(Credits: Far Out / United Artists Records and Tapes)
Sun 22 February 2026 21:45, UK
Ambition has been the driving force behind virtually every successful rock band in history, but in more than a few cases, it is that expansive ambition which often derails a band before they’ve had much of a shot at success – a fact which the Electric Light Orchestra regrettably found out during their early days.
There was never any risk of ELO being yet another run-of-the-mill progressive rock band, but the kind of mind-expanding collisions between grandiose orchestras and Beatles-esque psychedelia that Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne were conjuring up during those early days was at risk of being at odds with what was physically possible. The prevailing issue, then, was how to actually achieve that kind of sound.
Roy Wood didn’t exactly help proceedings, either, when he boldly claimed that ELO were “picking up where The Beatles left off”, giving the band an utterly impossible target to reach, and overinflating the expectations of audiences before the band had even released anything. What’s more, that combination of ambition and expectation caused a boatload of delays within the band, meaning that their debut single, ‘10538 Overture’, didn’t get released until 1972, two years after it had been recorded.
The very same month that the single was released, in fact, Roy Wood left the group to form rival progressive rock giants, Wizzard. That departure had a colossal impact on the band, owing to Wood’s incredible devotion to the music and achieving the kinds of otherworldly sounds he was dreaming up alongside Jeff Lynne. However, that devotion didn’t always go to plan.
During the band’s first jaunts into live performance, for instance, Wood’s expansive musical talents tended to cause more problems than they solved, according to Lynne. “We did our first gig at The Greyhound in Croydon. It was horrible, dreadful,” the songwriter recalled to Classic Rock in 2012.
“It was amazing how Roy taught himself to play the cello in a week, so he could play it on our first single, ‘10538 Overture,’” Lynne continued. “But on stage, it took him forever to change instruments because he was also playing the bassoon and the oboe. And we couldn’t hear ourselves properly.” Explaining, “We used to have to get a little drunk just to take the edge off.”
In essence, that was the double-edged sword of ELO’s ambitions. They were creating the kinds of compositions that had never been heard or even imagined previously, but with that came the physical limitations of their live performances.
Audiences in those early days weren’t particularly forgiving when it took Wood an age to switch over from the cello to an entirely different section of his one-man orchestra, and those setbacks certainly contributed to the fact that, by the time they finally got it together to release their debut single, Wood was already moving on to other things.
In the end, of course, ELO managed to move forward under the sole leadership of Jeff Lynne and, eventually, studio and live music technology started to catch up with the incredible ambitions of the songwriter. Even still, those early gigs remain the thing of nightmares for the composer, and most likely for Roy Wood, too.