Twilight Time

Background

The Moody Blues had started out as a rhythm and blues band, and had achieved commercial success in late 1964/early 1965 with the UK No.1 and US Top 10 single "Go Now". However, by late 1966, they had run into financial difficulties and personnel changes; as such, the band decided to change their creative course. Guitarist/singer Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick left the group to pursue other interests, allowing John Lodge, former bandmate and friend of Ray Thomas, to join the group on bass. The band would find guitarist and singer Justin Hayward through Eric Burdon of the Animals who had put out an advert for a new bandmember and passed on the responses he had rejected. The addition of Lodge and Hayward brought two additional songwriters into the group, allowing the band to pursue a new creative direction, which included writing about what they knew, rather than about American themes when they had not yet visited America. After a complaint about the poor quality of their R&B covers, the band focused on their own material

One element of the group's new musical direction was the use of the Mellotron. The Mellotron is a keyboard instrument where each key plays a tape loop of a recording of another instrument, chorus, or orchestra. Developed by the West Midlands company Streetly Electronics in the early 1960s, the instrument served as a precursor to sampling keyboards and synthesizers. Mike Pinder, a previous employee of Streetly, used his connections to purchase one of the instruments for the group at a reduced price. An October 1967 Sunday Mirror article gives the price of the band's Mellotron at £1,300, which was paid for by an air conditioning business millionaire, Derek McCormick. Though the instrument could prove fickle in concert, Pinder's experience allowed him to overcome any challenges. He converted the rhythm keyboard into a copy of the 12 second tape loop solo keyboard, so he could continue playing the second keyboard while the tape loop on the first reset. The instrument's ability to reproduce orchestral string sounds in the studio and in concert paired well with Ray Thomas' flute, which he had recently adopted in place of harmonica. Edge reflects on three distinct developments that drove the band's change in sound and creative development: "I think it was three different forces coming together. One was Tony Clarke, the producer. The other was the Mellotron, which Mike Pinder was playing. And the other was Justin Hayward joining the band, because he didn't come the rock 'n' roll route, he came the English folk route. So his feel for chord structure was just that little bit different."

Writing

In October 1966, the group relocated to Mouscron, Belgium to write new material and embark on a Belgian tour. Their shows typically consisted of two sets, the first consisting of rhythm and blues covers including "Go Now" and the second consisting of newly written original songs. Lodge says, "We loved playing together. It was really good. It was exciting when it was our own songs, we weren't playing a song someone had written for us. So every part of every song we'd invented ourselves. We wanted to play each part exactly right and new and like no one else had ever played that particular part to a song before. That was exciting about Days of Future Passed, creating something that no one else ever created before. That gave a great feeling." Lodge continues, "We went to a little village in Mouscron to start writing our own songs and we wrote a lot of songs before Days of Future Passed. But Days of Future Passed dictated its own album, really. When we knew what we wanted to do with Days of Future Passed, we dedicated the songwriting to exactly that album. And everything we did before was just left alone.

Graeme Edge remembers, "We designed a stage show which was going to be '24 hours': daylight 12 and night 12, and we had "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights" and I think "Peak Hour" all written for that." Lodge continues, "Ultimately, it was agreed that the record would be a concept album tracking a day in the life of Everyman, with original songs relating to different parts of the day performed in chronological order, introduced and interspersed with orchestral music. Considering that all five members of the group wrote material for the album prior to the concept being established, it's remarkable how seamless the execution of it was." Pinder explains the desire for a cohesive theme, "I had always wanted to create something that was conceptual. I loved the works of Mantovani. I wanted to have our albums on people's shelves...albums that people would want to collect, and play in their entirety."

Keyboardist Mike Pinder wrote "Dawn Is a Feeling" and Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin", which served as early bookends for the concept. Hayward explains, "Nights In White Satin" had been recorded quite a long time before it was for Days of Future Passed. "Nights In White Satin" and "Dawn Is A Feeling" were the two key songs that gave us the idea of the story of a day in the life of one guy, and that's what our stage show was about before Days of Future Passed was mentioned or thought about. So we had those two times of the day and the idea, then it was just a question of grubbing different times of the day to write about; it was quite frivolous, really ... nothing really too serious. I just put my hand up for the afternoon. So I ended up with "Tuesday Afternoon", and Ray Thomas wrote "Twilight Time".

Recording

In the summer of 1967, the group made several BBC appearances, debuting "Nights in White Satin" and "Peak Hour". Hearing the final BBC mix of "Nights in White Satin" heightened the band's excitement for the song and their new material. Hayward remembers, "A long time before we recorded it for Decca, we recorded it for the BBC. We recorded it and weren't invited into the control room to listen to it back. And then in our van on the way to a gig we listened to it, because it was on a program called Saturday Club — on a Saturday, of course — and we were going up the motorway and we heard it on the radio. And we pulled the car over, or the van, over to the side of the road, and we said, 'Hey, maybe there's something in that song,' because there was something about it, it sounded really good. We hadn't realised until we'd heard it back ourselves."

