“I said: ‘If the South Park guys are gonna do a Barbra Streisand on us, it’s a no’”: How Queen, The Who and Star Wars inspired the greatest power ballad about alien abduction ever written

Styx posing for a photograph in the late 1970s.

Dennis DeYoung was watching the sun hit the waves in the sea off Hawaii when the angels appeared. It was April 1977, and his band, Styx, were on the island to play the Crater festival, aka Hawaii’s Woodstock.

It was a welcome stop-off on a long and grinding journey. Styx were six albums deep into their career, but they’d managed just a single Top 10 hit a few years earlier, with DeYoung’s proto-power ballad Lady.