How a hay bale crushed Electric Light Orchestra’s Mike Edwards: “A freak incident”
Any musician is going to hope that they can bow out gracefully. Even though many artists never know when their time to face mortality will be, everyone usually can only dream of being able to close the door on their legacy, like Leonard Cohen did or David Bowie towards the end of their own journeys on this Earth. In the case of Electric Light Orchestra’s Mike Edwards, though, his passing has gone down as one of the most shocking tragic accidents in popular music.
Then again, if we had to focus on everyone remotely connected with Jeff Lynne’s rock and roll orchestra, we would be here all day. While it was always a collaborative process, Lynne used the string players the same way a painter uses paints, usually looking for the exact right kind of cello line to fit with a section or letting the orchestra build to a swell before everything explodes on a tune like ‘Tightrope’.
And it’s not like Edwards didn’t know his stuff, either. Compared to every other rock band, the violinist was inspired by everything besides traditional rock and roll, whether that meant playing jazz on his cello or playing the kind of music that felt ripped straight out of a Medieval Times restaurant.
Once he got into the band, though, he seemed to take all his lessons and apply them to a rock and roll context. Whereas the latter half of ELO’s career had the strings playing the same kind of pentatonic runs that you’d expect out of a guitar player, Edwards turned everything on its head by making ‘10538 Overture’ into one of the best examples of baroque pop music ever conceived.
There are even pieces of ELO’s career that are more Edwards’s handiwork than Lynne’s. Listening back to a song like ‘Showdown’, most of the breakdown section comes from Edwards spending a day in the studio with his cello, constantly overdubbing different parts onto everything until he had this tapestry of sound.
When he left the group in 1975, Edwards seemed content to leave rock and roll behind. Even though he had settled into life as a music teacher, he met his demise when a bail of hay collided with a van he was driving in 2010, crushing him to death. Even though he tried to swerve away from everything, reports from the time labelled his death as a “farm accident”, saying, “It would appear to be a freak incident.”
While Lynne did pay tribute to Edwards online, the world lost a vital part of ELO’s early sound. Outside of being one of the most engaging people onstage, Edwards was the one to truly turn his instrument into a spectacle when he played, including taking an orange and playing his cello with it instead of a traditional bow.
So, while that long stretch of road and a giant hay bail marked Edwards’s demise, his contributions proved that he was more than a fly-by-night player. He was the equivalent of Jimi Hendrix-style showmanship on his cello.
