TOP 40 DEBUT: January 26, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #39 (February 2, 1980)
On February 26, 2001, the French electronic duo Daft Punk released Discovery, their second full-length studio album. It was a gloriously giddy effort that moved from filter house to ambient instrumentalism to club bangers, incorporating everything from vocoders and vintage gear to Barry Manilow samples along the way. (The track where a robot croons a love song before blazing out an Eddie Van Halen-styled solo on keytar is both a highlight and par for the course.) For pure, unapologetic pop thrills, few records from this century can match it. Even its title spoke to Daft Punk’s democratized mission, honoring a long-maligned music genre via a goofy pun: Disco Very.
But Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were far from the first musicians to craft a big, bold, heavily produced endeavor with one eye on the pop charts. They weren’t even the first to find the joke inside their own album title. More than two decades earlier, Electric Light Orchestra unveiled their eighth studio effort to the greatest commercial success of their long career: #1 in England, double platinum in the U.S., and four hit singles on both sides of the pond. Like Daft Punk’s identically-titled album, ELO’s Discovery embraced electronics, piled on the keyboards, and included its fair share of vocoders. And on a few tracks—including “Last Train To London,” the album’s fourth and final American single—the British quartet took that same silly pun and made it fully literal. This wasn’t merely ELO dipping a toe into disco; this was disco, very.
The Electric Light Orchestra began in 1970 as an oddball British art project, initially just an offshoot of an earlier, equally arty outfit: The Move. For a couple years in the early Seventies, both bands existed concurrently with the same core members; television appearances from this period sometimes saw the group promoting the Move’s farewell record (“California Man”) and ELO’s debut effort (“10538 Overture”) simultaneously. But only the latter group found a foothold in America. It took several years and five separate singles, but starting with the Top 10 success of 1974’s “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head,” ELO (the main trio of keyboardist Richard Tandy, drummer Bev Bevan, and frontman/resident mastermind Jeff Lynne, along with assorted string players and bassists) became a reliable presence on the Billboard charts for more than a decade.
ELO were, objectively, fairly popular in America—nine Top 20 hits between 1974 and 1979, and another six in the Eighties—and yet, not quite as popular as pop culture retroactively remembers. They never scored a #1 single or album. Their most celebrated efforts didn’t always connect with audiences of the time. (The now-ubiquitous “Mr. Blue Sky,” AKA The ELO Song From That Movie, peaked at a lowly #35 during its original run in August ’78. It’s an 8.) And they only reached the Top 5 once, thanks to Discovery’s second single, “Don’t Bring Me Down.”
Discovery arrived nearly two years after ELO’s double-album manifesto Out Of The Blue, and in many ways its streamlined, sleekly commercial sound was a reaction—and a rebuttal—to the sprawling symphonic suites of the band’s 1977 release. Lynne famously fired the group’s longtime string section midway through the sessions, part of a concerted effort to pare ELO down to a more manageable size. Backing tracks were cut in a matter of days. Lynne took songwriting cues from the Bee Gees rather than the Beatles. Longtime fans, naturally, took one listen and decided their favorite orchestral rock band had sold out to the trends of the moment. For them, Tandy’s punny nickname for the album (Disco? Very!) doubled as a warning.
As someone who’s never entirely warmed to ELO’s intricately produced excess, I have no issues with Discovery’s stripped-down approach—even if “stripped-down” remains a relative term inside the hermetically sealed universe of Jeff Lynne. Leadoff track “Shine A Little Love” finds room for both a Studio 54 backbeat and a forty-piece string section; “Confusion,” the track that immediately follows, includes (in order): 12-string acoustic, vocoder, drums, rototoms, timpani, bell-tree, piano, bass, Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer, and enough vocal tracks to populate a small choir. (“Confusion” also confirmed that Lynne’s Fab Four worship was very much alive and well, as if there were any real doubt in the first place.)
