ELO Pop Goes The Rock Music (Xanadu reference)
Jeff Lynne, the Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr. Everything, is one of rock’s foremost mystery men. He rarely does interviews and usually ducks the media spotlight.
Consequently, most rock, fans know little about him except the basics: Lynne is an Englishman who joined the band in 1970 (then it was called the Move) and took it over in 1972; he sings lead, writes all the music, produces, arranges and efficiently runs one of the most successful bands in pop music.
Lynne is a genial guy with a good sense of humor who claims to be a little shy, yet is a lively, somewhat frantic talker. On a recent afternoon Lynne, drinking beer in an old sweatshirt and jeans, came across as a raging extrovert.
“I’m no weirdo,” he said in a Hollywood rehearsal hall where ELO was preparing for a concert. “I’m a normal guy. Back home [in the midlands of England) I play tennis and watch soccer and go down to the pub all the time with me mates. People shouldn’t think I’m strange, because I’m not.”
Lynne explained why he rejects nearly all interview requests. He is plagued by certain fears being misquoted, being made to look foolish or having an article built around something he considers insignificant. But all artists have these mi-givings. Lynne, however, offered a unique reason for avoiding the press most of the time: “I don’t have that much to say.”
But he really had a lot to say and to gripe about..
Lynne is furious about the backlash against ELO’s new album, Time. At first his charge seemed ridiculous, considering that the album is in the Top 10 and a single from it, Hold on Tight, is in the Top Five. “Some radio stations don’t want to play the album,” he said. “It’s hurt the album a bit. The problem is with FM radio. You see, there’s this prejudice against us in a lot of places. It’s because of that film. They’re saying “We don’t want to touch them after they did that bloody film.”
The “bloody film” is Xanadu, the awful Olivia Newton-John musical for which Lynne wrote five songs.
Why the backlash? “It’s because the film is so bad and it’s a failure and we’re associated with it,” he replied: “The film is an embarrassment and some people think of us when they think of it. Also I guess some people didn’t like the songs.”
“I hate everything to do with that album. It was a drag doing it. When we were asked to do it, the script looked really good and it seemed like an exciting project. Then they kept changing the script and changing it and changing it and it kept getting worse and worse. I was contractually obligated so I was stuck with it.
“After a while things got really bad. People were confused by all the changes. They said write a song and we’ll film around it. That’s nuts! There were too many people involved and not enough of them knew what they were doing. They cut the songs to bits in the film, or so I hear. I haven’t seen it. Everybody said it was so bad I haven’t bothered to see the finished version.”
Part of the backlash, Lynne admitted, stems from the feeling - apparently shared by some pop fans and radio personnel - that ELO’s Xanadu songs were too heavily pop. To some, the project seemed like a commercial sellout, as the material is so far from the elegant, classically tinged pop that elevated the band to super-group status in the mid-1970s.
“Maybe it does have too much of a pop approach on it,” Lynne conceded. “But that’s what they wanted. I had to give them what they wanted. I was trapped. But I still stand by those songs. I think they’re good. It’s just that it was the wrong direction for us. Everybody should be allowed a mistake and Xanadu is ours.”
The contention that ELO has turned into an overly slick commercial pop outfit is nothing new. This criticism surfaced in 1979 with the “Discovery” album and gathered legions of supporters with” Xanadu” and hasn’t really subsided with “Time”, although the album is one of ELO’s finest.
Lynne defended his latest style, contending, “I get into pop moods and want to write strong, obvious pop songs, simple songs. I think I do it well. It’s hard to write simple songs, you know. People don’t realize that. I know everybody was impressed with the other music we were doing but I got tired of that.”
Lynne’s disenchantment with that old ELO pop-classical sound peaked in 1978, after the release of the Out of the Blue album and during the band’s last tour. So he fired the three-man string section (violin-ist Mik Kaminsky and cellists Hugh McDowell and Melvyn Gale), reducing ELO to a quartet guitarist Lynne, drummer Bev Bevan, keyboards player Richard Tandy and bassist Kelly Groucutt.
“I’d had it with that lush string bit,” he said. “When I listen to the old albums, even Out of the Blue, the strings sound so loud. It makes me cringe. All you hear is strings and a tiny bit of rhythm section in the background. And it was all my doing. Well, I don’t like that sound now. After using strings so much I lost my fascination with them.”