In 1977 not only punk, but also the Electric Light Orchestra

In April 1977, while i Clash they entered the English sales charts with their first single “White Riot” and the punk revolution was taking hold more and more with the intention of overthrowing the hegemony of the rock bands of previous generations, an English musician named Jeff Lynne he was in exile, locked in a chalet in the Swiss mountains.

Thirty-year-old, bearded, obsessed with
Beatles
Lynne was the leader of the
Electric Light Orchestra
a refined fusion rock band: the most classic you could ask for from rock in that period, exactly the kind of group that the aggressive punks wanted to pre-retire and archive in the history books. In that spring of 1977, however,
Jeff Lynne
he had a big problem to solve: he had to write a double album, he only had four weeks to do it and inspiration was slow to emerge.

If Jeff looked out the window of the cabin he was staying in he only saw rain and more rain, two weeks of rain. An endless rain. But one day it happened that… “One day I got up and the sun was shining, all the mountains were lit up, and I wrote ‘Mr. Blue Sky’.” Lynne had finally given birth to the first song on the album. From that day on he never stopped. He wrote a new song a day for the next two weeks and on May 22 he and the other members of the
Electric Light Orchestra
they entered the Musicland recording studios of

George Moroder
in Munich, Germany.

When it was released, the double album “Out of the blue” was exactly the musical antipodes of the punk sounds that were going crazy in October 1977. But, upon closer inspection, without taking anything away from the demands of punk, London was not exactly on fire as the Clash. The Jubilee for the 25 years of the queen’s reign Elizabeth II it had fueled a national pride that had not been seen for some time, and the established order, despite a few shocks, was, despite everything, quite solid.

Even moving to the musical field, not much had changed. That year it opened with David Soulthe Hutch from the American television series ‘Starsky & Hutch’and his soft rock to the first position in the sales chart and closed with the ballad of Paul McCartney “Mull Of Kintyre”. Furthermore, disco music and disco music were spreading forcefully ‘Saturday Night Fever’ exalted gods Bee Gees. To close let’s add that ABBA dominated the pop charts around the world. In such a framework also the Electric Light Orchestra it could have its own space, provided it had a good album.

However, 1977 had started off well for Jeff and his band, the album “A New World Record”released in September 1976, had sold five million copies. While “Out Of The Blue” was in the mixing stage, the record company continued to release singles taken from “A New World Record”. Pre-sales of “Out Of The Blue” they reached the exorbitant figure of four million copies and, within a year of its release, in October 1977, it had sold more than double that number.

The album opens and closes with a hit single: “Turn To Stone” And “Wild West Hero”. Then, of course it includes “Mr. Blue Sky”the song that started it all in the warmth of the first sun in Switzerland. Jeff Lynne he summarized in a few words what the song represented for him: “exactly what I imagined ELO were”.

“Out Of The Blue” it was the pinnacle for the ELOthe next album, “Discovery” of 1979, sold very well and reached the top of the charts but, from there, the group’s decline began. The band slowly faded away until breaking up in the mid-80s. Jeff Lynne he worked as a producer for other artists and, in the late 1980s, realized his childhood dream. Indeed, the dream of life. He, raised on bread and Beatlesplayed with a real Beatle, George Harrisonit happened with i Traveling Wilburysa supergroup that included, in addition to the two of them, also, no less, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison And Tom Petty. In 1994, he even went so far as to produce some songs by Beatles – “Free As A Bird” And “Real Love” – for their series Anthology.