Artistry has two threads – self expression and an urge to create. How these are mixed shapes the artistic output.
Two scenes, forty years between them. The later scene shows a figure with his back to us, sitting on a garden bench, seen through the doors of a very large house with a vast panoramic vista, strumming an instrument and singing to himself. He has succeeded in life – beyond, perhaps, his wildest dreams. The camera shot has a solitary feel, despite his success. Apart from one lifetime colleague in the documentary, he seems to be on his own in this enormous house. Whether that is a trick of the TV documentary to draw attention to himself or because he really is a loner is not clear. The focus is on his music – we are not offered much insight to the man, although behind this creator of elaborate tones there seems to be a joker trying to get out.
The other scene is an early 1970s video. The singer has a black eye patch and long curly hair. There are four cellists, two of whom are wearing piggy masks as if they have just walked out of I Am The Walrus, while one of the others has long white hair, round glasses and a beard and leers rather unpleasantly at the camera. The french horn player has the most extraordinary large coloured spectacles (even by 1970s standards) and is wearing a brown and beige tank top. The drummer is earnestly doing his bit, wearing lurid green Masonic robes. There is also a surprisingly normal looking bassist. The band is clearly trying to say something, but what is anyone’s guess.
I’m going to include some links to the early songs in this blog. They are worth a look.
The bet was that mixing classical music into rock ‘n’ roll would give the latter much needed colour and breadth. ‘Pretentious’ in the prog rock world of the early 1970s was not a word anyone was particularly worried about. If the endgame was to produce something that appealed to the mainstream, though, ELO’s initial efforts on the first two albums were a work in progress. The grinding rhythms may be a bit harsh on modern ears and long symphonic declamatory pieces like Kuiama (check out the lyrics on that one) or 10583 Overture are easy to leave on a dusty shelf.
From the Sun to the World (Boogie No.1) is another – full of pomp and pseudo-distopian nonsense whilst at the same time being a great tune. Some fabulous violin playing and neat classical twiddly bits on the piano woven into a dramatic film-score like theme.
I think those early songs are great. They include a 7 minute version of Roll Over Beethoven, which does the musical equivalent of Pimp My Ride to Chuck Berry’s original, complete with massive chrome exhausts and tyres and the suspension jacked up as far as it can go. But while it was fine as a one-off, it lacked musical originality, which is presumably why Jeff Lynne took several more albums to get to the sound he wanted. The recent documentary about Lynne showed him to be nothing if not a perfectionist. He can’t have been easy to work with.
In between the two bookends lies the grandiose, frizzy-haired, highly orchestrated oeuvre of the Electric Light Orchestra. Unashamedly carrying the Beatles torch into the 1970s. Sometimes with quite startling similarities – listen to Mr Kingdom from the fourth album Eldorado, for instance; then listen to Across the Universe.
Underpinning the complex layering and the classical pastiche, the sure-handed pop songs steered them through, ensuring ELO a place in the musical canon. Grudgingly in some quarters, perhaps, because despite the virtuosity, ELO can never be said to have been particularly trendy. Popular, yes (selling over 50 million records, according to Wiki), but popularity doesn’t, of course, guarantee approval from the popular music establishment. The music industry has done to ELO what it has done to so many artists – sliced and diced and sliced again, shining a light on a handful of well known hits and leaving the rest in comparative obscurity, which is a shame, because ELO were an album band and a lot of the texture is lost by focusing just on the songs Lynne earmarked for particular commercial success. A New World Record was, after all, their 6th album. There may be more of a recognition of their contribution nowadays, but I’m not sure how far it goes beyond Mr Blue Sky.
Despite the (at times) laboured experimentation, early songs like Roll Over Beethoven and Ma-Ma-Ma Belle gave a glimpse of what Jeff Lynne liked doing best – big sounding rock ‘n’ roll numbers. Later, he got to like disco as well – hence Discovery.
On The Third Day shows the transition from obscure prog-rockers to mainstream hopefuls. The album is a pot pourri of musical ideas, looking backwards, forwards and sideways. As well as a pop version of In The Hall of the Mountain King which gives the sawing cellos an outing in front of Bev Bevan’s ineluctable drumming, Showdown is a clear pointer to the catchiness of ELO’s purple patch between A New World Record (1976), Out Of the Blue (1977) and Discovery (1979). Everyone’s Born to Die is unusually bleak and emphatic, Lynne showing what he can do with real passion in his voice.
After Discovery, the big poppy classical style was largely used up, although Lynne came back for a pared back spacey electronic version with Time (1981) that is still very appealing, the album yielding the futuristic retro classic Ticket to the Moon. Lynne being Lynne, he absorbed the musical zeitgeist of the time (listen to the Buggles-like Yours Truly 2095 – with the great line ‘She does the things you do but she’s an IBM’) and come up with something that is still very listenable today. Time tried to peer into an extraterrestrial electronic computerised future and really doesn’t do too badly at it.
In between the early days and the purple patch are Eldorado, with its front cover of the shoes from the Wizard of Oz and Face the Music, with its gruesome electric chair cover (what were they thinking??).
Eldorado (translucent yellow vinyl – sounds a bit crackly transferred to iTunes) is a rather ponderous mix of medieval and southern US frontier themes. Apart from the languidly brilliant I Can’t Get It Out of My Head, which always finds its way into the compilations, Mister Kingdom is an Out of the Blue rehearsal, the title track Eldorado a prelude to Shangri-la (A New World Record). Eldorado has that wonderfully ELO choral sweep, a lazy low key opening and an unabashed big finale with all the stops being pulled out.
