(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Stills / Alamy / Album Cover)
Wed 14 January 2026 16:45, UK
During their peak years, Electric Light Orchestra achieved the seemingly impossible: a ship steered by the defier of odds himself, Jeff Lynne.
Since day one, Lynne hasn’t fooled anyone about his ethos or desired journey. In fact, it was always clear that he’d built on the shoulders of a certain Liverpudlian Fab Four, taking their innovative approach to genre-blending and making something that felt like a new chapter for big, stadium-level rock.
You can imagine, therefore, the excitement Lynne probably felt the day that John Lennon described ELO as the “son of The Beatles”, not just because they were such a seminal influence, but because, as far as he was concerned, they were the blueprint. More than that, though, Lynne became his own force that showed how to navigate a landscape that didn’t know what the hell it was doing.
Drawing inspiration from the greats is one thing, but to really make it, you have to have bags of talent and intuition. And that’s something that Lynne took everywhere he went, even in collaborations with other legendary names, when he’d work hard to make things as good as they could possibly be by following his own simple instinct.
And many times, those small seeds of ideas ended up becoming massive ones, swirling into grandiose spectacles that made ELO both musically appealing and visually creative. A year after Out Of The Blue saw their success reach new heights, Lynne was embarking on an even more ambitious tour run, with a spaceship set that made audiences feel, quite literally, part of another world.
So, what was Jeff Lynne’s spaceship?
The idea to create a massive spaceship prop came from the band’s manager, Don Arden, and was conceived to go with the theme of the album while taking the audience on a unique journey through the set list. At the end, Lynne would sometimes go out to watch from the perspective of the audience, entirely captivated by the immense tech they’d been able to pull off to go with the musical experience.
Recalling this part of the set to Louder, Lynne said, “We were doing 70,000-seaters in some parts of America by then. But the shows were getting too big for me. The spaceship was Don Arden’s idea. We first tried it out at The Who’s studios in Shepperton. Pete Townshend came in, saw it and said: ‘I want one of them!’”
He went on, “The spaceship was amazing – the noise it made at the end of the show was incredible, like rocket engines. I used to dash out to the front and watch from the audience. It was Don who got Tony Curtis to introduce us on stage at Wembley that year, where we played to royalty [the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester]. But I was more impressed at the reception afterwards.”
The giant stage prop not only made it look and feel like the band were “taking off”, but the image also became synonymous with ELO’s legacy, not just aesthetically, but how they managed to soar to the top in an arena where the competition was intensely high. The spaceship, therefore, symbolised their explosiveness in the rock landscape, both in terms of artistic audacity and raw excellence.
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