Jeff Lynne
Mr Blue Sky himself! The ELO conductor and chicken pie connoisseur tells Uncut about his lifelong search for sonic perfection
Electric Light Orchestra’s conductor, chicken pie connoisseur and author of “silly stories about ventriloquists”, Otis Wilbury – aka JEFF LYNNE – tells Jaan Uhelszki about a blessed life in pursuit of sonic perfection. “Picking up from where The Beatles left off wasn’t my intention,” he reveals.
JwhichEFF Lynne arrives a few minutes late for the interview,
comes as a surprise. Fastidious would be one word to describe the venerable songwriter, arranger, producer and singer. Casually dressed in pressed jeans, a blue bomber jacket, blue shirt and Vans trainers, he walks into a suite at The Victorian – a clubby hotel in Santa Monica – apologising for his tardiness. It’s only a half hour drive from Jeff Lynne’s home high in the Santa Monica mountains, where he has lived in a rambling Spanish colonial since 1995, but he got snagged in today’s lunchtime traffic. You sense such a delay – although only 20 minutes, no great shakes – is anathema to an artist as careful and precise as Lynne.
“I’ll sit here,” he says, pulling a chair towards him. “I can hear you better. This is my good ear.” He indicates to the left side of his head. “It’s from having infections when I was young,” he explains. “I have to wear [an in-ear apparatus] on stage because you don’t have any monitors on the floor, you see. It comes straight up your back and then you plug ’em in. I’ve been using them for about five years now. Since I started playing live again.”
He is referring, of course, to Jeff Lynne’s ELO, inaugurated in 2014 and the latest remarkable iteration of the band he co-founded with fellow Brummies Roy Wood and Bev Bevan in 1970. The band’s history since is often complicated and soapy; it includes various separations, reformations, rifts and lawsuits. Along the way, though, ELO sold over 50 million records worldwide – pioneering grand, musical fantasias involving mythical cities, wild west outlaws and moon tourism. “Some of them were a bit silly, yeah,” he concedes now. “But they were fun and lots of people liked them.” But such selfdeprecation is typical of Lynne, who has always seemed a reluctant star. “I had no real plans to do any more ELO after we stopped in 1986,” he admits. “I disbanded it because I wanted to be a producer of other people.” Indeed, you sense Lynne at his happiest locked away in a studio, tinkering on one of those records by “other people” – George Harrison, say, or Tom Petty. When he speaks of them – as he does often, as well as other dearly departed friends like Roy Orbison and Del Shannon – he prefers using their Christian names. One gets the sense they’re never very far from his mind.
Soft-spoken and polite, today Lynne sits rigidly for long periods and rarely changes his expression, occasionally flashing a half-smile, splaying his long fingers to make a point, or touching the rim of his ever-present aviators. It’s like he’s constructing one of his flawless recordings, another one of which has just been released – the second under the name of Jeff Lynne’s ELO.
From Out Of Nowhere has a quieter voice than earlier ELO albums. Although its title recalls their 1977 double LP Out Of The Blue, it’s not as stately or fantastical; From Out Of Nowhere exists on a more human scale, befitting an artist who has begun, inevitably, to take stock. While Lynne claims to never write autobiographically, the song “Time Of Our Life” is a retelling of ELO’S 2017 Wembley show, right down to the scenes of mobile phones lighting up the night sky and the self-referential sample of “Telephone Line.” “Yes, you got me, that’s all true,” he says. “It was the time of my life. But it’s not over yet. I hope I’ll be working ’til my last day.”
