![]() ![]() Lynne lost his temper and sent them all home. “They were larking about and taking the mickey.”ĭuring Eldorado Finale and Nobody’s Child (Lynne: “About a young lad being seduced by an older woman”) some of the orchestra musicians were so annoyed the session had overrun, they noisily packed away their instruments while the band were still playing. “It was Clark’s first London session and because he was a new face they gave him a particularly hard time,” recalled studio engineer Dick Plant in 2011. To realise his musical dreams, Lynne hired a 30-piece orchestra to be conducted by ELO’s new young arranger, Louis Clark. Work on the album began at North London’s De Lane Lea Studios in February ’74. Here, in his alternative universe, he hangs out with Robin Hood, fights medieval battles and becomes irresistible to women. Lynne devised the story of Eldorado about a young man who escapes his dull everyday life by escaping into a fantasy dream world. But his father, plain-speaking Philip Lynne, who spent his working life paving roads for Birmingham City Council, thought otherwise: “My dad said: ‘The trouble with your tunes, son, is they’ve got no tunes.’ I thought: ‘I’ll show ya.’”Įnter ELO’s fourth album, Eldorado, and its big ‘tune with a tune’, Can’t Get It Out Of My Head. But John Lennon was so impressed he anointed ELO “son of Beatles” in an interview with a New York radio DJ. He came his closest yet in summer 1973 with Showdown, a sad, sonorous pop song with swooping strings and a riff nicked from Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Musicians came and went as Lynne struggled to recreate the sounds he heard in his head. “There were about four years of whistling, belching and groaning sounds,” recalled Bev Bevan. But even allowing for a pre-gig overload of lager, early ELO gigs were chaotic affairs, with the sound of the cellos clashing with the guitar and drums. ELO 2 impressed America with its string-driven version of Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven. “It was like having two bosses.”įrom now on there would only be one boss. But Wood walked out during the recording of 1972’s ELO 2 and formed Wizzard instead. ![]() Pepper-style pop with classical trimmings. Roy Wood told the press ELO would carry on where The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus left off: dressing Sgt. An unimpressed Lynne later called the LP “a self-indulgent non-event”. Described in New Musical Express, as “a 10-piece mini orchestra”, their self-titled debut album was trailed by a UK hit, 10538 Overture. Roy Wood and Bev Bevan, The Move’s frontman and drummer, shared Lynne’s misgivings, and ELO was born. “By the time I joined The Move they were moving into cabaret,” said Lynne, “and I didn’t want to do that.”īev Bevan, Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood in The Move (Image credit: Getty) But ELO grew out of The Move, the Brummie psychedelic group whose run of hits peaked with 1967’s Flowers In The Rain. Lynne left school at 15 and joined a local band, who turned pro and later called themselves The Idle Race. Before long he was dissecting hits by Roy Orbison and The Beatles to find out what made them tick: “It’s the way they built ’em that intrigues me.” After attending his first gig, by Del Shannon of Runaway fame, Lynne complained that Shannon’s drummer didn’t sound like he did on the record. Lynne grew up in the 1950s in Shard End, a post-war council estate near Solihull in the West Midlands. His daydreams came true: there were girls, glamour, fame and fortune: “But for me it was always about the studio and the music.”ĮLO’s journey to world supremacy came via three albums – Eldorado, Face The Music and A New World Record – that forged Jeff Lynne’s reputation as a studio magus and musical perfectionist. But Jeff Lynne was always an unlikely pop star. It was a long way from half-empty club gigs and pissing in a bucket. Electric Light Orchestra saw out the 70s as multi-platinum pop stars, feted by film star Tony Curtis and victory-lapping the globe with a stage set shaped like a flying saucer. ![]() Two years later, A New World Record delivered their first Top 10 album in the UK and the US. In September 1974, John Lennon declared ELO natural heirs to the Fab Four. ![]()
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