Farewell ELO, the ordinary blokes from Birmingham who made pop extraordinary

 Jeff Lynne’s boundless appetite for creating music was born when he was out with his dad in their home town of Birmingham in the 1950s. Walking its streets, the pair happened upon not a guitar or a piano, but a piece of industrial hardware.

“My dad could play along with one finger to classical tunes and harmonise with stuff on the radio,” Lynne told the journalist Jim Irvin in 2001. “He taught me one great thing, though. One day… there was one of those big steel pipes sitting in the road, about 40 foot long and four foot high. And he said to me, ‘Listen to this.’ And he leant into the pipe and went ‘Aah aah aah aah’, a note at a time, and it turned into a chord with all this reverb. I had a go, and this great big chord came back. It was amazing. That was my first experience of reverb and harmony.”

In a series of gigs in the UK’s largest indoor and outdoor spaces, Jeff Lynne will this week call time on his career as the kingpin with ELO, the band with which he made his name. As befits a man who has long been one of the music scene’s more anomalous public figures, the vibe is low key. The fans aren’t paying to see an all-eyes-on-me pop star. With his bird’s nest hairdo, welder’s shades and docker’s beard, even as a young man, Lynne looked middle-aged.

The tour hasn’t been without its problems. In Birmingham, last weekend, Lynne performed without a guitar after breaking his hand in a taxi that had slammed on its brakes to avoid a collision in London. On Thursday, the second date of ELO’s two-night stand at Co-op Live, in Manchester, was cancelled minutes before the band were due onstage. Recently, Lynne’s representatives released a statement confirming that Lynne would not play his farewell gig at Hyde Park, originally planned for July 13. “Jeff has been battling a systemic infection,” it said, and doctors “have advised him that performing is simply not possible”. 

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Bedevilled by ill health, at least Jeff Lynne knows that he can blend into the background. The 77-year-old is more captain of a darts team than major league rock star, as collaborator Tom Petty astutely noted, on the BBC documentary Mr Blue Sky, “His music certainly hasn’t been overlooked because you hear it. It’s part of the fabric of all our lives. But the man himself is very shy and retreating. I don’t think you ever saw his picture on an album jacket or anything back in the ELO days.”

Those songs, though, well they really did strut their stuff. As outrageous as Elton John in a glittering baseball uniform at Dodger Stadium, hits such Mr Blue Sky, Telephone Line, Hold On Tight and Livin’ Thing pushed the boundaries of production and pop arrangements to a degree that was at times berserk. If they were a foodstuff, the calorie count alone would kill you within a week. There were choirs in there, orchestras, Wurlitzers, vocoders and synthesisers. Cellists and violinists were permanent members. Restrained it was not.

Obverting the cliché that great songs sound terrific even when played on a beat-up acoustic guitar, the Electric Light Orchestra’s best work refused to be suffocated no matter how lavish the adornments. It may be an urban myth that the group formed because The Beatles refused to tour after 1966, but like Oasis after them, their songs repurposed the Liverpudlians’ immortal template for a new decade. Unlike the Fab Four, though, ELO were a Fab One. Following the resignation of the equally but more unreliably talented Roy Wood, early doors, the vision was Jeff Lynne’s alone.

In a radio interview in 1974, John Lennon noted not only the shadow cast by his own group, but also the musical worth of this new creation. “I call them ‘Son of The Beatles’,” he said, “although they did things that we never did, obviously. But I remember a statement they made when they first formed [in which they said the intention] was to carry on from where The Beatles left off with I Am The Walrus, and they certainly did.”

(In the 1980s and 1990s, of course, as a member of Traveling Wilburys, alongside George Harrison, and as the producer of the posthumous Beatles song Free As A Bird, from 1995, the relationship between the two parties would grow closer still.)

As distinct from The Beatles, though, for the Electric Light Orchestra, success was somewhat slow to arrive. Despite a smattering of early-day hit singles, in the wake of the modest popularity of the band’s first two albums, each of their three subsequent LPs each failed to trouble the British chart. Upon hearing Eldorado (my own personal favourite) in 1974, Jeff Lynne’s father remarked that his son “had really blotted [his] copybook with this one”. For a songwriter who remained somehow British even when he moved to Los Angeles, this inattention must surely have chafed.

“My dad said, ‘The trouble with your tunes is that they’ve got no tunes,’” Lynne told Mojo magazine. “I was a bit upset by that, but then I thought, ‘He’s right, you know. I’m not doing myself justice, I’m doing all this waffly stuff.’ That made me write… Can’t Get it Out of My Head, which became a big hit in America.” Okay. Maybe. But while ELO were playing to thousands of people in the New World, in Birmingham, they struggled to fill the Town Hall.

Of course, they went where the work took them. Six US tours in quick succession; 68 dates in 75 days on one stretch. At a time when televisions were plummeting from hotel room windows like raindrops, the remarkably well-behaved ELO began to fray in more mundane ways. The improbably named Mike de Albuquerque hung up his bass in favour of spending time with his family; cellist Mike Edwards became a postman. Tellingly, replacement members were drafted in on only limited terms. When success really hit, in the late 1970s, the only names on the group’s record contract were those of Lynne and drummer Bev Bevan.