So yes, given the context, I am absolutely in favor of the big, dumb, Neanderthal stomp of “Don’t Bring Me Down,” a Fifties-styled blues boogie welded to a two-bar drum loop and decorated with glam glitter paint. It’s the Electric Light Orchestra at their catchiest, sleaziest, and weirdest, especially once we reach the ostensible chorus; even the broadest definition of “sellout” doesn’t cover an army of squeaky-voiced Lynnes howling a made-up word in unison. (Officially, that word is grooss, not Bruuce, not that it makes sense either way.) Much like earlier single “Do Ya,” “Don’t Bring Me Down” proved that ELO were most potent at their least precious. No wonder this disarmingly silly rocker wound up being their biggest U.S. hit. (It’s a 9.)
With its sharp edges and insistent rhythm, “Last Train To London” should’ve been an equally big success in America; that it barely cracked the Top 40 probably says more about the limits of ELO’s audience than any deficiency in the song itself. “Last Train” flits casually between disco and new-wave, combining the bubbly pulse of the former with the cool synths and mechanical remove of the latter. The drums are squarely four-on-the-floor. ELO’s trademark string parts get replicated by keyboard patches. The groove doesn’t swing as much as gallop, in a charmingly clunky way that suggests robots attempting to emulate studio musicians. (As you might’ve gathered, this is the one Discovery track that could easily slot into Daft Punk’s own Discovery with minimal tweaking.)
Two elements in particular elevate “Last Train To London” immensely: the chorus and the bass line. The latter propels the song forward on a relentless rush of syncopated sixteenth-notes; imagine the low-end riff from ELO’s 1973 single “Showdown” after downing a six-pack of Monster Energy. In the decade to follow, such a part would almost exclusively become the province of sequencers. Here, it’s handled by bassist Kelly Groucutt (with occasional keyboard doubling from Tandy), and he delivers a technical tour de force, a twisty prog-rock exercise redesigned as octave-jumping disco workout.
Meanwhile, Lynne’s bittersweet refrain takes a simple premise—guy decides to spend extra time with a beautiful woman, missing his train in the process—and makes it magical. Until that moment, the vocal feels as mechanical as the rest of the track, clipped and cold and covered in digital delay. Everything changes when Lynne hits his falsetto: “But I really want tonight to last forever/ I really want to be with you/ Let the music play on down the line tonight.” You can hear the production audibly shift on those lines, like a single ray of humanity descending from the clouds to warm everything in its presence. The chords turn wistful; the strings sigh in tandem. “Last Train” is low-key fantastic throughout, but this is the part that you really want to last forever.
In the United Kingdom, “Last Train To London” reached #8 after being issued as a double-sided single with the more traditional “Confusion,” a clever way of appealing to different facets of ELO’s splintering fanbase. For whatever reason, Columbia Records in America made the decision to release each song separately, resulting in two modest hits with minimal chart impact. (“Confusion” peaked at #37, ten weeks before “Last Train” peaked at #39.) ELO wouldn’t make that same mistake with their next project. The group would close out 1980 with three straight Top 20 singles, each one situated squarely within the realm of safe, contemporary pop. As for the weird and wonderful direction suggested by “Last Train To London”? That would turn out to be a road not traveled.
GRADE: 8/10
I WANT MY MTV: Instead of touring in support of Discovery, Lynne decided to promote the album by shooting nine separate videos, one for each song on the record. The resulting compilation, released on VHS in 1979, helped launch the long-form music video market. (Fun fact: Blondie did the same thing around the same time with Eat To The Beat.) You can still purchase the Discovery collection—on DVD or BluRay—if the clip below whets your appetite for more dry ice-covered soundstages and Jeff Lynne in all his permed glory.
BONUS BITS: The British girl group Atomic Kitten scored a huge international hit in late 2002 with “Be With You,” a track that both samples “Last Train To London” and incorporates a large chunk of its chorus. (Supposedly Lynne charged them half a million pounds for the privilege.) “Be With You” reached #2 in Ireland and the U.K. while charting in fifteen other countries across Europe. Not particularly original, but nicely done—and further proof of the pop smarts hidden inside Lynne’s original refrain.