“I got away with it”: the album Jeff Lynne considered a massive step forward
Concept albums are almost always tricky to master. Unless a band or musician has a fully realised artistic vision, especially with the direction they intend to take with the record, the idea of mastering a concept album almost always falls flat. Before Jeff Lynne earned widespread acclaim with Electric Light Orchestra’s 1977 masterpiece Out of the Blue, he experimented with more ambitious works.
Since his early days, Lynne has probably taken every creative approach you could likely think of as an artist. From creating in a more traditional manner to leaning into collaboration and prioritising intuition and spontaneity, Lynne has largely been guided by a mix of his own instincts and the ideas of those around him. He has worked with the best, selected as worthy by many in his path because of his versatility and ability to enhance any project with his unique touch.
Even before accruing such an impressive resume, Electric Light Orchestra were viewed as one of the most innovative and endearing pop groups of their time, earning comparisons to acts like The Beatles. Even John Lennon himself once described Lynne’s work as “Son of Beatles”, namely due to Lynne’s ability to recapture the energetic and progressive spirit embodied by the band members themselves.
Along with Lennon, Paul McCartney also commented on the similarities. The moment Lynne first met McCartney, one of the first things he said was,”‘Mr Blue Sky?’ I know where you got that riff from,” the former Beatle recalled. Lynne added: “He didn’t mince words. He thought I took it from the middle of ‘A Day in the Life’. But we became great pals.” However, Lynne didn’t just earn his name by masquerading as a new iteration of the Fab Four; he also had the kind of innate ability to enhance music that others merely aspired to.
While countless projects prove this, including his work on George Harrison’s Cloud Nine and the endless ways he sought to make The Traveling Wilburys the best possible group they could be, his immense ambition can be single-handedly condensed to the existence of one record: Eldorado. Appearing in 1974, before his major break, Eldorado was a concept album about a character who wanders into different dreamlike worlds to escape his disillusionment with reality. Interestingly, Lynne had already conceived of the idea before he started making any of the music.
With a fully realised idea ready to be transformed into a record, Lynne had already achieved what many concept writers strive for: knowing exactly what they want to write about and how they want to execute it. As he once recalled, while attempting such a meticulous project seemed “scary,” it was also “a lot of fun to do” because it almost exuded him naturally. All he had to do was add lyrics.
“‘Concept’ usually implies lots of boredom, but I think Eldorado is a bit above that,” he told Uncut. Adding: “I think it stands up as a good pop album. I just sat down and had this idea: the album would open with this bloke talking about a place, and then it would drift into a scenario of this daydreaming guy. That was all it was about. It came to me pretty much fully formed – a guy who keeps having dreams about different things.”
Writing the songs at his parents’ house, he described the process as “a big step” because it also involved a “30-piece string section, a choir, a ten-piece brass and woodwind section.” In his words, he wasn’t “experienced enough” to know exactly what to do, but his ambition, drive, and intuition enabled him to pull it off, likely mainly due to the fact that he had already come into the arena knowing exactly what he wanted.
