‘Glass Onion’: The Beatles classic Jeff Lynne heard before anyone else
Not many people have managed to make a career out of Beatles fan quite like Jeff Lynne has. Even though he has spent years carving out his own legacy in Electric Light Orchestra, Lynne has never shied away from having a few Fab touches seeping into his sound whenever the time calls for it. While he did have a hand in resurrecting some of the best reunion singles ever made in ‘Free As a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, he was still on the ground floor when the band were still active in the 1960s.
But when looking at ELO’s career going forward, it feels like Lynne was prepared to make his entire sound modelled after tunes like ‘I Am the Walrus’. He did add his unique sonic touches to everything, but listening to tracks like ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ or ‘Mr Blue Sky’, everything from the way the guitars are produced to the crisp attention to detail in the vocals are descended from the Fab Four.
Before he had started working with a string section, Lynne had already been going through various bands when gigging through London. Despite his most famous band being The Move before he donned his signature shades, he was already starting to get his first taste of fame working in The Idle Race. But even at this point, he wasn’t prepared to get the chance to work in Abbey Road Studios.
At this point, the studio had already felt like hallowed ground, and despite its most popular clients still being the biggest band in the world, some of the tangential acts working there were also putting out classics themselves, like Pink Floyd working on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn during the same time The Beatles were working on Sgt Pepper.
By the time Lynne got to work there with The Idle Race, the band were already deep into production on The White Album. Although most people would have been banging down the door trying to hear what any new Beatles music was going to sound like, Lynne remembered being taken into a room and seeing George Martin putting the finishing touches on one of their most psychedelic tunes.
When recalling that time, Lynne remembered the orchestra warming up for what became ‘Glass Onion’, saying, “When I was recording with the Idle Race in London in 1968, a friend of our engineer phoned the studio to say he was working on a Beatles session at Abbey Road. He told us we could go down there to have a look if we wanted. I got invited into Studio 2, where John and George were in the control room. Down below, in the actual studio, George Martin was hurling himself around this pedestal, conducting the string section for ‘Glass Onion’. I was blown away. Nobody had heard it yet, but there I was in Abbey Road, actually listening to it being made.”
And without even hearing the finished version, there’s a good chance that ‘Glass Onion’ had a massive impact on Lynne without even realising it. Listening to how the string arrangement at the end of the song ends things off on a strange note, it’s not that far of a leap to think that Lynne took the entire format for that sort of record and channelled that into the complex string arrangements he’d put on tunes like ‘Tightrope’.
But even if he didn’t make another note of music afterwards, Lynne could have probably died happy seeing one of his idols playing a classic right in front of him. Others might revel in meeting their idols, but this might as well have been like watching a god perform a miracle in front of your eyes.
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