History
| “ | It's a great big galloping ball of distortion. I wrote it at the last minute, 'cos I felt there weren't enough loud ones on the album. This was just what I was after. | ” |
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—Discovery remaster (2001), Jeff Lynne |
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"Don't Bring Me Down" is the band's second highest charting hit in the UK where it peaked at number 3 and their biggest hit in the United States, peaking at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also charted well in Canada (number 2) and Australia (number 6). This was the first song by ELO not to include a string section.
The drum track is in fact a tape loop, coming from "On the Run" looped and slowed down.
The song was dedicated to the NASA Skylab space station, which re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia on 11 July 1979.
On 4 November 2007, Lynne was awarded a BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc) Million-Air certificate for "Don't Bring Me Down" for the song having reached two million airplays.
Read more about this topic: Don't Bring Me Down
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)