The Moody Blues – Days of Future Passed (1967)

The Moody Blues is known for their symphonic grandiloquent rock songs that have been accompanied by English mystical poetry relating to ancient druids and medieval themes. From today's perspective, their music seems very adult oriented, but they were young people when they started making music. At the beginning of their career, The Moody Blues played quite simple rhythm and blues music and, quite understandably, they didn't draw too much attention that way. Then, in order to be able to release their second album, they wanted to do something more ambitious. They came up with a concept album about a normal day in a man's life where they mix classical music with their pop rock sounds. Days of Future Passed became their probably most well-known album and it's largely considered to be a masterpiece and one of the first progressive rock albums.



The classical parts on the album have been played by London Festival Orchestra. Actually, the band and the orchestra don't really play that much together. The album is built so that between actual Moody Blues songs, there are classical interludes. The album progresses from the morning to the night conceptually. It's interesting how the songs have not been even named by their real song titles. The most well-known song from this album, Nights in White Satin, just appears under The Night part. After this album, The Moody Blues continued to make more traditional pop albums, but the concept of Days of Future Passed remains their most well-known work and for example the poetry sequences have been added to many of their subsequent albums as well.

The album starts with amazingly dramatic classical sequence, where strings, horns and harps create a dream world that could be from a Disney film. The Day Begins is only the classical intro with a poem read in the end of it. This is continued by Dawn: Dawn Is a Feeling, that again starts with gentle flute and string classical sequence but this time it evolves into a full pop song. This song is very beautiful and melancholic and even if the lyrics paint a hopeful forecast for the day, the song sounds like it's filled with despair. Then we go on to yet another fairytale classical sequence to start The Morning: Another Morning. The song itself starts with an almost marching band sounding beat with some flutes, but as we go on, we hear again the more traditional Moody Blues sound of melancholy and psychedelic hippie melodies. After that, we get to Lunch Break: Peak Hour. The classical part is very rushed sequence describing a busy period. The orchestra follows tunes already heard earlier on in the album. The pop song in this sequence is the most rock-oriented song on the album. There are similarities to some Beatles songs with steady Merseybeat-style drumming and psychedelic sitar-like parts played on the mellotron. There are some similarities to early Pink Floyd as well. The second part starts with The Afternoon, directly with the pop song that is better known as Tuesday Afternoon. This is one of the big hits of The Moody Blues. The melody is very catchy and there are interesting different parts in the song, which makes it a pioneering progressive rock song. It's also over 8 minutes long. Evening starts again with classical interlude. We hear quite a long classical sequence before moving on to pop tune that has some very hypnotic and psychedelic sounds that remind me of Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd. The album culminates in The Night, which is basically The Moody Blues' biggest hit, Nights in White Satin. This is the only song where the orchestra and the band play together. The vocals of this song are magnificent.

My father was a massive fan of The Moody Blues and progressive rock bands in general. This had a huge impact on me as well and especially as a teenager, I listened to my dad's old vinyl albums and discovered much of the late 60's and early 70's progressive rock. I even went to see The Moody Blues with my parents around that time, being surely the youngest person in the audience. The prog-rock scene has quite a bad reputation these days as it is regarded as very uncool, but I think there are some great things about these ambitious concept albums that mix jazz, classical, rock and pop together. The Moody Blues might sound a bit cheesy with its medieval poetry and classical interludes, but it's still a very impressive what they've managed to record at their time. The mellotrons combined with stereo recording were newest of the new at the release of this album and it must have sounded very impressive when it came out. I still think this is an important album for pop music history.

listen to the album on Spotify.