Songfacts®:

• Country Life highlight "Out of the Blue" is a gorgeously evocative song that captures the feeling of falling in love unexpectedly, with Bryan Ferry describing the intensity and suddenness of the experience:
  
  Then out of the blue
  Love came rushing in
  Out of the sky came the sun
  Out of left field
  Came a lucky day
  Out of the blue, no more pain
• This Roxy live favorite was co-written by guitarist Phil Manzanera. He told The Mail on Sunday on June 28, 2009: "I used to do demos of any contenders for a co-write with Bryan, and I recorded a rough version of 'Out Of The Blue' at home in Acton on a two-track Revox tape recorder. We were recording at AIR Studios on Oxford Street, and that's where I played my demo to the band for the first time."
• "Out Of The Blue" features tape phasing, a production technique that involves the use of multiple tape machines to create a shifting, disorienting effect. British producer Chris Thomas is credited with introducing this technique to Roxy Music, having previously used it on recordings with The Beatles. Speaking to Classic Pop on November 8, 2022, Ferry noted: "We liked to use tape phasing and this was something I guess our producer friend Chris Thomas had discovered in his days with The Beatles. Chris didn't work on this record but his great engineer and collaborator John Punter took over as producer."
  
  Manzanera added to The Mail on Sunday that it was Thomas who suggested Eddie Jobson perform an electric violin solo on the song. Jobson was hired to replace Brian Eno after Eno quit the band in 1973.
• British musician John Gustafson plays the funky, loping bassline on this song. "Ninety-five percent of the bass playing was all my idea: they'd bang some chords out and I'd wait until something gelled and then I'd join in and develop it," Gustafson told Roxy Music biographer David Buckley. "But I stuck in a few things in the middle of that that I quite liked, some James Brown-y bits."
• The introduction to the 1979 song "Halloween" by British new wave band Japan is often compared to the introduction to "Out Of The Blue." Both songs and their accompanying albums were produced by John Punter. In an interview with Electricity Club on January 19, 2021, Japan guitarist Rob Dean said Punter and Ferry fell out over this: "He [Punter] told us that he bumped into Bryan Ferry at AIR [Studios] later on and was berated for working with us. Whether in jest or not, I can't say. I guess Bryan Ferry must have thought we were invading his territory or something."
• On March 29, 2019, Roxy Music performed this song as part of their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Duran Duran members Simon Le Bon and John Taylor inducted the band into the museum. In his induction speech, Le Bon praised Ferry as "a synonym for cool." He continued: "He is like Cary Grant, another Englishman, whose phenomenal drive and determination lay behind an image that was made to look so effortless. Aspirational, but strongly grounded in his working-class roots, Bryan is one of the most restless spirits in 20th-century art."
• The models on the album cover are Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald, respectively the cousin and then-girlfriend of Can's Michael Karoli. The women appear to be caught by surprise in their underwear. Ferry explained to The Guardian on June 14, 1997: "We wanted it to be like they were at some amazing country house party, caught in the headlights of a car as they emerged from some encounter in their underwear. To me, the cover girls were like my ideal fans. It was rather like designing the perfect fan as well as the music."