The ELO song Jeff Lynne listened to 1000 times: “It was pretty good”
Jeff Lynne didn’t set out to become one of the best pop songwriters in the world when he first put together ELO.
He was already learning the tools of the trade when he first started making music with The Move, but it was clear that he needed to have more of a say in what he wanted to do when he started branching out into more extravagant music. But when he found those pieces of magic scattered throughout the band’s career, it was bound to stick with him for days afterwards.
Every single person who has ever put on one of their records could probably tell you where they were when they first heard tunes like ‘Telephone Line’ and ‘Livin’ Thing’, but Lynne never took a second for granted whenever he made a new record. He had a high mantle to live up to if he was going to become one of the biggest songwriters in the world, but ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ took all of those lessons that The Beatles had taught him and spit them out to sound completely different when he released it to the public.
But it turned out that Lynne’s love of top 40 music wasn’t what it was supposed to be. He and Roy Wood had started ELO as a much more avant-garde-style band than what they ultimately turned into, and when looking through many of their classics from their early period, there was a much more classical edge to what they were doing than what you would find in a song like ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’.
They were picking up where the experimental Beatles had left off back in the day, and Lynne was going to do everything within his power to make something a lot more extravagant than generic pop music. And once he hit upon the band’s debut album with ‘10538 Overture’, he realised that he had the perfect balance of what he wanted his band to be: pop songwriting with a classical scope.
The arrangements were everything you would have expected out of a finely crafted symphony, but when you look at Lynne’s melody, it wasn’t that far removed from what his idols had been doing years before. He wanted the chance to make the best songs that he knew how to make, and when he realised that he might have a future making this kind of music, he couldn’t describe the euphoria of being able to have a hit song of his own.
This was the start of the next phase of his career, and when he finally landed on the right sound, he remembered being utterly delirious when he first got the finished tune, saying, “They put this cello on it and it was totally amazing. We played it probably 8000 times in the van and it drove everybody else bonkers, because we played it nonstop. We got a bit carried away, but it was pretty good.”
Then again, if anyone managed to write that kind of song on a whim, they would have been happy not to write anything else throughout their career. Lynne and Roy Wood had finally cracked the code for what the band was going to be, and even though they did get more than a little bit pretentious on some of their earlier records, it was easy to see them slowly inching towards what they would become on ‘10538’.
The bones of classic rock were still in there somewhere, but there was a lot more room for him to work on stuff that no one had ever thought of before. The Beatles may not have been able to push themselves as far in the 1970s now that they were split up, but Lynne now had his vision of covering the ground that his idols weren’t able to do when they were together.