In October, the group were granted studio time to record a demonstration disc for Decca's newly formed Deram Records division. The company was eager to demonstrate their latest recording techniques, which were named "Deramic Sound". Decca had experimented with stereophonic sound for classical recordings, and hoped to capture the pop market in the same way, by interweaving classical recordings with the group's interpretation of the same music. Hayward remembers, "They were launching a label called the Deramic Sound System later to become Deram and every recording was in stereo—not just remastered later in stereo, like the Beatles—but actually recorded with a wide stereo sound, everything in its proper stereo place. Stereo then was confined to classical music and they wanted to demonstrate stereo could be as interesting for rock and roll as it was with classical."

For the demonstration record, Knight and the group were asked to record unoriginal material to demonstrate the new stereo technology, incorporating both orchestral and popular music. Band members remember being asked by the label to record an album incorporating elements of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9. Thomas explains, "They wanted a demonstration disc made for all the salesmen to try and sell Deramic Sound and we could never get any studio time. We were developing Days of Future Passed as a stage show. They wanted us to play tunes like "Blue Suede Shoes", "Rock Around the Clock" and stuff like that, and wanted Peter Knight and the London Festival Orchestra to play Dvorák's New World Symphony. We said that's going to sound bloody awful. One minute they're listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" and then the next minute to the symphony and us playing someone else."

Album cover

The album cover was designed by David Anstey and was commissioned for the album. Hayward remembers, "He was just thrown this idea, and we met him in a pub and told him about our songs, and he knocked that out, and they used it. It was reduced in scale from David Anstey's original picture." The cover features a painted collage of various time-related images inspired by the album's songs, including an hourglass, a sunset, moon phases and mounted knights.

Release

Days of Future Passed was released on 17 November 1967 in the UK (delayed from a 3 November 1967 announcement), and arrived in the US in March 1968. It reached number 27 in the UK Albums Chart on February 13, 1968. In the US, it was a steady seller in the late 1960s, helped by FM radio play of "Nights in White Satin", also reaching a peak of number 27 by October 12, 1968. When a 1972 reissue of "Nights In White Satin" climbed to number 2, the album re-entered the US Billboard chart and eventually peaked at number 3.

The U.S. mono version (Deram DE-16012) was pressed in a limited quantity as it was released during the "phase-out" of mono LP releases by the major record companies, thus it is an often-sought item amongst record collectors.

Days of Future Passed was issued as a discrete Quadraphonic open-reel tape in 1977. This master was also used for a 2001 dts 5.1 channel audio CD release and again for a two-disc Deluxe Edition SACD release in 2006.

In July 1978, it was discovered that the UK master tapes for Days of Future Passed had deteriorated. As a result of this, the album was remixed in its entirety in August 1978, which was used for reissues between 1978 and 2017. Some compilations, however, continued to use the original 1967 stereo mix for certain songs. The album's original mix was released in its entirety on compact disc in November 2017 as Days of Future Passed 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. Also released The Moody Blues Days of Future Past Live that was recorded live in Toronto on 13 July 2017 with a full orchestra backup.

Reception

Upon its release, Rolling Stone gave the album an unenthusiastic review, writing "The Moody Blues [...] have matured considerably since 'Go Now', but their music is constantly marred by one of the most startlingly saccharine conceptions of 'beauty' and 'mysticism' that any rock group has ever affected." New York magazine dismissed it as "a ponderous mound of thought-jello." However, the album has since received acclaim; for example, Spin cited it as a classic of progressive rock. By 2007, Rolling Stone — which had originally described Days of Future Passed as "an English rock group strangling itself in conceptual goo" — included it in its list of the essential albums of 1967.

Music writers cite the album as an early example of progressive rock music. Bill Holdship of Yahoo! Music remarks that the band "created an entire genre here." David Fricke cites it as one of the essential albums of 1967 and finds it "closer to high-art pomp than psychedelia. But there is a sharp pop discretion to the writing and a trippy romanticism in the mirroring effect of the strings and Mike Pinder's Mellotron." Will Hermes cites the album as an essential progressive rock record and opines that its use of the Mellotron, a tape replay keyboard, made it a "signature" element of the genre. An influential work of the counterculture period, AllMusic editor Bruce Eder calls the album "one of the defining documents of the blossoming psychedelic era, and one of the most enduringly popular albums of its era".

Track listing

All compositions originally credited to "Redwave-Knight". ('Redwave' is a collective alias for the band members.)

Note: "(Evening) Time to Get Away" is unlisted on original pressings, but has since been added to all subsequent track listings.

Personnel

Sources:

The Moody Blues

Justin Hayward – vocals, guitar

John Lodge – bass, vocals

Mike Pinder – Mellotron, vocals

Ray Thomas – flute, vocals

Graeme Edge – drums

with:

The London Festival Orchestra

Peter Knight – conducting, arrangements

Production

Tony Clarke – producer

Michael Dacre-Barclay – producer

Derek Varnals – engineer

Hugh Mendl – executive production, liner notes

David Anstey – cover design, cover painting

Steven Fallone – digital remastering