“Don't Bring Me Down” by Electric Light Orchestra

"Don't Bring Me Down" closes out Discovery, Electric Light Orchestra's 1979 album, and it's the sound of Jeff Lynne ditching the strings and just letting rip. By his own telling he wrote it at the last minute because the record was short on loud ones, and it's pure glam-stomp crunch, fat with distortion and pounding like a jackhammer. It was the first ELO single with no string section at all.

Engineer Mack says the idea to go without them was his, and that he nudged Lynne to simply boogie for a night. The drums aren't even played live: Bev Bevan sat the jam out, so Mack built the beat from a tape loop lifted from "On the Run", slowed down and then sped up again. It became the band's biggest hit in America, reaching number 4 on the Hot 100, went to number 3 in the UK and topped the chart in Canada.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.