“It’s about a guy in a dream who sees this vision of loveliness and wakes up and finds out he’s actually a clerk working in a bank and he hasn’t got any chance of getting her or doing all these wonderful things he was going to do.”Jeff Lynne (139)

“The song is just about love, love being a living thing.”Jeff Lynne (139)

“I sound really desperate and lonely on this one, and maybe I was. It’s about trying to find a girl every night and you just can’t get through to her. It was a scenario I thought of, but maybe it was prompted by the fact that I wasn’t happy at the time. When I was a kid, I loved the plaintive songs of Del Shannon and Roy Orbison. They wrote songs that were really sad and those were the best. I thought I was writing those sort of songs. People tell me the song gives them a boost, but I never dreamed I was doing that for anybody.”Jeff Lynne (699)

“I remember writing the words down. I was at a chalet in the mountains of Switzerland and it was all misty and cloudy all the way around. I didn’t see any countryside for the first four days or so, and then everything cleared and there was this enormous view forever and the sky was blue.”Jeff Lynne (699)

“It’s the most autobiographical song I’ve ever done. The words just wrote themselves, whereas normally I’d sweat them out and chain myself to my desk. It was about growing up and listening to my little crystal-set radio with headphones.”Jeff Lynne (699)