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Track listing
= Track listing ==

Out of the Blue is the seventh studio album by the British rock group Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), released in October 1977. Written and produced by ELO's frontman Jeff Lynne, the double album is among the most commercially successful records in the group's history, selling about 10 million copies worldwide by 2007, spawned four hit singles, and sparked a massive world tour.

Background & Writing
By 1977, the Electric Light Orchestra was at the peak of their popularity; the band was selling out arenas, and their previous album went platinum. In reaction to the band's success and the success of the live album Frampton Comes Alive!, United Artist Recordings asked bandleader Jeff Lynne to make a double live album. While Lynne declined to make a live album, he was willing to write songs for a double album. Lynne was given four weeks to write the album, which he spent in a rented chalet in the Swiss Alps accompanied by a guitar and an electric piano. According to Lynne, the first two weeks yielded nothing, citing the poor weather as the reason. However, one day, Lynne awoke to gorgeous weather across the alps. The sight gave Lynne a sudden burst of creativity and he finished writing the music for most of the album over the last few weeks. Discussing the whole experience, he says, "For two weeks, I came up with nothing, and I only had four weeks to write this double album! I was sort of thinking, bloody hell, maybe I can’t come up with anything. The weather had been really bad and then one day I got up and it was fantastic, the sun was brilliant and shining, all the mountains were lit up and this mist had gone away. It was gorgeous, and I came up with ‘Mr. Blue Sky.’ I just kept coming up with songs…about 14 in two weeks."

Many of the songs on the album were also written about the surroundings. "Starlight" was written based on the nighttime canopy over the alps, and the songs "Standin' in the Rain", "Big Wheels", and "Summer and Lightning" were inspired by rain breaking up a friendly game of football that the band were playing outside of the recording studio.

Recording
After Jeff Lynne returned from the Swiss Alps, he and the band took a few months to record it in Munich. The engineer at Munich was the band's frequent collaborator Reinhold Mack. While the sessions went smoothly most of the time, recording the choirs and orchestra for the album started chaotically. Mack suggested recording the choir at a giant soundstage in Munich's Bavaria Film studio, but he "could not get the right sound to save [his] life". He later suggested recording the strings with the choir at Musicland Studios, which was where the rest of the album was recorded.

Jeff Lynne was joined by the other members of ELO to record the album, although the resident string trio of the band, Mik Kaminski, Hugh McDowell, and Melvyn Gale, were used more sparingly than normal. While they were still a part of the band for the tour, they were dismissed afterwards and used only to record music videos for the following album, and in the case of Mik Kaminski, later tours. Louis Clark had returned to arrange and conduct the strings and choirs for the album, along with Lynne and keyboardist Richard Tandy.

The album was also one of the first pop albums to have an extensive use of the vocoder, and helped to popularize it. According to Lynne, he and the band received a prototype of the Vocoder 2000 synthesizer, and they spent a day learning how to use it due to the lack of a manual.

Concerto for a Rainy Day
Side three of the release is subtitled Concerto for a Rainy Day, a four-track musical suite based on the weather and how it affects mood change, ending with the eventual sunshine and happiness of "Mr. Blue Sky". This was inspired by Lynne's experience while trying to write songs for the album against a torrential downpour of rain outside his Swiss chalet. "Standin' in the Rain" opens the suite with a haunting keyboard over a recording of real rain, recorded by Jeff Lynne just outside his rented studio. Also heard at the 0:33 mark of the song, which marks the beginning of The Concerto, is thunder crackling in an unusual manner voicing the words "Concerto for a Rainy Day" by the band's keyboardist, Richard Tandy. At around the 1:07 mark, the staccato strings play a morse code spelling out "ELO". The band used the song to open their 1978 World Tour Out of the Blue concerts.

