(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Sat 11 October 2025 18:30, UK
There has been no stickler for perfection in rock and roll quite like Jeff Lynne.
As much as he may have been willing to work with whatever legend that was on the other side of the glass, the song was never officially done until he had an ample amount of tracks on and had everything finetuned to a high-polished sheen. But even for someone with that kind of track record, Lynne knew that there were times when things could go wrong.
But you’d hardly find any rough spots when listening to most of ELO’s catalogue. No one who would eventually go on to produce The Beatles gets there by being a merely passable producer, and looking through his greatest-hits record, there’s a reason why John Lennon had such an affinity for him. Here was a guy taking the Fab Four’s experimentation into the next generation, only with more theatrical flair this time around.
It’s not like Lynne was trying to deliberately make music sound weird. That was all Lennon’s job when he first started, but many of Lynne’s productions hardly had a note out of place. ‘Strange Magic’ had that kind of ethereal quality about it, and when the strings come in on tracks like ‘Livin’ Thing’, you can feel a certain rush of adrenaline that simply doesn’t happen if you have straight power chords.
Then again, one of the cool things about Lynne’s production is how everything is easily transposable to the guitar. A lot of what turns up on a few of the violin lines could have easily been typical rock and roll lead guitar breaks, but when played on the strings, it can feel like Lynne has taken out a pocket-sized orchestra and is noodling around on it just to see what he gets out of everything.
He may have pushed himself to the limits in the studio, but not every production was going to stand the test of time. There are bound to be moments where the ingenious ideas of the 1970s look incredibly dated, and when Lynne looked back on a few of his major hits, he remembered having a few abrasive reactions when the playback started.
Before remastering many of those original singles, he remembered it being a nightmare trying to sort through all of the tunes that sounded a bit off, saying, “I kept hearing the original versions on the radio or in films, thinking and I’d think to myself, ‘OooOoh, I don’t remember it sounding like that. That sounds very wooly. My, I could have done that better.” But listening to the re-recorded versions of his tunes, it’s shocking how well they actually translated to the modern day.
People can fawn over all of the fantastic arrangements and the lush layers of guitars, but the true testament to Lynne’s abilities is his voice. With decades of playing under his belt, his voice managed to sound a lot more full than almost any of his contemporaries, which would only become more clear when he tore through some of the more ballad-heavy portions of his catalogue like ‘Telephone Line’.
So even if the old versions aren’t necessarily Lynne’s favourite, they do offer perspective for diehards that want to hear both of them back to back. Neither of them are of any lesser quality because of the physical medium of the time, but when looking at where Lynne eventually took his tunes, a lot of the new versions back the classics feel like the garage-rock versions.
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