Discovery

The eighth studio album entered the British chart at number one and stayed there five weeks, a first for the band. Five hit songs came from it: Shine a Little Love, Don't Bring Me Down, Last Train to London, Confusion and The Diary of Horace Wimp. Many leaned toward disco, and Richard Tandy nicknamed the album Disco Very. Horace Wimp went another way, closer to the Beatlesque style of Mr. Blue Sky. Discovery was the first album to yield four UK top-ten singles, one of them a double A-side. Don't Bring Me Down reached number 4 in the US, ELO's highest American single, and the album was certified double platinum there in 1997.

On the back cover, the actor Brad Garrett appears as a palace guard drawing a scimitar. Mik Kaminski, Hugh McDowell and Melvyn Gale played on the record without credit, and a VHS video album of all the songs came out in 1979. Ken Paulson of the Gannett News Service called the album commercial creativity at its best. The 2001 remaster added a cover of Del Shannon's Little Town Flirt, started in 1979 and finished that year.