When progressive rock is discussed almost everyone points King Crimson as the inventors of the genre. They surely were among the pioneers of the style that was a shift from classic rock, but The Moody Blues were the actual fathers of the merge between rock and classical music with all its elaborate arrangements and instrumentation. Here we have an album that was a total surprise in the year it was released - an entirely new sound and approach to popular music. “Days of Future Passed” was recorded in 1967 and it is the second album by The Moody Blues. The story behind the album is very interesting. Decca Records wanted a rock band to record Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" to showcase its new and enhanced stereo-sound technology called Deram Sound System. But the band and the producer Tony Clarke decided to take the money and the paid studio time along with the London Festival Orchestra and record their own material instead. Conductor and arranger Peter Knight added the orchestral accompaniment and devised the bridge sections between the songs' and the album's opening and closing sections. The record company didn't know what to do with the resulting album, which was neither classical nor pop, but audiences found their way to it as the first orchestrated, full-length psychedelic rock album to come out of England.
The beauty of this music is that it sounds very cohesive although it was among the first attempts to blend rock and classical idioms. The album is also one of the defining documents of the blossoming psychedelic era, and one of the most enduringly popular albums of its era (alongside “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles, “Piper At The Gates of Dawn” by Pink Floyd, “Surrealistic Pillow” by Jefferson Airplane and the debut album by The Doors, which all came out that year.) Beside the orchestral instrumentation and the rock/pop parts, Days of Future Passed also includes spoken poetry written by the drummer Graeme Edge, recited by Moody Blues’ keyboard player Mike Pinder. Another interesting fact is that there are no individual songwriting credits. Instead, all the songs are credited to “Redwave”, a collective name for the group, and the orchestral pieces are credited to Peter Knight and Redwave.
The album ends with the biggest hit that The Moody Blues had in their entire history, “Nights In White Satin”, a haunting tale of unrequited love. The song was actually recorded as a single before the album was even conceived but failed to gain attention at the time. Still, despite taking several years for the new version to become a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, the song is definitely the group's most popular number, on the radio and in concert.
