The 1975 Electric Light Orchestra song Jeff Lynne wrote in “a matter of minutes”
Birmingham has a great deal to be proud of, from its impressive canal system to Ozzy Osbourne and his formative metal group Black Sabbath. Undoubtedly challenging these two assets for the Brummie throne is Jeff Lynne, the robust frontman of Electric Light Orchestra – or ELO, to save our breath.
Lynne began his musical career in 1963, aged just 16. His early bands, The Andicaps and The Chads, played classic rock ‘n’ roll music and were heavily inspired by the British Invasion and its biggest proponents, The Beatles.
Little did Lynne know then, but his subsequent musical journey would find him sharing stage and studio with not only George Harrison but Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison as a member of Traveling Wilburys.
Following a mildly successful run fronting The Idle Race through the late ’60s, Lynne accepted an offer from Roy Wood to join The Move. After contributing to the popular psych-pop band’s final two albums, Lynne began to focus on ELO, his new side project with Wood, which eventually took centre stage.
Starting with 1971’s eponymous debut, ELO set out to bring a more progressive yet accessible edge to rock music, a mission that was well and truly accomplished by the end of the decade. With eight successful studio albums over this period, ELO ravaged the charts with groovy hits like ‘Livin’ Thing, ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’, ‘Turn to Stone’ and ‘Mr. Blue Sky’.
In the middle of the decade, Lynne and his band treated fans to Face the Music, their fifth studio album and home to the hit singles, ‘Strange Magic’ and ‘Evil Woman’. The latter became the band’s first worldwide hit, penetrating the top 40 across a handful of countries. Despite being regarded as one of ELO’s finest creations, Lynne admitted to a very brief and relatively effortless writing process.
That spontaneity became part of what made ‘Evil Woman’ so effective. Rather than being overworked or meticulously refined, the track carried a natural immediacy, with Lynne trusting his instincts in a way that allowed the melody and structure to fall into place almost effortlessly. It stood in contrast to the more layered and time-intensive approach that often defined ELO’s sound.
In hindsight, that quick burst of creativity delivered exactly what the album needed. While much of Face the Music leaned into experimentation and atmosphere, ‘Evil Woman’ provided a direct, accessible centrepiece, proving that sometimes the simplest ideas, executed with confidence, can have the most lasting impact.
Pinching a little inspiration from The Beatles’ 1967 song ‘Fixing a Hole’ for the line, “There’s a hole in my head where the rain comes in,” Lynne claims to have crafted the words and lyrics in no more than half an hour.
“I wrote this in a matter of minutes,” the Birmingham rocker told Rolling Stone in 2016. “The rest of the album [Face the Music] was done. I listened to it and thought, ‘There’s not a good single.’ So I sent the band out to a game of football and made up ‘Evil Woman’ on the spot. The first three chords came right to me. It was the quickest thing I’d ever done. We kept it slick and cool, kind of like an R&B song. It was kind of a posh one for me, with all the big piano solos and the string arrangement. It was inspired by a certain woman, but I can’t say who. She’s appeared a few times in my songs.”
“Playing concerts in those days wasn’t fun,” he added. “The sound was always bad, and we were still playing theatres and town halls, the occasional dance hall. After ‘Evil Woman’, we got more gigs, but it didn’t change my life all that much. You can’t buy a palace or anything after just one hit.”
Listen to ELO’s ‘Evil Woman’ below.
