Song 563 ( Electric Light Orchestra - Fire On High )

I remember back in the day when your music library was measured in shelf space an not gigabytes I was a one of those who had many mix tapes recorded from the radio; this was the first ELO song that I recorded off the air. Those were the days... no lawsuits against music fans, just you and your tape recorder.
Anyway, this is still one of my absolute favourite songs from ELO; it is only matched by a few in my mind. Just beautiful Symphonic Progressive Rock at its best!
Funny enough at the beginning of this song there is a backmasked message that if played backward states: "The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back, turn back, turn back, turn back." From what I understand, this was a stab back at the fundamentalist witch hunts by Jeff Lynne, who had accused him of planting messages in his song "Eldorado."

I personally had a lot of experience dealing with these idiots who were trying to tell us that my music was satanic. The problem is if you do not look at what they are subtitling, the song being played backwards is just gibberish. One of the things that most people are forgetting is that the human brain processes audio information in more ways than just one. If you are faced with indecipherable audio and you are given more information, (visual, or told by someone), you will expect to hear what you are told is there and the brain will splice the two bits of information together in order to make sense of it and from then on you will hear what they say is there.

Here is the studio version on YouTube.
Here is a live recording on YouTube.

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