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Electric Light Orchestra - 1978
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YouTube links:
On Sunday, April 16, 1972, The Electric Light Orchestra played their first live show at the Greyhound Pub in Croydon, Surrey, England. The line-up was Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan, Bill Hunt on keyboards and French horn, Andy Craig, Hugh McDowell and Mike Edwards on cello, Wilfred Gibson on violin and cello and Richard Tandy on bass.
Their seventh studio album and most commercially successful, was the double album, Out of the Blue released on the 24th of October, 1977, in the United States and four days later in the UK on the 28th of October. It sold about 10 million copies worldwide by 2007. Jeff Lynne
wrote the entire album in three and a half weeks after a sudden burst
of creativity while hidden away in his rented chalet in the Swiss Alps. It took a further two months to record in Munich. It was one of the first pop albums to have an extensive use of the vocoder. The opening song on the album, Turn To Stone, is one of my favorite cuts on the album.
In 1978 the band set out on a nine-month, 92-date world tour, with an enormous set and a hugely expensive spaceship stage with fog machines and a laser display.
Out of the Blue stage set
photographer unknown
I attended the August 24 concert of that year, at the Oakland Arena during this tour; it was a truly amazing experience as shown in the images of the souvenir program I got that night (link below).
In the United States the concerts were billed as The Big Night and were their largest to date, with 62,000 people seeing them at Cleveland Stadium. The Big Night became the highest-grossing live concert tour in music history up to that point (1978).
Viewfinder links:
A New World Record reel to reel tape
Out Of The Blue Tour (The Big Night Tour) 1978 program
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