(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Sat 28 March 2026 18:00, UK
Everything that Jeff Lynne ever made was always in the service of making great pop music.
Although the typical tropes of pop had become more than a little bit cliche by the time that Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd started to climb the album charts, Lynne was always keen to follow in the Beatles’ footsteps and make the kind of music that landed on that single perfect melody every time he went into the studio. It took him a long time to get those massive hits, but it turned out that Lynne wasn’t in love with every single step of the journey before making hits like ‘Mr Blue Sky’.
But when talking about Lynne, every one of his old bands was a new step towards pop perfection. The Move were the typical power pop outfit that the British invasion was used to by the time they debuted, but when he got the chance to sit in on one of the Fab Four’s recording sessions, he was getting an education. He was studying every single thing that went into one of their songs, which probably explains why he was so good at those ‘I Am the Walrus’-style musical transitions.
If Lynne was going to become one of the biggest writers in the world, he was going to need to call his own shots. He would have been happy in The Move for the rest of his life, but when he and Roy Wood started ELO, the world was their oyster when it came to making whatever music they wanted. They could throw in as many bells and whistles as they wanted, and ‘10538 Overture’ is as clear a sign as any that Lynne was turning over a new leaf with his songwriting.
Then again, there was definitely a little bit of fluff in there as well. As much as Lynne liked the idea of making the best pop songs that he could, Wood’s vision to bring in more classical influences never sat well with him. He didn’t sign up to be in a progressive rock band for the rest of his life, and even when working on those first few albums, having songs that stretched well past the ten-minute mark wasn’t going to do him many favours when he wanted to write tunes like ‘Showdown’.
And if ‘Kuiama’ was already a bold leap forward, the band’s debut album had a lot more musical masturbation than Lynne remembered. By the time he had begun working on albums like A New World Record, he felt that songs like ‘First Movement’ started them off sounding like one of the most pretentious bands in the world before anyone had even heard a note of their music.
He was still proud to have come up with the arrangements, but Lynne figured that he would have much more fun trying to write pop songs later in life, saying, “When we first started ELO, there was a lot of pretentiousness with the music. I was doing stuff that I didn’t really want to do but doing it all the same. I thought I should do it because it was cool, man. It was experimental, but there was no direction to it.” Once he started following his muse, though, there was no limit to where he could go.
Aside from being one of the greatest hitmakers of his generation, the reason why the former Beatles saw something in him had a lot more to do with how he structured some of his pop songs. He didn’t forget all the lessons he learned from arranging, but it was now all about packaging them in just the right way to suit the song, whether that was a grand orchestra on Out of the Blue, helping George Harrison layer everything for Cloud Nine, or managing to hold his own when producing Roy Orbison’s parts in the Traveling Wilburys.
There was a lot of ground that Lynne could cover in the classical field, but ‘Rockaria’ feels like a line in the sand for what his career was going to be. He had spent years trying to be one of the most accomplished classical rockers, but it turns out when you lean into the rock and roll side, there’s a lot more ground to cover.
