This song is about The Great Northeast Blackout that forced planes in New York to remain in ascent in 1965 with the power outage provoking a Scandinavian flight to detour to Kennedy Airport in the dark. The lyrics tell the struggles the pilots and crew members faced who were desperately trying to communicate with air traffic control and find a safe place to land. The Great Northeast Blackout took place on November 9, 1965. Due to disastrous technical problems, electricity supplies to thousands of people in southern Ontario, Canada, and across eight north-eastern American states, were abruptly cut. Alarmingly, this included power supplies to airport runway lights, forcing countless planes to be re-routed elsewhere.
Biff Byford was watching a BBC documentary about the blackout, presented by noted science historian James Burke, and suddenly had a cool idea for a song. “I was watching this documentary and somehow it all just went in, you know?” Biff recalls. “I’d heard another song with a lyric about ‘riding on a 747’ and that was stuck in my head, and it all seemed to come together naturally. I came up with the melody for the chorus first. I think I wrote that arpeggio in the chorus with the words ‘Strangers in the Night’ in there. I probably got the idea from the [1966] Frank Sinatra song – the syllables were the same. I’m a big Sinatra fan. I like his phrasing. So when that riff came along, it all fitted together really nicely.”
This song is about The Great Northeast Blackout that forced planes in New York to remain in ascent in 1965 with the power outage provoking a Scandinavian flight to detour to Kennedy Airport in the dark. The lyrics tell the struggles the pilots and crew members faced who were desperately trying to communicate with air traffic control and find a safe place to land. The Great Northeast Blackout took place on November 9, 1965. Due to disastrous technical problems, electricity supplies to thousands of people in southern Ontario, Canada, and across eight north-eastern American states, were abruptly cut. Alarmingly, this included power supplies to airport runway lights, forcing countless planes to be re-routed elsewhere.
Biff Byford was watching a BBC documentary about the blackout, presented by noted science historian James Burke, and suddenly had a cool idea for a song. “I was watching this documentary and somehow it all just went in, you know?” Biff recalls. “I’d heard another song with a lyric about ‘riding on a 747’ and that was stuck in my head, and it all seemed to come together naturally. I came up with the melody for the chorus first. I think I wrote that arpeggio in the chorus with the words ‘Strangers in the Night’ in there. I probably got the idea from the [1966] Frank Sinatra song – the syllables were the same. I’m a big Sinatra fan. I like his phrasing. So when that riff came along, it all fitted together really nicely.”