Jeff Lynne Explains How Electric Light Orchestra Came Back to Life
On September 14th, 2014 an extremely nervous Jeff Lynne walked onstage at London’s Hyde Park for his first major Electric Light Orchestra concert since the group folded in 1986. “We were fenced off by the BBC, and I couldn’t see the audience,” he says. “I was walking up the stairs with my fingers crossed, hoping that people hadn’t gone home since they already saw the act they came to see.”
But as he burst into the opening notes of “All Over the World,” he saw a sea of 50,000 fans singing along. “I felt such relief that all these people were there, screaming and clapping to every song,” he says. “It made me feel really good. I was just knocked out, just the most wonderful crowd I’d ever seen. I had so much fun doing it, I decided to come back and do a new album.”
This wasn’t the first time Lynne attempted to resurrect Electric Light Orchestra. In the summer of 2001, he released Zoom (the first ELO album since 1986’s Balance of Power) and booked an ambitious arena tour to promote it. He taped a VH1 Storytellers concert and a PBS concert, but ticket sales were so dismal, the entire tour was canceled. “That showed me I probably shouldn’t even bother,” Lynne says. “My manager spared me the details of everything, but I wasn’t too demoralized because I got some tunes in films and I just love recording.”
It seemed like a permanent death sentence for ELO, and in the aftermath, Lynne returned to his day job as a record producer, but slowly he began seeing a groundswell of interest in his old band and offers began coming in. Getting the band back onto the stage still remained a distant thought until BBC DJ Chris Evans began pushing the issue on the air. His listeners responded in such overwhelming numbers that Lynne agreed to give it a try.
After the triumphant Hyde Park show, Lynne returned back to his Los Angeles home full of energy, which he transferred to the sessions for ELO’s upcoming album, Alone in the Universe, out November 13th. The LP was cut across 18 months at Lynne’s home studio, with the singer-songwriter playing nearly instrument himself. “I did everything except the shaker and the tambourine, which my engineer Steve [Jay] played,” says Lynne. “It was just a two-man exercise, with him manning all the lifeboats and me doing all the singing and playing.”
The end result, credited to Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra, has a vintage ELO feel with a few modern touches. Lead single “When I Was a Boy” was inspired by Lynne’s memories of his childhood. “My interest in music grabbed me when I was a boy,” he says. “I used to go under my bed listening to the crystal set [radio.] There weren’t many good stations back then. You only got about an hour of pop music and that was on a Saturday night. That’s what led to the song, which was one of the quickest I’ve ever written lyrically and musically.”