Electric Light Orchestra released “Twilight” as a single in October 1981, 45 years ago this month, and it stalled at No. 30 on the UK chart.
Two years later a group of amateur animators in Osaka set the opening film of a science fiction convention to it without asking permission, and anime fans have tied the song to that film ever since.
A single about a trip to the year 2095
“Twilight” was the second single from Time, the concept album ELO released on Jet Records in July 1981. The record follows a man from the 1980s who wakes up in the year 2095, and it topped the UK albums chart for two weeks, according to its chart history.
Jeff Lynne made it at Musicland Studios in Munich, the studio Giorgio Moroder founded and where Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was cut. Lynne and keyboard player Richard Tandy are both credited on synthesizers and vocoder, and the album drew mixed reviews for trading the band’s orchestral rock for synths.
Lynne said in a 1981 radio interview with Jim Ladd that during “Twilight” he pictured the song’s character “in bed, actually, looking out the window a little bit.”
The single came out on Jet as JET 7015, backed with the unreleased “Julie Don’t Live Here,” in a picture sleeve taken from the “Hold On Tight” video.
It spent seven weeks on the chart. ELO fanzine writer Andrew Whiteside called it the band’s worst placing since “Strange Magic” in 1976 and said the fade-in intro, awkward for DJs, probably contributed, in notes collected by the Jeff Lynne Song Database. In the US it reached No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Fans know one more detail. The interlude after the song hides a backwards verse from “21st Century Man”: “Though you ride on the wheels of tomorrow, you still wander the fields of your sorrow.”
The promo video put the four members on a stage full of lasers, which the band did not use in its live shows at the time.
Daicon IV and the Osaka animators
In August 1983 the Nihon SF Taikai, Japan’s national science fiction convention, came back to Osaka as Daicon IV. Its organisers, working as Daicon Film, made an opening film on 8 mm with Hiroyuki Yamaga directing and Hideaki Anno and Takami Akai supervising the animation.
After a reimagined minute of their 1981 Daicon III short, the film cuts to “Prologue” and “Twilight,” the first two tracks on Time. The music was not licensed. “The animation is so precisely timed to the score that it is permanently wed to it,” writer Tim Eldred notes in his Daicon Chronicles history.
The crew worked from a rented floor of the Hosei Kaikan, a clothing union building near Osaka Castle, and Yamaga left his work on the TV series Macross to help.
Daicon Film later became the studio Gainax, and Anno went on to create Neon Genesis Evangelion. In 2001 the anime magazine Animage ranked the two Daicon films 35th in its list of the top 100 anime of all time.
From fan film to prime-time TV
The Daicon IV film spread on home video, which is how most fans outside Japan first saw it. In 2005, Fuji TV’s drama Train Man, about an otaku, used “Twilight” over opening titles made as a homage to Daicon IV. Its 11 episodes aired from July 7 to September 22.
That put a song that had stalled at No. 30 in Britain on prime-time Japanese television 24 years after its release. More film and TV music stories sit in our soundtracks section, next to the 1985 “Take On Me” video.
Time itself was reissued on CD in 2001 with three tracks that had been left off the original LP.
Lead photo: Richard Humphrey / Wikimedia Commons / Geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0