Out of the Blue

Jeff Lynne wrote the whole double album in three and a half weeks in a rented chalet in the Swiss Alps, and it took a further two months to record in Munich. It was one of the first pop albums to use the vocoder extensively. Side three is Concerto for a Rainy Day, a four-song suite shaped by the relentless rain Lynne met in Switzerland, with rain and thunder recorded in Munich at the start and between the songs. It ends with Mr. Blue Sky, and a melody sung through a vocoder in the intro of Big Wheels returns in orchestral form at the end of that last song. Elsewhere Jungle brings in Tarzan effects, elephants and a talking lion, and Lynne wrote The Whale after a television programme about whale hunting. Part of the proceeds went to Greenpeace.

The spaceship on the cover was designed by John Kosh and illustrated by Shusei Nagaoka, building on the logo Kosh made for A New World Record. The catalogue number JTLA 823 L2 is printed on the shuttle arriving at the station. The same space theme carried onto the stage as a glowing flying-saucer set.

It reached number 4 in both the US and the UK, 3 in Australia and 2 in Sweden, and was the first double album in UK chart history to produce four top-twenty singles. About 10 million copies had sold worldwide by 2007. Capital Radio and the Daily Mirror Rock and Pop Awards named it Album of the Year in 1978, and Lynne won his first Ivor Novello award that year. In the US, Jet's distribution moved from United Artists to CBS, and discounted cut-out copies soon spread through the shops. Lawsuits by CBS and Jet did not stop them.

Reviews at the time were split. Record Mirror gave it four stars and called it almost a masterpiece, while Rolling Stone's Billy Altman found it meticulously produced but sterile. Later views warmed. The Guardian's Ian Gittens, giving three stars, wrote that it had aged better than the three-chord wonders who derided it. Pitchfork's 2007 review of the reissue, by Rob Mitchum, scored it 8.1 and noted that the album is often thought the band's high-water mark. It was voted number 346 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums in 2000 and is listed in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The 30th anniversary edition in 2007 reached 18 in the UK.