Jeff Lynne buffed, polished, refined and added over the years. Early efforts were very raw – the cellos and the violins multi-tracked and multi-tracked, Jeff Lynne sounding as if he is singing from the room next door, Roy Wood’s horns that he later took with him to Wizzard (eventually leaving only that Christmas single that is only marginally less irritating than Merry Christmas Everybody).
Album number 5, Face the Music, the one before they became famous (in the UK at least) is getting near to perfect. The lush production is in full swing, adding a dreamy quality to the simplicity of tracks like One Summer Dream. Fire on High, the opening track, is stunning – a great ELO explosion. This album has the very commercial Strange Magic, the wonderful Waterfall and the homely ironic proto-Traveling Wilburys Down Home Town.
After Out of the Blue, for me Discovery was a huge disappointment. I have never listened to the whole album. I didn’t feel the need; in any case, 5 of the tracks were released as singles. The Diary of Horace Wimp has its charm, but Discovery is just a slightly more buffed and polished version of its predecessor with disco tones, having absorbed more of the musical trends of the time. It was OK having the singles as wallpaper – general radio and disco background, but I didn’t feel the need for the album in my collection. And I’m saying nothing about Xanadu. I think I dreamt that one anyway.
It was time to go backwards. A rather trendier friend of mine was pruning his vast collection (an only child, he never seemed to have pocket money problems), so he happily offloaded A New World Record. About 6 months after getting Out of the Blue for my 15th birthday, my aunt, who worked in a record shop somewhere in Hertfordshire, sent me The Light Shines On Volume 2. I remember the price label: £2.85. It had a selection of those interesting early tracks, including the all-time classic, Roll Over Beethoven.
A New World Record, with its embossed Wurlitzer logo (which reappears as the top of the Out of the Blue spaceship) brings the ELO concept together. Probably the album with the most perfect finale, you get the rock / classical thing (Rockaria! – with its operatic slip at the beginning allowing Lynne one of his musical jokes), the Beatles homage (Shangri-la), the New Age-y space thing (Mission – A New World Record).
A prelude to Out of the Blue. This had to be a double album (how else would you get a gatefold interior of the ELO spaceship?), although nit-pickers might say it is only just.
17 tracks, one side barely longer than 16 minutes long, including The Whale, which sits like a lump of cold porridge on Side 4. But it’s the complete package – right down to the minutiae of the exotic electronic instruments (what on earth was a ‘systec flanger’?), credits (‘Dance sequence by Spratley’s Dancing Academy featuring Bladys and Goreen Turvis’). And if you got it in limited edition blue vinyl (which I didn’t), it was the pinnacle of prog rock, beautifully produced and perfectly marketed. Rock traditions may have been exploding all around them (although it may not have seemed like it at the time, in the end rock turned out to be pretty nearly indestructible – interesting that after ELO Bev Bevan joined Black Sabbath) but ELO were just going to bring forward the finest of the old style – like a Bordeaux claret under an onslaught of New World wines. Lynne was savvy and creative enough to plug some of the new stuff in – so no medieval knights or old legends, but spaceships and cities.
Neatly sidestepping the pitfalls of a concept album by producing a short ‘concept side’ instead – going for the compact ‘concerto’ rather than the full blown symphony, starting off with stormy sound effects, lots of rain and finishing up with Mr Blue Sky, demonstrating the eternal obsession of the British with the weather.
A light touch infused with humour keeps a balance. Structurally, the double album gives Lynne the opportunity for four big openers (Turn to Stone, Night in the City, Standin’ in the Rain and Sweet is the Night) and four dramatic finales (Across the Border, Steppin’ Out, Mr Blue Sky and Wild West Hero), then working out what goes in the middle. Lyrically, the album remains firmly in the pop convention and the words are really just another line in the orchestration. No revolutions here. There is an internationalism about it – written in a chalet in Switzerland, recorded in Germany, artwork by a Japanese artist. Birmingham Blues may be an affectionate, if slightly patronising, tribute but it also clearly marks the distance Lynne has travelled since he grew up in the east of the city and despite the lyrics I doubt he ever seriously thought of going back there for good. Does the album’s final track, Wild West Hero betray a regret at just being a vastly successful record producer, singer and instrumentalist? Probably not.
The mix of self-expression and creativity in Jeff Lynne’s case is heavily skewed towards the latter. There is little that can be described as personal, other than his musical choices. But that’s what you get with the package – so I say just enjoy it.
With vinyl back in vogue, Lynne’s production techniques can show off again – you get a real warmth of sound from the stylus. My son bought me a blue vinyl version in a charity shop recently for 50p; it seems to be in almost mint condition and plays beautifully. It even has that long thin poster of the band folded into one of the sleeves.
The guy in the TV documentary sitting on the bench with his back to you strumming like a court jester does so with one of the richest back catalogues of any individual artist. Leaving aside his meticulous production for other artists (a touch too meticulous sometimes – they often ended up sounding like ELO) and the Traveling Wilburys (where he was able to indulge the jester urge – persuading a bunch of big names to make music just for the fun of it), Lynne used ELO to drive towards a work that may not have been revolutionary, but was peerlessly presented and remains a masterclass of its genre.
And I’m going to put Out of the Blue back on the turntable – just as soon as I can get both copies back from those thieving gnomes.
musicalduffer 