(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Fri 14 November 2025 17:00, UK
Any chance of Jeff Lynne matching the power of his records with ELO live was a pipe dream back in the 1970s.
There was no doubt that a song like ‘Mr Blue Sky’ was an absolute masterpiece when he first started writing it, but if he had hired a full orchestra to play with him every single time he performed live, he would have had to cut many of his tours criminally short or pay every member of the group a frugal salary to break even. His muse was bigger than the limitations of the time, but that didn’t mean that Lynne couldn’t have some fun every now and again.
While everything you would need to know about his band could be found on records like Out of the Blue or A New World Record, there was always the dread in the back of his mind about going back out on tour. The adoring crowds screaming for songs like ‘Telephone Line’ may have felt awfully good back in the day, but there would always be a slight asterisk next to it when he couldn’t recreate the same backing tracks.
In all fairness, he did try to make progress by having backing tracks, but it’s not the same when the entire band is locked to that kind of grid. There’s no push and pull with that kind of setup, and when Lynne started making his name as a producer, he realised pretty quickly that he didn’t need to worry about keeping the band afloat if he wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of it anymore.
Like it or not, he was the only member that people recognised from that time, and even if he was known by many as the guy with the afro and the dark sunglasses, what mattered to his colleagues was the songs. He clearly had the knowledge of what made songs work, and when George Harrison called on him to help him on the album Cloud Nine, Lynne finally found the one thing he had been missing for so long: fun.
He had been working on so many different things that depended on the stage, so with the former Beatle, he was finally free to be himself, saying, “I was free of the last one [in 1986], it was right at the time that George called me, after Dave Edmunds had given him the number. It was exactly the right time. It turned out fantastic in the end. George’s album was a big hit, he had a number one in America. So that was the start of my new career and my new attitude, probably ’cos I was enjoying it again.”
But even if he didn’t get to the top of the charts, this was clearly Lynne’s wheelhouse. He was already being heralded as the Fab Four’s adopted son before he even started to fly solo, but when working with Harrison, it’s like he found a long-lost older brother half the time he started playing. Even if Harrison was in charge, it’s not like Lynne didn’t know how to have some fun as well.
No one would dare challenge a Beatle on how their song should go, but Lynne could be the one to help kickstart an idea. Whether that’s suggesting that Harrison use a wah-wah effect on his guitar for tunes like ‘This is Love’, it did help usher him into the new era of his career with a few more tricks up his sleeve.
While this was only a precursor to what the pair of them would eventually do with the Traveling Wilburys, Cloud Nine was the kind of album that both of them needed to hear. They both had become disenchanted with the music industry and all of the bells and whistles around the music, and all they needed was someone next to them to remind them why music was so much fun in the first place.
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