"Big Wheels" forms the second part of the suite and continues with the theme of the weather and reflection. Apart from its inclusion on the Out of the Blue album, the song has never appeared on any of the band's compilations or as a B-side until 2000, when Lynne included it on the group's retrospective Flashback album. "Summer and Lightning" is the third song in the suite. The raining weather theme is continued throughout the track though the mood and lyrics are more optimistic. "Mr. Blue Sky", an uplifting, lively song celebrating sunshine, is the finale of "Concerto for a Rainy Day" suite. Again, the vocoder is used at the end of the track where, at the 4:54 mark, one can hear "Please turn me over" as it fades out. It is the only piece from the Concerto to be excerpted as a single.

Cover art
The large spaceship on the album's cover (by now symbolic of the group) was designed by Kosh with art by Shusei Nagaoka. It was based on the logo Kosh designed for ELO's previous album, A New World Record, and looks like the space station with a docking shuttle from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The number JTLA 823 L2 which is featured on the shuttle arriving at the space station is the original catalogue number for the album. The album also included an insert of a cardboard cutout of the space station as well as a fold-out poster of the band members. The space theme was carried onto the live stage in the form of a huge glowing flying saucer stage set, inside which the band performed.

Release
The album had 4 million pre-ordered copies and quickly went multi-platinum upon release. Out of the Blue spawned five hit singles in different countries, and was ELO's most commercially successful studio album. It was also the first double album in the history of the UK music charts to generate four top twenty hit singles. Lynne considers A New World Record and Out of the Blue to be the group's crowning achievements, and both sold extremely well, reaching multi-platinum according to RIAA Certification. Capital Radio and The Daily Mirror Rock and Pop Awards (forerunner to The Brit Awards) named it "Album of the Year" in 1978. Lynne received his first Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Contributions to British Music the same year.

The US release of Out of the Blue was originally distributed by United Artists. This changed after United Artists Records was sold by Transamerica Corporation to an EMI Records-backed partnership, which triggered Jet Records' change of control clause in its distribution contract, and Jet shifted to CBS Records as its new distributor. American cut-out copies of Out of the Blue soon became widely available at discounted prices in record shops in the US and Canada shortly after the album's release, affecting the album's sales and triggering lawsuits by CBS and Jet. The suits were ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the discounted sales.

Reissues
The 30th Anniversary Edition was released in February 2007 with three bonus tracks, as part of the Sony/BMG Music Epic/Legacy series. The 30th anniversary issue was a limited pressing in hardback book with expanded 24-page full color booklet. It includes full-length sleeve notes by Lynne and ELO archivist Rob Caiger, as well as rare photos and memorabilia. A push-out replica ELO Space Station is included as well as the standard jewel case edition with a full color 12-page edited booklet. The album once again reached the top twenty album charts in the UK peaking at number 18. A sixth single "Latitude 88 North" was released as digital download single and as a promo 7" single.

In 2012, Music on Vinyl re-released Out of the Blue on vinyl on Epic; the first 1,000 copies were made on transparent blue vinyl and the rest were released in the standard black vinyl.

In 2017, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the album, a double picture vinyl disc was released by Sony Music and Epic Records.

Promotion
To promote the album, the band undertook a massive world tour that spanned from January 1978 to October 1978, known as "The Big Night" in the North American promotional material. The tour's main draw was that in North America (and at the Wembley Arena in the United Kingdom), the band would emerge and play out of a huge spaceship that resembled the one seen on the album's cover. The spaceship would be playing rocket noises mixed in with lasers, fog machines, and a clip of Benjamin Britten's "Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20" performed by the London Symphony Orchestra while the band came up on risers onto the stage. Sometimes, the spectacle of the ship would be so great that Jeff Lynne himself would join the audience to watch it close. The tour is also notable for being one of the earliest examples of lasers used at a rock show, with nearly 525,000 watts of light being used to generate it. The tour started in the Pacific with Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, followed by Europe, then the United Kingdom, and finally North America.

