The Beatles song that Jeff Lynne was the first person to hear: “I was blown away”
In the 1950s, practically every child dreamt of holding down a stage like Elvis Presley, but the following decade, it was all about four lads from Liverpool. Like most of his peers, Jeff Lynne adored The Beatles and, during his teen years, formed a couple of bands to guide his ambitions, including The Andicaps and The Chads. Little did Lynne know then, but this musical journey would find him befriending George Harrison and eventually producing the retrospective Beatles album Anthology.
Lynne rose to fame in the 1970s as the frontman and creative director of Electric Light Orchestra. Towards the end of the band’s emphatic first chapter, he honed his production skills and ultimately stepped back from the stage to enjoy some time in the studio. If he sought a quiet life, his head wasn’t in the sand for long, with George Harrison inviting him to co-produce his 1987 solo comeback album, Cloud Nine. This successful working relationship led to the formation of Traveling Wilburys and later production jobs with Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney.
Although Lynne didn’t befriend any of The Beatles until his rise to fame with ELO in the 1970s, he did once meet the band while they were still an item. “I’ve had lots of luck when it comes to The Beatles,” Lynne exclaimed in a 2020 interview with Classic Rock. “When I was recording with the Idle Race in London in 1968, a friend of our engineer phoned the studio to say he was working on a Beatles session at Abbey Road. He told us we could go down there to have a look if we wanted.”
It is safe to say that Lynne dashed over to Abbey Road like shit of a shovel. He had been a fan “right from the start. Please Please Me turned me on to them, and I became a really great fan,” he said of his teenage infatuation. Nothing could quite prepare a 20-year-old Lynne to enter a studio where The Beatles sat recording music for The White Album.
As Lynne recalled, The Beatles were split into two rooms: the rhythm section in one and the guitarists in the other. “I saw Paul and Ringo in Studio 3, doing a piano and vocal,” he remembered. “Then I got invited into Studio 2, where John and George were in the control room. Down below, in the actual studio, George Martin was hurling himself around this pedestal, conducting the string section for ‘Glass Onion’.”
‘Glass Onion’ was one of John Lennon’s contributions to the sprawling self-titled (white) album of 1968. The lyrics reflect on the band’s recent psychedelic releases, referencing “Strawberry Fields” and revealing that “The Walrus was Paul.” The song was eclipsed somewhat by the success of tracks like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Revolution’, but enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in 2022 when director Rian Johnson named his Knves Out sequel after it.
Continuing, Lynne remembered feeling honoured to be among the first ears to appreciate ‘Glass Onion’. “I was blown away,” he said. “Nobody had heard it yet, but there I was in Abbey Road, actually listening to it being made. I stayed for maybe half an hour. Then I thought it would be polite to leave because you feel a bit of a dick in that company. So I went back to where the Idle Race were recording, and, of course, it didn’t sound quite so good.”