Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Back in the seventies, the Electric Light Orchestra or ELO was quite popular. Many of their songs are still on the radio today.

Out of the Blue - Live at Wembley captures the band when they ruled the concert halls. This DVD was remastered from tapes of that concert and done in full surround sound.
Although it is only an hour show, the band performs many of their radio hits.

Electric Light Orchestra performs Standing in the Rain, Night in the City, Turn to Stone, Tightrope, Telephone Line, Rockariai, Wild West Hero, Showdown, Sweet Talkin' Woman, Mr. Blue Sky, Do Ya, Livin' Thing and Roll Over Beethoven

The performance itself is very good with Jeff Lynne and company looking very 70s with huge perms and white tuxedoes performing with guitars, drums, piano, violin and two huge cellos below what looks like a big flying saucer of lights. You can tell you are watching a concert from the 1970's! You can tell that the band and the audience was having a lot of fun with the show. My personal favorites were Turn to Stone and Mr. Blue Sky done complete with the electronic sounding ,Mr. Blue Sky, Mr. Blue Sky why?

Band Line Up

On this tour Electric Light Orchestra was:

Jeff Lynne - guitar and vocals
Bev Bevan - drums
Richard Tandy - keyboards
Kelly Groucutt - bass and vocals
Mik Kaminksi - Violin
Hugh McDowell - Cello
Melvyn Gale - Cello

Video

The video quality looked good, but it appears to have been cut from a wide screen presentation. The whole concert is done in 4:3 format, and in many songs, the band is outlined with a blue rectangle or a giant oval. I suppose that was the height of artistic presentation in that era. However, the left side of the rectangle and oval is cut off from the screen, which makes me believe that at one point this was originally filmed for movie screens. I thought it was a shame that they didn't restore it to widescreen when they did this DVD release. The color and detail was fair.

Audio

The producers of this concert did a good job with the audio here, the show was remastered in three choices, PCM stereo, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and DTS 5.1 surround. The surround sound tracks both spread the band across the front three channels very naturally with crowd noises and other ambient sounds being assigned to the rear channels. Sound clarity, including LFE (bass) was very well done and holds up when played loudly.

Extras

The only extra included is a small version of the original tour program. I hope the original tour programs were much larger, because I had to strain my eyes to read it, and my eyesight is still 20/20. No extras were on the DVD, except a brief introduction of the show at the beginning of the program.

Summary

I've always like ELO, and I enjoyed this show, but due to the mixed video quality and the short length of the show, I can't give more than 3 stars here. I prefer the 2001 Zoom tour on DVD, but ELO fans should get both.

For dozens more DVD concert reviews check out Shopaholic_man's Guide to Concert DVDs



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD