When George Martin blessed a classic ELO song: “You’ve got a hit there”
Any comparisons between ELO and The Beatles are practically compliments as far as Jeff Lynne is concerned. From the minute that he started his extraterrestrial rock and roll project, he worshipped the recordings of the Fab Four, and the chance to work alongside any of them in any capacity would have been the equivalent of him living out his childhood fantasies. While Lynne had the good fortune of working with three of The Beatles during his lifetime, he could have been happy simply with getting approval from their production mastermind, George Martin.
As much as the Fab Four were important in crafting many of their classics, the ‘Fifth Beatle’ was equally as responsible for making them what they were. None of the lads were the most proficient studio technicians in the world, and since they didn’t know how to properly read sheet music, Martin was the one who made those glorious strings from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ come to life and experimented with different studio techniques to get John Lennon’s fantastic vocal on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
So for Lynne, studying Beatles recordings was the equivalent of musical homework at the time. He had looked at what Martin had created and began making something totally new out of it. Looking at his own catalogue, everything from ‘Mr Blue Sky’ to ‘Can’t Get It Out of My Head’ took everything that was great about those 1960s songs and modernised them for the new decade.
That’s not even limited to Lynne’s work with ELO, either. There’s a reason why he was chosen to lead the production of The Beatles Anthology when Martin had to step aside, and looking at the kind of musical flourishes on a song like George Harrison’s ‘When We Was Fab’, it is clear that he knew what made the band’s recordings work. He knew everything from ‘She Loves You’ to ‘I Am the Walrus’ like the back of his hand, but Martin realised he was a master before ELO fully fell to Earth.
The first handful of albums Lynne had been working on after his break from The Move were far more indebted to space rock in the vein of Pink Floyd. However, after hearing their version of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Martin sensed they were onto something, with bassist Mike de Albuquerque recalling, “When his George-ship walked into our studio and accepted an invitation to listen to a version of something he cut a long time earlier, it was very exciting. He listened like a professor would, nodded appreciatively and said quietly, ‘I think you’ve got a hit there, chaps’. Which was very exciting for everyone—and he was right!”
Which is really saying something considering Martin’s penchant for other genres outside of rock. The producer could have easily done away with rock music and moved to orchestration in his later years, but since he had a knack for making rock and roll sound fantastic, he was always kind enough to be the musical godfather, giving some young bands a hand with what they were working on.
If any song piqued Martin’s interest, it had to be high praise, considering the bar he had. Aside from The Beatles and eventually working on some of McCartney’s solo work, some of his most high-profile collaborations came from working with people like Elton John and Jeff Beck, so getting this kind of approval would have been like a musical prophet sanctifying the tape they were working on.
But that kind of adulation was never how the producer saw himself; he was simply someone trying to get the best sound that he could on tape. But looking at where Lynne had taken his music, his idol had created a small army of kids who wanted to make sure their songs sounded as perfect as the Fab Four, whenever they could.
