(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Tue 24 February 2026 15:00, UK
There’s a certain degree of perfection that Jeff Lynne wanted on every single ELO project.
It’s not like he was trying to make every single song sound perfectly in tune by any stretch, but he did feel that anything that turned up on their records needed to have a lot more sheen to it than any average rock and roll song. He wanted to make the kind of music that The Beatles had only dreamed of back in the day, but sometimes that meant going a bit too far over the edge when making some of his masterpieces.
Granted, it’s not like anyone was exactly slowing Lynne down at the time, either. He and Roy Wood were the ones calling the shots every single time they made a record, and even when they started to make their first classics, it didn’t take long before Wood decided he was going to move on to something different. He wanted to make music that was more space-y, but Lynne found his love in creating the kind of pop tunes that he had loved as a kid.
While anyone could have called that “selling out” if they wanted to, that’s not exactly the case here. Lynne genuinely loved the kind of pop-flavoured classics that he heard out of his favourite bands, and crafting those tunes wasn’t going to be easy. He had to have the perfect hook to rope people in every single time he played, and it wasn’t until ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ that he actually felt like he was working with something that would become classic.
So after Eldorado, he figured there was no point in looking back. With every single record that would come out, he was starting to inch closer and closer to the kind of standards that he had heard out of his favourite records. ‘Mr Blue Sky’ couldn’t have been any more perfect if he had tried, but after working on albums like Out of the Blue, there was no other place to go but down afterwards.
I mean, think about it for a second. Here is a double record that has some of the greatest tunes that Lynne would ever write, and while the next few albums did marginal success, there was never a chance that anyone was going to knock what he had already done. Those records from the late 1970s were untouchable, and even Lynne seemed to realise that there was no point in him trying to make something different.
Singles like ‘Last Train to London’ and ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ were still fine for what they were, but Lynne remembered sleepwalking through some of the later albums once he hit his peak, saying, “There was no way of following [Out of the Blue], but there were contracts to fulfil, so I was forced to do things I didn’t want to do, just because of signing bits of paper when you don’t know what you’re doing: Sign that? Oh yeah, of course, thank you! You can have 50 quid and all the brown ale you can drink. You don’t realise what you’re getting into.”
And to his credit, Lynne seemed to find a way to close up shop on ELO at the exact right time. It might not have been fair to the rest of his bandmates to see him reach the end of the road and decide that he didn’t want to play that kind of music anymore, but his time was much better served working among his friends, both as a songwriter with Tom Petty or working on perfecting the final Beatles songs for the Anthology project.
So while it was disheartening knowing that Out of the Blue was his peak, it’s better for Lynne to keep making music that he wanted rather than give in to the pressure that he had around him. Most people would have decided to hang the whole thing up right then and there, but Lynne is the ultimate example of someone being a lot more sensible with what they’re doing before they decide to officially walk away.