The one album Jeff Lynne said went too far: “Where not to go”
There didn’t seem to be a limit on where Jeff Lynne could go whenever he started leading Electric Light Orchestra.
He and Roy Wood may have started everything when the band emerged from the ashes of The Move, but it was only a matter of time before Lynne started to interweave some of his favourite Beatles moves into his songs every single time he started working on one of his hits. He knew that was after a sound, and he knew how to get it, but that didn’t mean that every single one of their albums was the most perfect version of what he had in his head.
If anything, it took the rest of the world years to understand what they were on about until ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’ came out. Lynne was making music that sounded like it was coming from the other side of the world, but when you have that many bells and whistles in one album, there comes a point where you need to start peeling things back and do justice to the song rather than throwing in everything but the kitchen sink.
That’s not to say that Lynne needed to go full-on garage rock or anything, but when you listen to A New World Record, he did understand what it meant to get a more subdued approach out of his songs. ‘Tightrope’ was the extravagant opening that everyone would have killed to see in a live setting, but ‘Rockaria’ was as by-the-numbers rock and roll as they would ever get, and even a song like ‘Mission’ does a far greater balance of every single piece of the band throughout its runtime.
But that’s not what you were getting in the early part of Lynne’s career. He was already looking to wow people right out of the gate on songs like ‘10538 Overture’, but ELO 2 was where he threw every crazy idea he had into the mix. John Lennon had already talked about ELO doing everything they could to copy The Beatles, but even the Fab Four wouldn’t have been this blatant about throwing everything they could into a song, especially when stretching ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ out for over ten minutes.
The whole thing sounds great from a sonic standpoint, but even Lynne had to admit that he started to wonder if he had gone too far trying to outmatch everyone, saying, “Some of the songs are a bit longer than they might be. [It was] all very experimental and sometimes a bit over the top. … It taught me a bit about where to go musically and where not to go.” Even if it was a failed experiment in a lot of ways, it did at least point Lynne in the right direction when making his next albums.
The orchestral touches were all still there on On The Third Day, but when listening to a song like ‘Showdown’, he was clearly honing in on something that was more pop-centric than what he was used to. And since he knew how to take things away, that ended up working wonders when he began his production career with George Harrison. ‘The Quiet Beatle’ didn’t need bells and whistles on his tunes, and when he started working with Tom Petty and the Traveling Wilburys, Lynne managed to create a sound that made it feel like everyone was in the room playing together.
He did end up putting his Beatles fixation to good use when working on the Anthology project, but when you look at the way that he sculpted a lot of his best work, it was about being a bit more subtle during every song. A song like ‘Kuiama’ took everything to the nth degree, but even if ‘Free Fallin’ didn’t have that massive wall of sound, you could hear Lynne slowly painting a sonic picture underneath Petty’s lyrics the whole time.
He might have needed to learn from his mistakes a few times to realise where he was going, but it was all part of the learning experience for him. The Eagles didn’t knock it out of the park on their first releases, and all it took was a little more time for him to settle on the right groove every time he made a pop record.
