The 1977 song Jeff Lynne will always regret singing: “It’s not any good”
Jeff Lynne wasn’t one to settle for simply good enough when working in the studio.
He was a sonic wizard who wanted to make music that would make his idols proud, so there was no way that he was going to make the same kind of ho-hum rock and roll song that everyone else was known for making. What he was doing needed to be bigger, especially since he had an orchestra behind him, but there were a few times when he didn’t seem to meet the moment as he should have.
But that’s not necessarily his fault half the time, either. What he was doing was light years ahead of what the typical stage setup was made for, and unless he played only classical concert halls, there was no way that he was going to be making the same sounds that he did on the record. He was playing massive stadiums, and that didn’t exactly accommodate a massive string section all that well.
Even when making beautiful songs like ‘Mr Blue Sky’, Lynne felt that he would have done without going on the road altogether. He didn’t like the idea of making the same trek across the world playing a half-hearted version of what they were doing in the studio, and when you listen to Out of the Blue, you can really hear why. Not even Queen would have been adding this many layers onto their tunes, and Lynne knew that it was better for him to retire from the road like The Beatles had done before him.
Then again, Out of the Blue is one of the few records that has absolutely everything and the kitchen sink added into it. No one was used to making music that sounded this gargantuan every single time they made a record, but the song ‘Steppin’ Out’ did have a few asterisks next to it as well. Lynne knew that he had outdone himself to a certain degree, but he figured that one song really needed tightening up.
Which probably explains why he ended up recording a lot of his old tunes all over again in his twilight years. In his mind, there was a lot of ground that he didn’t get to cover when he didn’t have the right technology at his disposal at the time, and if he was going to make music that had more of a bite to it, he was going to need to do better than the throwaway version that ended up on the original album.
As far as he could tell, he missed out on what the original was supposed to be on the first one, saying, “There’s one song I re-recorded called ‘Steppin’ Out’, which I really messed up on the original, on Out Of The Blue. I can’t even listen to the song, on that record, cos of the vocal.”
“It’s just so flimsy. It’s not even thrown-away, it’s just not any good. So I wanted to sing it properly, nice and close to the mic, so that it actually did say what I wanted it to say, at last.”
Jeff Lynne
And while it does sound fixed to a certain degree, the real star of the show isn’t even the production; it’s Lynne’s voice. The fact that he could preserve his instrument for that long is almost unheard of in the industry, and when he ended up making some of his newer renditions of his classic songs in his studio, it’s strange to hear him do stripped-down versions of tunes like ‘Telephone Line’ and singing them in a higher key than he did the first time.
Most singers are usually only working with what they have by the time that they reach middle age, but Lynne wasn’t yet ready to throw in the towel. He knew that his songs needed to sound perfect, and if he didn’t have the right resources available to him back in the 1970s, he was willing to wait until he had everything laid out for him.
