This is one of Stephen Bickford’s pencil-on-velum sketches for ELO’s tour. He notes it was part of a series “where we wanted to look at a variety of ideas for how the speaker wings could be dressed, and we decided to draw only one side of the stage for each concept to save time and money. The two concepts were alternates, one with a themed scrim cover over standard speaker stacks and one with themed speaker stacks. The central stage area concept could have been used with either perimeter setting. The ‘flying saucer truss’ concept was based on the movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind which I was smitten with as it had just come out. Oh, and, the ELO flying saucer.
“In the end, there was a huge round-ish truss filled with various lights aiming down that had a crustacean-like shell fitted on top of it so that when it started, at the beginning of the concert, to rise up from the deck, it resembled a flying saucer taking off with light pouring out of the underside as its power source,” he continues.
