(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Thu 23 April 2026 20:00, UK
Some of the greatest ideas in history have been drummed up in the warm surroundings of a local pub, spurred on by the kind of confidence that only warm ale and camaraderie can bring. During the latter part of the 1970s, though, his penchant for a local pub very nearly cost Jeff Lynne the chance to create his magnum opus.
Pubs have an unlikely importance within the expansive tale of the Electric Light Orchestra. After all, Lynne, along with Roy Wood, spent the vast majority of their famously disastrous early days attempting to translate their expansive compositions into live performances, typically in the backrooms and on the ramshackle stages of local pubs around London.
Inevitably, those early gigs – while well-meaning – often ended in a rather drunk ELO falling over their extensive arsenal of instruments and struggling to get through a single track.
Even when ELO truly took off, though, with Wood leaving the band and live music technology catching up with their grandiose concert ambitions, the group were never too far away from a local boozer. At points, it wasn’t clear whether Lynne’s endless hours spent sitting at a bar were providing him with musical inspiration or an excuse to forget about his musical ambitions entirely, if only for a brief period.
In an attempt to begin working on the album that would eventually become Out of the Blue, Lynne holed himself up in the mountains of Geneva for weeks on end. While you might envision that period as a flowing euphoria of songwriting inspiration, in the naturalistic surroundings of the Swiss Alps, the reality was that it was incredibly rainy during Lynne’s four-week stint in the mountains, so he invariably forwent the mountainous scenery and found the pub.
“The weather was crap for the first couple of weeks,” he recalled to Prog in 2016. “I didn’t come up with anything, and I was down the pub all the time, this nice little tavern in the village.” Fortunately, both for Lynne’s liver and the musical future of ELO, that rainy period eventually ended, with the emerging sunshine bringing with it immediate songwriting inspiration.
“Finally, the weather cleared, and that’s what gave me the idea for the words to ‘Mr Blue Sky’,” Lynne shared, adding: “Inspiration could come at any moment. And did, frequently.” Inevitably, ‘Mr Blue Sky’ became ELO’s definitive anthem upon its eventual release in 1978, peaking at number six in the UK singles charts and spurring on Out of the Blue to sell a whopping ten million copies upon its release.
It is difficult to envision ELO’s beloved discography without that landmark album, which ushered in perhaps their most essential period, both in terms of its commercial success and the ambitious songwriting at the heart of the record.
Seemingly, though, if the rain in Geneva had never cleared, the entire album might have been left scrawled on the back of a beer mat in that local tavern; it might never have been written in the first place.
