The first album I bought (must have been birthday money) was E.L.O.’s "Discovery". I’d been blown away by the video to "Wild West Hero" that Top of The Pops played for a while. It had a cartoon of a weird desert along with THE E.L.O. SPACESHIP!!! That spaceship on the cover of "Out of The Blue" was genius. The perfect hook for 10-year-old sci-fi nut. The song is a corker, too – and I coveted "Out of The Blue" for years, but being a double album it was out of my price range – even on birthdays. That copy of Discovery is long gone, replaced with the LP box sets "3 Light Years" & "4 Light Years". I never did get a copy of "Out of The Blue" with the full gatefold sleeve – after they discontinued the cardboard spaceship, it didn’t seem so important…
E.L.O. stopped touring way before I was old enough to go see ‘em. Then we missed out on the Hyde Park gig in 2014. Knowing that it wasn’t the classic line-up of the band, I was prepared to be disappointed. Instead, what we got was incredible. Apart from Jeff Lynne, Richard Tandy is the only original band member in the line-up; he plays a mean piano and still did the vocoder bits on Mr Blue Sky, which made me very happy. Lynne seems not to have aged (okay, we were at the back of the floor at the O2, so he seemed a couple of miles away) - certainly his voice is still there for the falsetto parts and he’s still a great guitarist. The lady singing the operatic bits was bang on, and the whole band was giving it their all.
And they didn’t play inside a spaceship, nor did they have the (proper) Wild West Hero video, but the visuals were spectacular and the new CGI spaceship is a corker.
How good was the gig? Two days later I bought a ticket for the last London gig of the tour – and did it all over again!