The spaceship, while a spectacle for the audience to watch, was incredibly difficult to work with. The ship cost tons of money to create and transport, many technicians had to dismantle and rebuild it, and thirteen 18-wheelers had to carry all of its parts in time for the next show. Because of these problems, the band would host "A-shows" and "B-shows", where the A-shows would feature the ship, and the B-shows would not. Not only that, but the ship would often experience issues with the hydraulic presses not functioning, resulting in the backing tapes used to play without the band being visible. One of the most major problems was that the spaceship being so large resulted in the band being unable to hear each other. It also created an echo effect that made the sounds made on their instruments out of time, and the heat of the spaceship combined with the heat of the lasers caused their instruments to go out of tune.

Due to the problems with tuning, and the fact that recreating Out of the Blue and its complex arrangements would prove to be impossible to do on-stage with the band, they employed many backing tapes to help the band perform the songs in full, including many orchestral intros to some of the songs played. The tapes were mostly used to help the band keep in sync with each other under the circumstances, but a promoter sued the band in 1979, accusing them of not actually playing live. This, combined with the TV concert film broadcast at Wembley Arena's audio being poorly mixed, made it appear as if the band was lip syncing. The lawsuit and accusations of lip-syncing heavily harmed the band's image.

Reception and legacy
In a contemporary review for Rolling Stone, Billy Altman said that the album was "meticulously produced and performed" and showed the influence of the Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees. However, he detected a lack of passion in the work, which he dismissed as a "totally uninteresting and horrifyingly sterile package" and "All method and no madness: perfectly hollow and bland rock Muzak."

Over the years a more favorable view has developed. Rob Mitchum of Pitchfork wrote in 2007: "Calling in the string section and commissioning the spaceship cover-art may be a big gamble, but Out of the Blue is proof of how good it can sound when the grand approach works."

In 2000 it was voted number 346 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.

Axl Rose – by his own admission "an old ELO fanatic" – said: "Out of the Blue is an awesome record."

In October 2013, the album was ranked 23rd on VH1's list "Double Trouble: The 35 Best-Selling Double Albums of All Time".

Track listing
All songs written by Jeff Lynne.

Personnel
Credits according to the record liner notes, unless noted.


 * ELO


 * Jeff Lynne – lead and backing vocals, lead, rhythm and slide guitars (Gibson EDS-1275, Gibson Les Paul Custom, Gibson Marauder, Ovation 1615/4, Ovation 1619/4), electric piano (Wurlitzer) , synthesizer (Minimoog) , orchestral and choral arrangements, tapdancing and animal noises on "Jungle"
 * Bev Bevan – drums (Slingerland), rototoms (Remo) , cymbals (Avedis Zildjian) , drumsticks (Slingerland "Bev Bevan") , drumheads (Remo) , gong, various percussion, fire extinguisher on "Mr. Blue Sky", backing vocals, tapdancing and animal noises on "Jungle"
 * Richard Tandy – piano (Yamaha C7B), electric piano (Wurlitzer) , synthesizer (ARP 2600, Minimoog, Polymoog, ARP Omni, ARP Odyssey, SLM Concert Spectrum) , clavinet (Hohner) , Mellotron (M400) , sequencers, electric guitar (Gibson SG Custom) , vocoder, orchestral and choral arrangements
 * Kelly Groucutt – bass guitar (Gibson G3), percussion, backing vocals, co-lead vocals on "Sweet Is the Night", tapdancing and animal noises on "Jungle"
 * Mik Kaminski – violin
 * Hugh McDowell – cello
 * Melvyn Gale – cello, jangle piano on "Wild West Hero" (uncredited)


 * Additional Personnel
 * Louis Clark – orchestral & choral arrangements, orchestra conductor


 * Production
 * Jeff Lynne – production
 * Mack – engineer
 * Original LP Mastering – Stan Ricker (USA) and Kevin Metcalfe (UK)

Weekly charts

 * Original release
 * Reissue

Certifications
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