How Electric Light Orchestra stole from themselves on one of their biggest hits
Throughout the 1970s, Electric Light Orchestra were quietly one of the most innovative bands of the time. With production wizard songwriter extraordinaire Jeff Lynne at the help of the good ship ELO, the orchestral rock band were able to pioneer new recording techniques that helped shape the sound of pop music throughout the decade. Lynne was always looking for something new, and by the time ELO reached 1979’s Discovery, music had changed drastically in the decade since Lynne first came to prominence.
After the explosion of disco, new drum sounds were discovered thanks to studio experiments. Lynne was tinkering with the track ‘On the Run’ when he had a novel idea: slow down the drum performance. When he did so, Lynne combined the old-school process of varispeed control with the decidedly new practice of sampling. Sampling would become a revolutionary approach starting in the 1980s, but Lynne didn’t have to get permission from anyone to use his samples, considering how he had written the material he was ripping off.
The slowed-down drum sound was then treated with an array of studio effects, most notably a boatload of compression. The results were unlike any drum sound that Lynne had ever heard, and he was immediately inspired to write a new song around the loop. Walking over to the studio’s piano, Lynne began pounding out the chord progression that would eventually form into ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, the album’s final track and eventual third single.
The final recording of ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ is a mix of live and pre-recorded performances. Bevan’s drums are looped, but Lynne, Richard Tandy, and Kelly Groucutt all play live. Like most of ELO’s material, Lynne multi-tracked his own vocals to create the song’s monstrous blend of harmonies. When it was all said and done, Lynne had a Frankenstein’s Monster of a track that was tacked on to the end of Discovery, thanks to its last-minute completion.
“It’s a great big galloping ball of distortion,” Lynne wrote in the liner notes for the 2001 reissue of Discovery. “I wrote it at the last minute, ’cause I felt there weren’t enough loud ones on the album. This was just what I was after.” Perhaps because it was such an impromptu composition, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ was passed over for release as a single for ‘Shine a Little Love’. Even then, the band opted to release ‘The Diary of Horace Wimp’ in the UK before they released ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ as a single.
When it was eventually released, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ wound up being the biggest cross-continental success of the band’s career. While they hit number one in the UK the following year with the Olivia Newton-John collaboration ‘Xanadu’, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ would be the highest-charting ELO song in America, rising all the way up to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1979.
Check out ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ down below.