“Disappointing”: the 2001 album that Jeff Lynne still laments
Every band has a handful of records that seem to miss the mark ever so slightly. As Jeff Lynne knows all too well, sometimes, it is even just down to timing and chance.
People can try their best to put songs in a decent order or have every track speak to each other throughout an album, but it’s anyone’s guess whether it will actually work when it gets into the living rooms of fans worldwide. As Billy Joel once explained, he writes the music, but he’s never been any good at picking his own hits. It seems he is far from alone on this front.
Jeff Lynne may have already been interested in moving past the rock star, hit-driven stage of his life in 2001, but when Electric Light Orchestra came back together to create Zoom, he admitted being just a little bit disheartened when everything started falling apart.
Because, really, what else was needed when Lynne was at the table? He had already become the glorified frontman of the group, and even if he didn’t play every single instrument on the record, everything was meticulously crafted with his vision in mind from the moment he began working on classics like A New World Record and Out of the Blue.
There’s more than one way to create an ELO album, though, and the loss of every original band member aside from Richard Tandy was bound to leave a gaping hole in their sound. Also, since Bev Bevan had left the name to Lynne, it quickly became a Jeff Lynne solo outfit that happened to have all the licensing rights to his old group once Zoom landed on the horizon.
It’s not like Lynne had lost his touch in the dormant years after Bevan’s departure. He had spent all that time honing his craft behind the board, and his collaborations with George Harrison and Tom Petty had given him a new lease on life as a producer. And no matter how humble he seemed, there’s nothing better for a rock producer to put on their resumé than claiming to resurrect three songs by The Beatles.
Coming off of their last few albums, though, Zoom felt a bit lacklustre for the fans. It’s not that the band sounded any different, but it was clear that Lynne had settled into a producer’s role as a collaborator, so now, without all of his bandmates at his disposal, it’s hard to tell if the problems are coming from the new players contributing their own work or Lynne taking charge a little bit too much.
Despite being proud of the record, Lynne remembered being unpleasantly surprised by the album’s reception, telling Uncut, “I just fancied making a record. I had six or seven songs ready to go, and it was just something I felt like doing at the time. I kept it pretty straight.”
He continued, “There wasn’t many gimmicks in it, or odd twists and turns. I suppose it was a bit disappointing that it didn’t do better, but a lot of people like it. I get lots of nice things said about Zoom.”
It had been 15 years since the last ELO LP, but the singles had failed to garner the enthusiasm that you might expect. It debuted at 34th in the UK album charts and a measly 94th in the US. That’s very far from a hit. Given the sincerity with which Lynne had approached it, he still lamented its lack of success years later. It felt like a slight.
If you listen to the record without the typical ELO history behind it, it’s still a fun listen nonetheless. Lynne already had one great solo album under his belt in Armchair Theatre, and a lot of the great moments here seem to pick up where that left off, even with a few traces of the Traveling Wilburys being left over in the way that he wrote the melodies.
Zoom is probably not going to replace copies of Face the Music in fans’ record collections, but it’s far from the absolute travesty that most people take it for. Lynne just wanted to see what would happen with a modern version of his old band, and even without all of the familiar faces, he could create symphonies as good as what he made in his prime.
Perhaps that was part of the problem: it was 15 years down the line and Zoom offered up ‘more of the same’ but newer. Now, divorced from the expectation that led up to it, that makes the LP a fine listen, but upon the release it felt somewhat flat to the public, and brutally sore to the curly-haired singer behind it.
