(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Tue 31 March 2026 9:57, UK
Being a songwriter has always been about more than capturing the right moment in time whenever there’s a guitar around.
Most artists can try their best to make a complex tune, but it’s the hardest thing in the world to make something incredibly simple and have it sound original compared to all of the other big names that have come before. Although Jeff Lynne has made a living out of making the most complicated rock songs in the world simple, he still felt he hadn’t cracked the code on how to write certain anthems from his youth.
However, everything about Electric Light Orchestra’s music already feels like an elongated tribute to the kind of music of the past. Outside of being indebted to the biggest names in rock and roll, bringing in strings behind him felt like he had taken the technician proficiency of Jimi Hendrix or Marc Bolan and filtered it through a violin rather than a guitar half the time.
Even when listening to some of the biggest tracks of their career, it’s almost a one-to-one comparison. The string lines on tunes like ‘Evil Woman’ and ‘Livin’ Thing’ sound much more sophisticated in some respects, but the more that you listen, all it is is the same kind of pentatonic licks most people learned on the guitar transposed over to an orchestra.
But if we’re talking influences, it’s hard to deny the elephant in the room when it comes to The Beatles. Every part of Lynne’s music already feels like if the tune ‘I Am The Walrus’ had gained sentience and started making its own music, and while he is pretty liberal with the tracks that he picks, even the Fab Four didn’t have as much impact on him as Roy Orbison.
Credit: Jack de Nijs for Anefo
Compared to the other pre-British Invasion acts, Orbison was head and shoulders above everyone in terms of singing. While there was nothing terribly complicated about the way he sang, that borderline operatic voice on ‘Only the Lonely’ was enough to send shivers down the spine of everyone from The Beatles to Bruce Springsteen, with ‘The Boss’ even namechecking the tune at the start of ‘Thunder Road’.
Orbison is a unique character who seems to inspire everybody, including Lynne’s Traveling Wilburys bandmate, Bob Dylan who said of the singer,
“Orbison, though,” Dylan wrote in his memoir, “transcended all the genres – folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn’t even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn’t know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes.”
He continued, “His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttering to yourself something like, ‘Man, I don’t believe it.’ His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious – no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn’t anything else on the radio like him.”
Despite him rubbing elbows with The Beatles, Lynne felt that he would have loved to have written ‘Only the Lonely’, telling Forbes, “It’s such a clever song. It’s so simple, there are only like four chords in it, and it sounds like hundreds of them. I think ‘Only The Lonely’ sums up all the beauty you can have, but such simple chords. I used to think all the time, ‘How do they do that?’ I do my best, but I’ll never get near that one, I don’t think.”
That didn’t mean that Lynne wouldn’t at least try to match it. Outside of his impressive vocal range on ‘Mr Blue Sky’ or ‘Telephone Line’, hearing him singing harmony to Orbison on the second verse of The Traveling Wilburys’ ‘Handle With Care’ is about the nearest that any rock star would ever come to playing with one of their heroes.
Then again, the fact that Lynne was able to make such grand symphonies and still have a soft spot for ‘Only the Lonely’ says a lot about how he approaches music. Regardless of how many orchestral instruments are thrown into the mix or how many operatic singers are put onto a given track, the mark of any good song is knowing if it stands out amongst the rest by playing the bare essentials.
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