(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Sun 22 February 2026 18:30, UK
The number one rule of the Traveling Wilburys was to never take anything too seriously.
Any other band with this many legends could have easily disintegrated if one of them got too big an ego about themselves, but every time you see a piece of footage, it looks more like a bunch of friends that are getting together and having a laugh in the studio. They were still willing to put in the work whenever the red light came on, but in between the freewheeling pop songs, George Harrison didn’t forget how to kick some ass when they wanted to.
Then again, to say that the Wilburys had “ambitions” is not really what they aimed for. Harrison hadn’t cared about being a pop star for the longest time before Jeff Lynne started working with him, and if there was anything that they wanted out of their album, it was the memories of working together and maybe showing people how much of an icon Roy Orbison was whenever he opened his mouth.
When you look at the individual songs on the record, though, it’s not exactly the same kind of throwback that you would have expected out of the biggest names in 1960s rock. Each of them were still trying to write the best songs that they could muster, but when you compare them to actual nostalgia acts around the same time, The Stray Cats seemed to have a lot more credibility as a throwback than songs like ‘Last Night’ or ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.
Half of the record is more about looking at how these guys sound with a few more years under their belt, but they still had a lot more love for their roots when working on tunes like ‘Rattled’. Harrison had spent most of the time talking about how the band would talk for hours about loving old Carl Perkins records, but this was the one song that actually sounded like the kind of skiffle tunes that the Fab Four used to play when they got started.
And while Lynne may have had the best voice for this kind of tune, Harrison felt that the song was as close to straight-ahead rock and roll as they would ever get, saying, “The sound I think is so close to a good old rock ‘n’ roll thing from, like, the late ’50s. But that partially is, I think, the guitars, acoustics. And the fridge. I tell you, it’s the great new sound, folks! It’s happening. You know, it had to be a bit rough, but that was the fun about it. It’s like the most basic rock ‘n’ roll sound.”
Even if it does sound rough around the edges, that’s only a good thing. The rest of the record would have been in danger of being almost too sanitised, but having a song that features percussion being played in different items in the kitchen is a lot more indebted to old school rock and roll than the sonic sheen that they put on Orbison’s voice throughout a song like ‘Not Alone Any More’.
A lot of Bob Dylan’s vocals may have lent themselves well to this kind of sound, but it does manage to give Lynne a chance to stretch out a little bit. Despite knowing how to create sonic records that the radio absolutely loved, he’s sorely neglected as a rock and roll singer, and this was his opportunity to embrace the same kind of fire that he had when working on some of his forgotten ELO songs like ‘Rockaria’.
The band did get the chance to cut loose a little bit more once they got to working on songs like ‘She’s My Baby’, but this was a lot more authentic to the kind of music that Harrison envisioned in his head for the Wilburys. All he wanted was to make the perfect little rock and roll band, and this was the kind of music that he probably heard in his head when he first had the idea of working with his friends.