Your new album’s called From Out Of
Nowhere. Is that a comment on where the songs come from? Yes, it really is about how music suddenly appears from nowhere. When you’re just messing around on a piano or a guitar, suddenly an idea will come and it will be tiny, maybe a fragment, six or seven notes and maybe four chords. That’s enough to get me going, and I’ll say to myself, “Oh, this is fun.” Then I can start expanding on it and making it into an actual song rather than just a little piece that floats in the air with nothing connecting it. But [the album] was also written at the same time as all those disasters were happening in California. It almost joined up to that, to people having houses and suddenly there was a boulder bigger than the house coming down the mountainside. From out of nowhere there was now a big flat place where there used to be posh houses. So it’s all those things. Whatever’s here now didn’t used to be, and that includes this whole album with 10 songs on it. Because the songs really did come out of nowhere.
Isn’t that what you said back in 1989 when you and Tom Petty wrote “Free Fallin’” together? It was. I just said the word ‘freefalling’ and Tom jumped on it. Before we even knew it, we wrote a song. One minute it wasn’t there, and there it was. From out of nowhere!
It seems that your best songs come in five minutes. Is that always the case? The main idea for it does, yeah. You’ve got to tidy it up a bit. You can’t just leave it with its shirt hanging out.
Are you ever afraid that you might sit down to write one day and nothing will come out? I always think something’s going to show up. I know it is, and it might be great but it might be bad and I might chuck it away, or it might be really good and I might say, “Wow, I’m glad I waited around for that one. Because I might’ve missed that altogether.”
Do you write all the time? Not lyrics. I’m always messing with music, tunes and chords. That’s my favourite thing to do, chord sequences, nice chord changes. The most interesting thing about music to me is the tension of a chord change, of how you can change a mood from light to really dark with just one finger moving. Then once you’ve got five or six or seven or eight of these nice chord changes you realise, ‘Oh, that’s a nice tune.’ Then you keep playing it over and over and it starts to sink in as a real tune that’s always been there, but of course it wasn’t until 10 minutes ago.
When you started writing these songs, did you know that they would become an album?
I knew I was making an album when I started writing in 2018, before the last tour. I got the songs more or less finished, then I said, “Why don’t we just leave it.” So I did. It was so much fun coming back from tour to finish the songs because I’d got more ideas to add; little harmony pieces and instrumental passages and stuff like that. More thought’s gone into it now. I suppose you could spoil it as well by overdoing it. But I don’t think I did.
Is there a theme that ties this album together? There seems to be quite a lot on the subject of leaving… I don’t usually do autobiography. I like to make a little story up. That’s the way I’ve always done it, even in my earliest music from… well, the first album I ever did was 1968. That was all little silly stories about ventriloquists and things like that.
“YOU CAN CHANGE A MOOD WITH JUST ONE FINGER MOVING”
After you called time on ELO in 1986, did you ever think you would come back and make more ELO records? No, I just wanted to be a producer. So I sat in my own studio learning how to be an engineer instead of a producer; I thought I had to be both. As luck would have it, George Harrison got in touch with me to see if I would produce his album.
That changed my life around. It was all due to Dave Edmunds. I was working with him, and we went to dinner one night. We’d been together for hours at a restaurant in the pub. When we got outside the building, he shouted, “Hey Jeff, I forgot to mention, George Harrison asked me to ask you if you’d like to work on his new album.” I said, “What do you mean, you forgot to tell me?!” We’d been sitting at dinner for like three hours! When I actually went round to George’s, he was more interested in would we be friends, would we get on well and all that, rather than if we would work well together. On the first day we met he said, “Do you want to go on holiday?” I said, “Yeah.” This was the first time I had ever met him and it’s just like in the afternoon or the early evening that he asked me that.
Didn’t you think that was a bit… sudden? I thought he would rather have a great time with somebody, like be friends and have a laugh. Get stoned, whatever, have a drink, have a few. Then you could have fun as well as making records. He said, “I’m going to Australia to the Grand Prix. Do you want to come?” So I said, “Yeah, I’d love to.”
As a Beatles fan, you played it cool, of course? Ha ha! Of course! I was cool on the outside. I was just enamoured with George. I couldn’t believe I was even in his house talking to him at that point. We became great mates after that. We went on this holiday and we had a laugh, went in all the pits, sat in the Formula One cars. When you’re with George Harrison you can get in anywhere. We asked if we could see the cars, and they said, “Why don’t you have a sit in them?”
