be doing the orchestral stuff, came down to see us at the Club, and it was his idea to change it around to a concept album about a day and night. Derek Varnals engineer : In fact, it was originally recorded as a stand-alone mono single.

But harmonically, the spread is huge. But this was totally different. Every instrument on that record has its own space. Nothing gets in the way of anything else. Because everything has its own space, everything sounds bigger. Your imagination takes over. Your brain is filling in the picture.

It was like we were recording in CinemaScope. We used to talk about that. Hayward: Tony Clarke was a boffin producer who could see the whole thing cinematically. Your brain makes huge differences. Varnals: We did three bounces from one four-track to another, with a view to getting lots of Mellotron on, because its sound needed layering and smoothing out. For 4 weeks receive unlimited Premium digital access to the FT's trusted, award-winning business news.

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Learn more and compare subscriptions content expands above. Drummer Graeme Edge says the band was originally contracted by Decca to cobble together a classical rock version of Dvorak 's "Symphony Number Nine," but the group always intended to use money provided by Decca to record its own compositions, including "Nights In White Satin.

According to Edge, "This guy was on the graveyard shift and he needed to smoke a bong. He saw a song that clocked in at over four minutes and played it. He played it every night to go do his business, and the switchboard lit up.