(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 6 December 2025 15:00, UK
Jeff Lynne was never going to release a track unless he felt it was ready for primetime.
As much as people like to think that he pulls some of the finest ELO melodies out of the air, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that turned him into one of the greatest musicians that the 1970s ever spat out. But when looking at the kind of music he made, it’s insane to think that there were some songs that Lynne was stumped by.
Then again, any artist seems to have their Achilles’ heel whenever they start working on their classics. John Lennon could never get his head around working on some of Paul McCartney’s more fruity compositions for The Beatles, and there was always bound to be a rub between The Rolling Stones when Mick Jagger kept pushing to get more commercial material out of the band at every single opportunity.
Even if Lynne didn’t have that particular problem when working with ELO, there were still a fair number of issues that were impossible to get over. The physical medium of the time was never going to allow those massive orchestras to go out on tour with the band, and even if they could afford to pay every single person for showing up, there was going to be a certain presence lost when they started kicking into the rock numbers and had everyone competing in the midrange to be heard.
Which probably explains why he felt it was best for him to close up shop after going on one too many underwhelming tours. He was always more comfortable in the studio anyway, but that offered its own set of challenges as well. No one could have pictured him making the same magic work for the surviving Beatles in the 1990s, but for Lynne, the biggest challenges usually came from when he was working on genres outside his wheelhouse.
Whereas working with George Harrison and Tom Petty was nothing but fun for him when he first began his production role, Long Wave is one of the more sophisticated entries in his catalogue. Not many would have pictured him going the sophisticated route of making an album of standards, but compared to the rock and roll masterpieces he made, there were tunes on the record that were even more complicated than his own orchestrations.
Most people would have had a history of working with this material, but Lynne felt that some of the tunes required him to pore over them endlessly, saying, “I literally had to listen to the recordings of all of the songs on Long Wave and learn all of these songs. It probably took 100 listens before I could actually understand the song, because of all of these big arrangements. When you get to where you have this tunnel hearing on, then you start listening to one instrument at a time.”
While listening to any song more than 100 times is enough to make someone absolutely sick of the tune, it wasn’t so much about trying to make Lynne numb to the melody or anything. Every single piece of the musical puzzle is supposed to be doing something, and when looking at everything from how the strings move to the way that the melody falls on top of the backing track, Lynne was spending those days taking notes so that he could recreate them perfectly.
Although he does take a few liberties with his arrangements here and there, it’s clear that Lynne wanted to make something more than a fluff album full of ‘granny music’. He clearly had an affinity for this kind of genre, and whether he knew it or not, there’s a chance that his history of working on one classic after another came from him subconsciously going back to how these tunes sounded.
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