Jeff Lynne’s ELO review – a little too perfect

The first of Jeff Lynne’s run of four gigs at London’s O2 Arena is nothing short of flawless; both sumptuous in sound and generous with its hits. Millennials will revere Kanye West as the daddy of maximalism but Jeff Lynne was one of the co-authors of the book back in 1970, when ELO began.

Tonight his band’s multiple harmonies take the notion of polyphony, and cube it. A total of three keyboard players – longtime pianist Richard Tandy, plus two more drawn from Gary Barlow’s band – augment the live string section with spools of pristine virtual catgut. With few exceptions, every song on the set list is reproduced exactly as fans remember it, only more so. Lynne’s sad songs definitely say the most. Telephone Line burbles and whirrs, suffused with wistfulness and 50s doo-wops.

No spaceship descends from the rafters, as it did on ELO’s 1978 tour, but video screens project high-definition footage of the ELO craft – part Wurlitzer jukebox, part primary-hued rubber ring, all branded with “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”, a legal distinction that starts to seem like megalomaniacal revisionism when you see it across all the merchandise.

Be-shaded, with wavy curls down to his shoulders, Lynne, too, looks just as you remember him from the last time he engaged with the world, as part of the Traveling Wilburys – the late 80s-early 90s supergroup he formed with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty (they were my personal gateway drug to classic rock).

If everything tonight sounds perfect, then it should. It has been 30 years – give or take a couple of shows – since a Jeff Lynne-fronted Electric Light Orchestra meaningfully filled arenas in the UK; this tour sold out in minutes after 2014’s Hyde Park show reintroduced Lynne to his devotees. In June the band will fill the Sunday-afternoon heritage slot on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage.

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ELO’s initial success consisted in picking up where the Beatles left off, but – crucially – they did not ape the experimental Beatles of tape loops and revolution but the Beatles of curlicued classical flourishes, pillowy harmonies and northern male romantic hurt. The seriously Beatle-ish Can’t Get It Out of My Head finds a count of seven people cupping their lips to a microphone as the strings rise and are cross-hatched by keyboards. One of Lynne’s more affecting lyrics, it’s a persuasive advert for the ELO frontman as a little-boy-lost, gazing up into space as he struggles to understand women (it has been quite a struggle, given songs like Evil Woman).

But these songs are a little too perfect. There is an airlessness to ELO’s sound tonight, a saturation that is technically impressive but over-wrought. You can’t tell the live strings from the army of clones deployed by the keyboards. When ELO play the plangent, dreamy Steppin’ Out, Lynne says at the end that the song is “better than it used to be” – a comment that speaks volumes. It is telling that Lynne not only remastered his entire catalogue, as every heritage act does, but actually rerecorded much of it for 2012’s Mr Blue Sky best-of compilation, playing every instrument himself.

After 30 years of not touring, it took two key events to lure Lynne out of his home studio. One was a campaign, fronted by Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, to get the man in shades – these, surely, a nod to Roy Orbison – on a stage again, after decades in which the bulk of ELO’s catalogue theoretically languished, after the advent of punk, in the record shop racks labelled “uncool”.

Ultimately, though, ELO’s space-age harmonics did influence great swaths of cool people: the Flaming Lips, Super Furry Animals and Daft Punk, to name just three. Daft Punk in particular are such an ELO tribute act that they not only sampled ELO, they named their 2001 Discovery album in partial tribute to ELO’s 1979 Discovery album, and caught the voice processor bug off them too. It is present and correct on Mr Blue Sky; All Over the World from the Xanadu soundtrack, Lynne’s disco-era side project, features it too.

I’m guessing that the other, more pivotal, event to prise the reclusive Lynne from his home studio was probably a leap in live digital sound that allows him to leave nothing to chance. Perfectionism is nothing new in the arts, particularly where technology meets them, and music production especially is fertile ground for those who value attention to detail and a vision.

But gigs are different. There is something that happens in the miles of cabling, in the acoustics of a hall, that inevitably changes the music once the nerve impulse leaves the musicians’ synapses on its way to the fans’ ears. At a guess, Lynne sees playing live as an obstacle course full of hazards to be eliminated rather than an organic relationship between electricity, space and warm bodies. The result is a flawless gig in which any trace of spontaneity or surprise is absent. You don’t go to an ELO concert looking for grit but it’s a shame that music this emotional can sound so plastic.

• This article was amended on 29 June. The Radio 2 DJ was Chris Evans not Chris Moyles. This has now been corrected.