The group played their first massive festivals in decades at Glastonbury and at Hyde Park, certain key songs found their way onto some big Hollywood soundtracks and in 2017, ELO was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.īut one gets the feeling Jeff Lynne would have been quietly satisfied whichever way things went. It's the kind of skill and sensibility that Lynne gave many ELO records as well as his amazing production CV which include works with Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, The Beatles and of course, the world's greatest supergroup, The Travelling Wilburys.Įven with such incredible songs and production credits to his name, Jeff Lynne and ELO's legacy wasn't exactly assured until fairly recent times. “I think the multi-track layering that Jeff Lynne achieves in his songs without making a 'mess of it' is something that is really amazing and probably really influential on our approach to production.” “Seventies nostalgia was a new concept back in the late 90s, so ELO kind of represented an alternative to Blink 182 and Foo Fighters I guess.”īrowning says that just as Lynne's stellar songs have stood the test of time, so too will his production genius. “I was a bit of Beatles nerd as a kid, certainly the sweet harmonies stood out right away, and the strings of course too,” he tells Double J. I tried to make something the opposite to what I was hearing on the radio, so it would stand out.”ĭecades later, ELO was still a distinctly different offering against the prevailing music mainstream.Ĭut Copy's Ben Browning explains why the Birmingham group's music caught his ear. “So, I thought, I want to do something different from that. That just seemed like all I ever heard on the radio,” he told BBC TV in 2014. “In that era, you know '72, '73, it was all big long guitar solos and tunes that lasted seven or eight minutes. His symphonic pop songs were also somewhat of a reaction to what he was hearing at the time. Lynne's idea of what his group could be was formed from a very young age shaped by his father's love and broad knowledge of music from popular to classical. “All the bits that come in and out, the backing vocals, the cellos sliding, all the little naughty bits, the sound effects, everything is exactly what I imagined ELO to be.” “It captured all what ELO, my vision of ELO, was all about,” he said. Lynne says the song is his crowning ELO achievement. I didn't see any countryside for the first four days or so, and then everything cleared and there was this enormous view forever and the sky was blue.” I was at a chalet in the mountains of Switzerland and it was all misty and cloudy all the way around. “I suppose this is my most well-known song,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. Indeed, blue skies provided inspiration for one of Lynne's most enduring songs of his five-decade career, ‘Mr Blue Sky'. The word ‘blue' crops up repeatedly throughout this album too. Not surprisingly, you get a strong impression of longing and melancholy that comes with the territory of being in a prescribed solitary state as Lynne found himself in Switzerland on tracks like ‘Believe Me Now', ‘Birmingham Blues' and the album's soaring closer ‘Wild West Hero.'

There are mystical and romantic nightscapes in ‘Starlight' and ‘Jungle' and, of course, the rain inspired suite of songs that form ‘Concerto for a Rainy Day'.

He explores urban environments: ‘ The city streets are empty now…' in the joyous melodic charge of ‘Turn to Stone' and ‘ I was searchin' (searchin') on a one way street…' in ‘Sweet Talkin Woman'. The great outdoors and wide blue yonder feature consistently throughout Electric Light Orchestra's 1977 double album. Surrounded by the pristine natural environment of the Swiss Alps, where Jeff Lynne had locked himself away to work, it seems that all he had to do to shake of his writer's block was simply look out the window. It also literally references the skies above from where weather and spaceships might arrive. It's a phrase that signifies spontaneity, spur of the moment stuff.

Electric light orchestra jungle