“It must be weird to be in ELO,” Bev Bevan told Rolling Stone, in 1979, a time when he was actually in ELO. “To be a member of the string section, say. There’s no real group feel about this band, except live. Then it’s a real seven-man band. The strange thing is that Jeff and I don’t really project that much onstage, and the string section shows a lot of the personality.”

While personality was one thing, credit was quite another. Not unreasonably, when the names of the very same musicians failed to appear on the sleeve notes for the mega-platinum Discovery album, on which they played, feelings ran sour. “The guys in the string section were upset about it,” Bevan conceded. “I don’t blame them. It’s embarrassing.”

“Over time it became obvious that the band was split into a hierarchy and lower minions,” admitted bassist Kelly Groucutt. “People were whispering to Jeff, ‘You’re the one that counts, it’s all your music.’ And it was, I’d never deny that, but its success had a bit of help from the rest of us.”

Entreaties to manager Don Arden, an old-school bruiser who made Reggie Kray look like Gandhi, were predictably fruitless. “Don was a bully,” Groucutt noted. “He was okay to Jeff and Bev, but he looked down on the rest of us. We’d try and negotiate more money with him and it was impossible. You’d go in all nervous and he’d start saying, ‘If it wasn’t for this what else would you be doing?’ In other words, ‘If you don’t like it, f--- off!’”

Instead, money was spent on dazzle. A hundred thousand quid went on a spaceship stage set that played havoc with the sound. Each night the band would look up nervously at the 500 lights suspended from its fibreglass undercarriage. Needless to say, audiences loved it. Multiple performances at Madison Square Garden followed, as did a remarkable eight-night stand at Wembley Arena. At a landmark gig at the Universal Amphitheatre, in Los Angeles, the spaceship appeared to fly in from Burbank. Acting MC Tony Curtis shot roadies dressed as aliens from the rigging.

Such entertaining frippery, though, likely contributed to the unfair but enduring impression that ELO were glorious in only a daft way. With Jeff Lynne’s personality hidden behind lights and the swells of an orchestra, even today, they remain a kind of guilty pleasure for people who suspect that those who truly love them are irredeemably uncool. At a time when critical reappraisals are commonplace, even in the 21st Century, ELO remain tragically unhip.

Not that they were in any hurry to help themselves. After turning down an offer to write the score for the Alan Parker film Midnight Express, Jeff Lynne happily hitched ELO to the fantasy musical Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John, from 1980. In this, it was almost as if he’d responded enviously to news that Queen were working on the dismal Flash Gordon movie, from the same year, with the words, “Hang on, I can do much worse than that”.

Not only did Xanadu fail to recoup its $23 million budget but, perhaps predictably, it was also savaged by the critics. “The acting is wooden, the direction and cinematography confused, the special effects largely out of place, the dramatic interest non-existent,” wrote Jeff McLaughlin in the Boston Globe. Yet it would be disingenuous of me not to point out that ELO did contribute a few good songs to the soundtrack album

Today the group trade under the name Jeff Lynne’s ELO, which seems about right. Certainly, in its original incarnation, the collective term “band” ceased to apply in any meaningful sense long before the journey’s end. Resenting the contractual obligations to which he’d signed his name, Lynne began delivering albums that were at first patchy, and then poor. Members on temporary contracts suddenly found themselves on the dole. There were lawsuits, foreclosures on homes, and nervous breakdowns. Acrimony was spread more evenly than money.

All of which I prefer not to think about. As a 15-year-old, I saw the group’s final home town concert of the 20th Century, at a charity all-dayer at the National Exhibition Centre. Memory is malleable, I know, especially at that age, but I remember it as being one of the outstanding moments of my teenage years. I took my late father along, too, who loved ELO. Every Sunday, right up until his death, he’d do the ironing while listening to one of their albums.

As a miner and then an engineer, my old man never escaped the dawn chorus of the working day. But Jeff Lynne did. After being hired by his first band, a local turn named Mike Sheridan and The Nightriders, he told his mum that he would no longer be getting up at 7.30 on Monday morning. In fact, as a newly minted professional musician, he wouldn’t be doing that ever again.

“If I hadn’t been doing the music I probably would not have been very happy because it meant that all it [life] was was these black mornings, grey skies, raining, freezing cold,” he once said. “Getting up on the upstairs of the bus, going into town, going to work. That didn’t have any kind of fascination for me at all. I’m so glad I got into the rock and roll music. Into the pop.”

And now it is, seemingly, over. Last weekend, when Black Sabbath were closing their own account at Villa Park, across town at the Utilita Arena, the Electric Light Orchestra played the first of two final final hometown concerts. For the life of me, I struggle to believe that more hasn’t been made of this; not just the incredible coincidence itself, but that – with The Moody Blues, UB40, Wizzard and many more – Birmingham itself has been a production line for working-class groups the success of which helped shape modern music while changing the lives of the people involved.

Unlike Sabbath themselves, I suppose it could be said that ELO didn’t create anything new. But that’s fine; very few bands do. Instead, with a deliciously sweet tooth, and with exquisite finesse and attention to detail, they improved the recipe of rock and roll. And for that, they will be missed.