Electric Light Orchestra, “Evil Woman” (1975).It means something different to me every time I sing it. A lot of people ask me what my songs mean and I have no idea. It’s one of my favorites, though the lyrics don’t mean anything, really. When we cut it the engineer said, “This is a classic.” I was thrilled to bits. I knew it was going to be a hit even after I had just done a few notes of it. I made the riff up and I was thrilled with it. I wrote “Showdown” in my mom and dad’s front room in Birmingham. I carried on and became the sole producer and the sole writer. After about three months, Roy left me to do his own group. It was a real pain in the ass trying to do shows. The big problem with strings in those days is there was no pickups for them. I wanted to do something different than 15-minute guitar solos since I wasn’t that good at that anyway. Back then, most groups didn’t have anything other than drums and guitar, organ and maybe saxophones and trumpets. We’d go to each other’s house and listen to each other’s music, and we thought it might be nice to have a group with strings in it. In the late 1960s, I was in a group called the Idle Race and this guy called Roy Wood that was in the Move, we used to meet up at the clubs in Birmingham and we got to be pals. Electric Light Orchestra, “Showdown” (1973).I had so much fun doing it, I decided to come back and do a new album.” “I felt such relief that all these people were there, screaming and clapping to every song,” he says. He was a jumble of nerves when he walked onto the stage and faced 50,000 fans. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I should have been doing this years ago.'”īut after 30 years of working almost exclusively behind the scenes, Lynne accepted an offer to revive Electric Light Orchestra for a massive show in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 2014. When a shifting musical climate in the 1980s made ELO seem like dinosaurs, Lynne became a producer and within the course of less than two years crafted comeback albums for George Harrison, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison before pulling all of them together, along with Bob Dylan, into the short-lived supergroup the Traveling Wilburys.
All I wanted was studio time and more studio time and even more studio time.” “I could have gotten a big head, but it just wasn’t in my nature. “I never pushed myself forward,” he says on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. Even during the height of Electric Light Orchestra’s hit-making days in the late 1970s, only the most devoted rock fans knew the name Jeff Lynne.
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