Revisiting ' Time' by ELO (with Jamie Sefton)

Briefly a number 1 album in the UK in 1981, 'Time' was a sci-fi concept album that saw orchestral pop-proggers ELO blast off in a whole new direction. A synth-heavy time-travel odyssey featuring sexualised robots, one-way lunar trips and much heart-rending homesickness for the early eighties, the record later proved influential on Daft Punk, The Flaming Lips and Future Sound of London, but still feels oddly like 1981's best-kept secret. In this video Jamie Sefton and I explore this groundbreaking album on which Jeff Lynne and Richard Tandy rebooted ELO with the help of a million synths, processors and of course vocoders, in the process creating a new brand of classically-influenced techno-pop that was entirely in tune with the futurist spirit of its times.