Besides George, you seemed to have had an immediate connection with Tom Petty. Do all your relationships have that kind of predestined quality? Every single one. Haha! I loved Tommy, he was a great bloke and just a lovely chap, and the way we got together was rather… I was just driving down the street in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving. Then there at the stop light was Tommy. He motioned for me to pull over, and he came over to the car and said, “We’re having a barbecue at my house. Do you fancy coming over? We’re playing George’s new album [Cloud Nine] that you did, and it’s fantastic.” I went over there and had a good laugh.
The first song you wrote was “Free Fallin’”. You’re not a noted co-writer, are you? I never really wrote with anybody, not even with Roy. It started with Del Shannon, then George, really. I don’t know
what it was with Tommy. It was just this chemistry. This ease. When I went over and we wrote “Free Fallin’” I thought it was going to just be the one. But it turned out we ended up co-writing seven or eight songs.
You mentioned Del Shannon – but Roy Orbison was another childhood hero, wasn’t he? Yeah. Both their records came out in ’61, Roy’s “Only The Lonely” and Del’s “Runaway.” I just went to Del Shannon’s hometown to have a look as his memorial there. It’s a black granite headpiece in Coopersville, Michigan. We were playing in Grand Rapids, and it’s probably 10 miles from there, just a tiny little village, really. I had to go see it. If I hadn’t have done it I’d have been mad. I got pictures of me standing with it.
Were you surprised that all the people you asked to be in the Traveling Wilburys said yes so quickly? Roy said yes immediately, because I’d actually been down to Roy’s house in Nashville. We tried to write a few songs and never finished anything, but it was still wonderful just to hang out with him. Lovely guy. But then the next thing I knew, a few months later, there was a phone call for me and he said, “Hey, Jeff, it’s Roy. I’m in Malibu and I’m ready to work.”
From out of nowhere… Just out of nowhere, yeah. He came over and Tom came over, and the first go we had at writing a song together it was “You Got It”. It came together so quickly and easily.
Did you guys decide on names the first day?
I was Otis once… and then Clayton. It came over a matter of a few weeks or so. People thought about it in bed, mostly. They’d wake up and say, “Who can I be?”
Who had their name first? It was George. He called himself Nelson, probably after Lord Nelson. Then Roy was Lefty, Dylan was Lucky. Tom was Charlie T.
So much has been made of ELO being the heirs apparent to The Beatles. Did you have a favourite Beatle when you were younger? They were all great! I suppose I liked the quirky songs John wrote, like “I Am The Walrus”. People have said that what ELO was supposed to be was an extension of The Beatles when they were experimenting, but that was not true at all. Roy Wood said that, not me. He left the group two months later and saddled me with that kind of quote – thanks a lot, mate! Picking up from where The Beatles left off wasn’t my intention. When you listen closely, you’ll see there’s no
comparison in the music or the sounds. My idea for the sound of ELO was to get away from what all the other groups seemed to be doing around that time. All those long guitar solos.
So was The Beatles reference a bit of an albatross? I think [what Roy Wood said] hurt at first because people thought, ‘Well, we can’t take it seriously then, if they’re just copying The Beatles, or if they want to sound like The Beatles.’ I thought rather than change the name and start again [after Wood left] I’d just stick with it and see what happened. Luckily, John [Lennon] loved the hell out of the first couple of albums. He said it on the radio, back in 1974: “This is a great record. I love this group. Great little group. A bit ‘son of Beatles’ but not to worry. It’s still great.” He played “Showdown”.
You met them when they were recording the ‘White Album’, didn’t you? Yeah, I was in Idle Race. The engineer at the studio I was recording in said, “Anybody want to go down to the Beatles session at Abbey Road?” Yes, let’s go! We got straight in a taxi and went to Abbey Road. Somehow we got in without having to tell the security guard who we were.
