(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Sat 24 January 2026 16:30, UK
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Jeff Lynne called the shots in ELO.
Although it’s hard to tell who was doing what with an entire orchestra onstage, all you had to do was turn your attention to the afro-haired man with impeccable sunglasses whenever they performed songs like ‘Telephone Line’ to see an absolute master pulling music out of every musician onstage. But even if Lynne has become the most malevolent dictator of everything the band does, that wasn’t how he got his start.
If anything, his work with The Move was a lot more straight-ahead rock and roll than what he would ultimately become. He was definitely a fan of bands like The Beatles and The Stones, but since the strings hadn’t come in yet, there are a lot more tunes that stand out as decent blues rock and power pop jams from the time. But when he and Roy Wood decided to form the basis for their next project, they were going to need a whole lot more power once they came up with ‘10538 Overture’.
As if the classical-style didn’t give it away, having orchestral instruments in the mix was almost a no-brainer, but Lynne didn’t want to make baroque pop in the same way that other artists did. If you listen to the string lines of a lot of their classic tunes, all of them are basically the same kind of pentatonic licks that everyone starts out with on guitar, only transposed over to suit the violin and cellos instead.
It was certainly interesting for the time, but it was clear that Wood didn’t really want to stick around that long. It was clear that Lynne was coming into his own as a songwriter, and for the next decade and a half, every musician seemed like one different colour on the musical spectrum for him to play with. And while everyone was fine with following Lynne’s lead, it was bound to be a punch in the gut when he finally decided to fold the band in the late 1980s.
But you can’t really question Lynne’s line of thinking. They didn’t exactly have the same hits they had back in the day, and Lynne’s chance to work with giants like Tom Petty and George Harrison were almost too good to pass up. Then again, the rest of the band weren’t going to go back to working day jobs, and drummer Bev Bevan figured that he would try his hand at keeping the band going with ELO Part II.
It’s cheeky enough that he named the band after their sophomore record, but after Lynne heard about his drummer’s new outfit, he wanted to block them out of his memory as quickly as possible, saying, “He wants to dig it all up again. To me, it’s silly. At one point, I thought about suing him — I mean, I did write all the songs for ELO, except for one by Chuck Berry, and I produced them all. But in the end, I thought, well, why go to all the expense of two years in court? I decided it isn’t worth the bother. It’s nothing to do with me at all.”
And like so many other one-off bands like Creedence Clearwater Revisited, it’s not like Bevan was going to be filling the same stadiums as Lynne’s outfit. After all, the reason why Lynne quit touring was because he couldn’t match the sound of his records on the live stage, so bringing in a couple of random musicians to sing those songs without the main figure in the band was never going to work out.
It’s one thing for a band like Pink Floyd to carry on without Roger Waters, but ELO II is the equivalent of The Beatles deciding to call it a day and then having Ringo Starr decide to keep the band going without the rest of them. No matter how much someone might want it, some artists are irreplaceable, and there was no sense in anyone trying to match what Lynne did naturally with ELO.
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