“Too drunk to notice”: The terrible gig that helped form ELO
Live performance has always been an intrinsic part of rock and roll music, but the progressive rock era took the art of concerts to entirely new heights. From extensive light shows to bizarre onstage theatrics, the prog-rock era was synonymous with grandiose live performances. As one of the biggest groups to emerge from that era of musical history, Jeff Lynne and ELO have been noted for their incredible live performances countless times over the decades, despite their early shows being somewhat disastrous.
It takes any band a while to find their feet, but the Electric Light Orchestra took a particularly long time to get together. The band’s earliest origins go back to 1968 when Roy Wood – then of the band The Move – decided to form a new group. It soon became clear that Wood’s manifesto of creating rock music using elements of classical music and instrumentation could not be completed alone. However, it took Wood nearly two years to convince Jeff Lynne – who had been with The Idle Race at the time – to join this defiant new band.
So, from the idea entering Wood’s head to ELO releasing their first single, it took four years to get the band together. Even then, the ambitious nature of the project meant that the intricate sounds of the debut single ‘10538 Overture’ were very difficult to translate onto the stage. As their career progressed, with the venues getting bigger and concert technology advancing at a rapid rate, these issues soon went away. However, you can imagine the difficulty in trying to include orchestral instruments in a small-capacity venue in those early years.
The band’s inaugural concert happened on April 16th, 1972, at the Greyhound Pub in Croydon, a few months prior to their debut single, which immediately established the band in England’s musical mainstream. Inevitably, a pub setting was an odd place for Jeff Lynne and company to emerge on stage with, among other things, a French horn, three cellos, and a violin, so it is not surprising that the band’s first concert was a shambles.
Seemingly, though, the gig’s disastrous nature arose not only from the small confines of the Surrey pub but also from the fact that ELO themselves were incredibly intoxicated. Lynne later reflected on that first show, revealing, “I was probably too drunk to notice [how bad it was].” Admittedly, this might have worked in Lynne’s favour, as it meant the band’s weak reception did not particularly dishearten him during those early performances.
“In those days, you couldn’t hear anything because there was no way of amplifying the cellos and stuff,” the songwriter explained. “So we used to have this habit of going down the pub for quite a long time before we went on – it numbed the pain a bit.” The idea of a drunken gaggle of strange-looking musicians, all of whom were incredibly drunk, emerging onto a pub stage with multiple cellos is certainly an uncommon origin story for one of the biggest bands in British music history, but, luckily, their performances quickly improved.
With their debut single quickly reaching number nine in the UK singles chart upon its 1972 release, ELO found themselves elevated from the pub stages of Croydon to grand theatres and, eventually, arenas all over the world. It didn’t take long, therefore, before Lynne’s need to numb the pain prior to playing a show became superfluous.
Of course, in the years that followed their first-ever live performance, ELO rose to become one of the UK’s greatest musical exports and were particularly noted for their live performances. Lynne and ELO have been playing to sold-out arenas and stadiums for decades, but they owe a lot to those early experiences and that first night at the Greyhound Pub in Croydon.