We could see Paul and Ringo in the studio. Paul was singing “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?” and Ringo was giving him the starting note because he doesn’t have a chord at the beginning. We were watching it through the glass. Then we went down the corridor and into this other room and there were John and George with their little Fair Isle pullovers on.
What did you say to them? Oh, it was a ridiculous moment. I couldn’t even speak, hardly. I was so unbelievably taken aback.
But they said hello and shook hands and everything, asking us, “How you doing?” Then down through the window in Studio Two was George Martin conducting all these cellos on “Glass Onion” and throwing himself around the room to make the right length swoop. I couldn’t believe it, because I love cellos anyway. To see him swooping about doing that, and John and George going, “Yeah, it’s great, that” – I couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards. I’d suddenly see George’s face or John’s face or Paul’s face. I think Paul was looking through the window going, “What’s he doing there?”
You worked on two songs on Anthology, years later. Wasn’t there also meant to be a third Beatles track, “Now And Then”? It was a song of John’s that George didn’t like very much. He didn’t want to be bothered to do it. I know I shouldn’t say that, because he can’t answer me back, but Dhani [Harrison] was there and he knew that George didn’t fancy it.
You seem to be a consummate insider, but is that how you feel? I still feel exactly the same as I always did. Like I’m going to make it one of these days!
Did you worry early on that you didn’t have the personality to be a star? Probably did. But then I wasn’t and I didn’t ever pretend to be. I don’t consider myself a star. I consider myself a songwriter, a producer and a guitar player. I sing all right.
Were you initially nervous about bringing ELO back after such a long hiatus? After we agreed to play Hyde Park in 2014 [ for Radio 2’s Festival In A Day], I thought, “What if nobody stays to see us?” But we walked up the stairs and just before we were due to go on, I peeped through the curtain and saw it was completely full to the brim. It went down fantastically well. After that, we did lots more. This summer we toured America, 20 shows and we sold out every one of them. I can’t believe it, because I was always the one going, “What if nobody shows up?” But now it’s so easy [to perform], because you know they’re going to like you, because they come.
There’s a song on From Out Of Nowhere called “Time Of Our Life”, about your Wembley Stadium show from June 2017. You sing, “As we played on it came to me/ This could be the best night I’ve ever seen”.
What made it so special? I think it was the best time I ever had in music. Far beyond anything I could have imagined. We made it into a film, Wembley Or Bust, so I’ll always be able to remember. The audience is shot so brilliantly. The director [Paul Dugdale] somehow winds his way to intimate moments in the 60,000 people. When a certain song comes on you see people say “aw”, and they hug and they kiss each other. You see things like that so many times throughout the show. It’s just amazing.
In “Time Of My Life”, you name check “your friend Phil”. Is that the same Phil who used to roadie for you, and you peed on him at a show in Liverpool back in 1972? Ha, ha. No, it’s a different Phil. I was behind this curtain at that [Liverpool] show. It was probably our third show ever. I’m playing the bass with one string. I remember this passage coming in the song and I went, “Now I can go and take a piss.” I went behind this curtain and there was a whole other auditorium the other side of the curtain. Nobody was in it, luckily. I let that rip into one of those Mrs Mop buckets. It was a fantastic plan until Phil moved the bucket too quick…
What connects the early Jeff Lynne from the 2019 version? I think, all these years, I’ve been learning what to do and how you do it just by trial and error. Messing about until you get something good. And I think I’m probably the same as I was then, except I’ve got more knowledge.
Your father famously told you at one point there “wasn’t any tune in your tunes”. Did he ever change his mind? Not really, no. He was never a big fan. He’d listen to something once maybe. I think the best compliment I ever had was when he heard “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”: “It’s a smasher there.” That was the end of the conversation.
Could that be why you’re always striving for this idea of perfection? Well, I kept trying and I kept trying… so, yeah.