The ELO song Jeff Lynne knew was destined to be a hit: “This is a classic”
Since their inception in 1970, Birmingham-born Electric Light Orchestra have helmed their fair share of hits. Driven by frontman Jeff Lynne, ELO effortlessly fused genres and delivered some of the most dance-worthy tracks of the 1970s, including the bouncy ‘Last Train to London’, the rocking ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, and their most iconic hit, the beloved ‘Mr. Blue Sky’. But there was one song Lynne instantly knew would be a hit, even after penning just a few notes.
Though it would never quite reach the same mammoth success as ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, ELO’s 1973 single ‘Showdown’ was one of Lynne’s favourite songs and one of his most certain hits. The track features swaying instrumentals and a guitar borrowed from Marc Bolan as Lynne sings of southern winds and rain all over the world.
Lynne first penned the track at his home in Birmingham, in his parents’ front room, as he recalled in a conversation with Rolling Stone. Though the strings often dominate the track, soaring above Lynne’s vocals and Bev Bevan’s percussion, it was the underlying guitar riff the songwriter wrote first which instantly convinced him the song would be a hit.
“I made the riff up and I was thrilled with it,” he recalled, “I knew it was going to be a hit even after I had just done a few notes of it. When we cut it the engineer said, ‘This is a classic.’ I was thrilled to bits.” Though Lynne and his engineer seemed sure of the song’s hit potential, the song never quite touched the legacy of their biggest songs.
While Lynne may not quite have correctly predicted the song’s success, it still remained one of his personal ELO top picks. “It’s one of my favorites,” he noted, “though the lyrics don’t mean anything, really. It’s just a story, a made-up scenario. A lot of people ask me what my songs mean and I have no idea. It means something different to me every time I sing it.”
This opinion is not limited to the songwriter; even John Lennon named the song as one of his favourites. “‘Showdown’ I thought was a great record and I was expecting it to be #1 but I don’t think UA [United Artists] got their fingers out and pushed it. And it’s a nice group – I call them ‘Son of Beatles’ – although they’re doing things we never did, obviously,” he once stated in a radio interview via Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon.
‘Showdown’ may not have reached the heights of ‘Mr. Blue Sky’, but it remains a classic hit and a demonstration of Lynne’s prowess over strings and riffs. Listen to the song Jeff Lynne “knew would be a hit” after just a few notes below.
