Credit: Far Out / Jeff Lynne
Mon 14 September 2026 16:00, UK
There was no way for Jeff Lynne to anticipate the kind of career that he would have had when he was starting out.
He was nothing but a humble rock and roll singer who wanted the chance to live up to the dreams that he had as a kid, and yet his work with ELO has become the soundtrack for what all great pop rock was supposed to sound like every single time he made one of his records. That would have been enough for any rock star to be happy for the rest of their lives, but Lynne had a lot more ahead of him when he found the right friends to hang out with behind the scenes.
If you’ve listened to the guy’s music for more than two seconds, you already know that Lynne is a fairly big Beatles fan, but there was no reference point for what he could do when he started working with George Harrison. The ‘Quiet One’ had been one of the biggest fans of Lynne’s brand of pop music, and he felt that he was going to be the guy who could get him back in everyone’s good graces all over again.
Harrison was more than a little bit tired of the pop machine by the time he made Gone Troppo, but Cloud Nine at least made a lot more sense for him as a pop hitmaker. No one expected him to be one of the biggest stars in the world all over again, but with a hit like ‘Got My Mind Set On You’ and ‘When We Was Fab’, Lynne was helping to remind everyone of the kind of standards that his favourite band set when they were still together.
That would have been enough for the rest of his career, but in between that and eventually working on The Beatles Anthology, the Traveling Wilburys were the kind of band that no one would have anticipated working so well. The whole thing felt like a vision when Lynne and Harrison were talking about starting a band, but the fact that they actually made a record is one of the greatest happy accidents in the music industry.
‘Handle With Care’ was the kind of tune that would have made for a decent one-off single, but the fact that Lynne could hang out with Roy Orbison when he came into work was the real dream come true. Orbison was one of the greatest singers he had ever come across, and hearing him on any of those tunes meant that Lynne needed to work his ass off to make sure that everything else sounded perfect.
It took a lot of hard work, but Lynne felt that nothing could compare to how the final tracks sounded, saying, “It was absolutely marvellous. When I think about it, it was like a dream come true. You can get what you really wish for if you try hard enough. That’s what I found.” But when looking at all the legends among the band, Lynne was actually the one pulling his weight the most throughout those sessions.
Further reading: From The Vault
He wasn’t afraid to work on any song until it was perfect, and even though there were many times when he felt like he needed to go the extra mile, you can definitely hear it working on all of his vocals. ‘Rattled’ was the only song he had on that first record, but the backing vocals he added to tunes like ‘Heading for the Light’ were the real high points of many of the arrangements, whether he knew it or not.
Most people would have been happy to simply focus on Harrison, Orbison, or even Bob Dylan whenever they sang, but there was something a lot more interesting going on underneath that afro. Lynne was the pop genius still in the prime of his life, and since he ended up putting ELO on the shelf for a while to just be a producer, it’s not like he was lacking in great material to work on.
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