“I can do this”: the song that made Jeff Lynne form ELO
Any aspiring or even well-established musician will know just how difficult it is to cut your teeth in the industry. It takes many years of graft, often very little money, and a hell of a lot of talent to eventually make things work if you get lucky. Even though it may seem like a distant memory to him now, these same problems were once shared by one Jeff Lynne of ELO.
After spending four years in a “pretty odd band” by the name of Idle Race, Lynne was down on his luck and accepted an invitation from Roy Wood, who would later form part of ELO, to join his group called The Move. In Lynne’s eyes, it was a last-ditch effort to get his career going. He told Uncut in 2014: “I thought maybe it wasn’t going to happen. I joined as co-producer and co-singer, and we had quite a few hits. By then, I was already into recording things in little bits rather than in one go as a live session.”
It was this technique that led him to strike with his golden opportunity. “The idea for the Electric Light Orchestra happened around the same time. Roy and I would go to pubs and clubs in Birmingham and keep talking about having this group with strings. We finally figured out a way of doing it, and while we were making Message From The Country [The Move’s album], we started knocking out these little tunes, just the two of us.”
Clearly, ELO’s iconic sound began to take shape from the very start, even though Lynne admitted that initially, “It was a bit odd recording it, me and Roy playing it all ourselves with all these silly instruments: bassoons and stuff like that”. However, the heart of the band’s ethos has always been obvious in the sense that “It was fun and kind of wacky, a pseudo-classical pantomime horse.”
Lynne and Wood’s collaborative ingenuity then paid even further dividends when they conjured their first tune as ELO not long after. Lynne continued: “During that time, I wrote ‘10538 Overture’, which started as a track for The Move but became the first single for ELO. That was a Top 10 hit, and that changed my whole perspective. I thought, I can do this!”
It’s an inspiring backstory of determination and resilience, especially from a man who became a genre-defining face of his time. ELO then even managed to achieve the elusive feat of breaking into the pop mainstream with 1976’s New World Order, tracks of which Lynne himself claims are among the group’s “catchiest tunes”.
Not bad for someone who didn’t think he would ever make it big. It displays the tenacity of iconic rockstars and undoubtedly plays a huge role in enshrining their longevity – something which every up-and-coming artist could learn from. You never know where the next break will come from because if there’s anything Jeff Lynne’s career has shown, all it can involve is a leap of faith, some new ideas, and just one chance.
