• Writer: Jeff Lynne
• Producer: Jeff Lynne
• Recorded: Late 1978/early 1979 at Musicland in Munich, Germany
• Released: June 1979
• Players:
  Jeff Lynne — guitar, vocals
  Bev Bevan — drums
  Richard Tandy — keyboards
  Kelly Groucutt — bass, vocals
• Album: Discovery’(Jet/CBS, 1979)
• Also on:
  Afterglow (Epic, 1990)
  Strange Magic (Legacy/Epic, 1995)
  and other compilations
• ELO was formed in 1970 by three former members of the Move — Roy Wood, Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan — who envisioned a unique synthesis between a rock band and a string section. They initially viewed ELO as a side project to the Move.
• Wood surprisingly left after the first ELO album in 1972.
• The group featured a three-piece string section until 1978, when the trio was jettisoned, though violins were still used on the Discovery album.
• ELO’s 1978 tour had been the subject of considerable criticism when it was discovered the band was playing along to a tape for some performances.
• “Don’t Bring Me Down,” the second single from Discovery, was dedicated to the Skylab space project.
• It was the group’s biggest selling single in the U.S., selling more than a million copies.
• “Don’t Bring Me Down” peaked at Number Four on the Billboard Hot 100 and at Number Three in the U.K.
• The Discovery album hit Number Five on the Billboard Top 200, and Number One in the U.K.
• The album sold more than a million copies.

FAST FORWARD:

• Though ELO broke up in 1986, Bevan, Kelly Groucutt and Mik Kaminski went on to lead a spin-off called ELO II between 1991-99.
• Lynne has gone on to produce successful albums for George Harrison and Paul McCartney, as well as songs for Roy Orbison, Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson and others. He also produced the two “new” songs for The Beatles Anthology and was a member of the supergroup the Traveling Wilburys.

Lynne re-launched ELO in 2000, but it was short-lived due to weak sales for the album Zoom.