“There was no way”: The album Jeff Lynne thought could never be topped
An artist can normally be their own worst enemy once they’ve been around the block a couple of times. Even though many musicians can go on a run of perfect albums, every smash hit is another bar to clear whenever they return to the studio trying to make something equally as good. While Jeff Lynne could never claim to have any outright duds during Electric Light Orchestra’s development, he admitted that he would never match what he did on this massive album.
Then again, every ELO album felt like it was building to something in the mid-1970s. Since Lynne had been working with The Move before striking off on his own, it’s easy to see him working out the bugs on their first albums before they started getting mainstream hits like ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’.
Right after Eldorado, though, every single album seemed to have some magic thrown into it. Whether it was Lynne’s obsession with The Beatles or his symbiotic relationship with his bandmates, records like Face the Music and A New World Record took everything great about their sound and went beyond what anyone had thought possible, like the string sections on ‘Telephone Line’ or the idea of putting an operetta vocal break in the middle of ‘Rockaria!’.
While the bar was still high, Lynne found he had more than enough quality material for a double LP for Out of the Blue. Outside of having the traditional classical sections, this album is probably the closest anyone would ever come to getting that trip to the stars that Lynne always promised, especially on the third disc, where every song bleeds into each other as one continuous movement.
Although any would be thrilled to have that kind of album under their belt, it did feel like a final chapter of sorts. Lynne had hit the peak of what he could do with all of his bandmates, but once he was asked to follow a masterpiece, he knew that whatever he put out afterwards was going to look worse by comparison.
For Lynne, Out of the Blue was clearly his watershed moment, and despite moving on, he knew it couldn’t be equalled, saying, “There was no way of following that, but there were contracts to fulfil, so I was forced to do things I didn’t want to do, just because of signing bits of paper when you don’t know what you’re doing: Sign that? Oh yeah, of course, thank you! You can have 50 quid and all the brown ale you can drink. You don’t realise what you’re getting into. So it turned out I had to do another 93 albums for ELO!!!”
Still, that might be selling the later material a bit short as well. Sure, not every album set the world on fire like they did back in the day, but if it meant getting a handful of great tunes like ‘Last Train To London’ or the massive sing-along of ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, it was well worth it for Lynne to keep going.
And it’s not like people didn’t take notice, either, with Petty eventually stealing some cues from Lynne’s chord structures on songs like ‘Change of Heart’ before joining him in The Traveling Wilburys. While Lynne should be commended for never creating any stinkers throughout his career, it’s almost comforting knowing that some of his records weren’t as heartfelt as he thought they could have been.
