When the DJ Sean Rowley stumbled on the Guilty Pleasures format on BBC Radio London 11 years ago, listeners soon started jamming the switchboard, requesting records that had long been a byword for naff, but which they genuinely loved. The irony is, when Rowley played a song by, say, ELO, he did so out of love and respect, not mockery. Yet the format’s title soon began to be used quite differently, describing songs you were somehow ashamed to admit having a soft spot for. Right up there at the top of many such lists would be the barrage of hits — Evil Woman, Strange Magic, Livin’ Thing, Mr Blue Sky, Sweet Talkin’ Woman and the like — that Jeff Lynne wrote, sang and produced for ELO during the 1970s.
These same songs were the ones that ravished the 50,000-strong crowd who watched Lynne perform in Hyde Park last autumn — his first live performance with a version of ELO for 28 years. It is a gig people still talk about with baffled delight. “I was more amazed by it than anyone,” the 67-year-old chuckles. “I was genuinely thinking, ‘I wonder how many people there will be left by the time we go on?’ We were the last on, and most people had been there all day. I had a little peep round the corner and there they were — 50,000 people, going mad.”
Lynne became aware of the Guilty Pleasures phenomenon, he says, and it’s clear it irked him. “Oh yes, I used to hear that phrase. But I don’t hear it any more. Tom Petty came up with a good explanation for it — that it was because we had too many hits to be taken seriously. I had so many of them, like, 30-odd. But I had hit albums, too. That’s the strange bit, Top 10 albums that sold millions. It’s almost as if hit singles don’t count. But I think that’s all gone now.”
Although he has lived in Los Angeles for the past 35 years, Lynne continues to speak with a strong Brummie twang, as imperishable as the mop of curls that still frames his face and the opaque sunglasses he wears, day and night. After decades spent behind the scenes, producing albums by artists such as Petty, Roy Orbison and George Harrison — and, with those three singers and Bob Dylan, forming the Traveling Wilburys — he seems keen to venture out again. A new album, Alone in the Universe, is being readied for release under the name Jeff Lynne’s ELO.
The new album, which he recorded in his home studio, thrums with chord structures Lynne has apparently patented. You listen to songs such as Ain’t It a Drag or One Step at a Time and find yourself willing them to do that timeless ELO thing — which they duly do, rolling back the years in the process.
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“I do have my favourite chord sequences, I’ll admit,” Lynne says. He played every instrument on the album, and insists he is happiest in a studio, tinkering away. When ELO wound down, that is where he retreated to, and he found he preferred life there.
He returns regularly to Britain, but seems content with the lifestyle he leads in California. “When I come back here and go, say, to the Cotswolds, where I’ve got a couple of mates, I do think, ‘Wow, this wouldn’t be bad.’ But then I remember it wouldn’t be like this, it would be pissing with rain or freezing.
“I do think about it, but then I get home and it’s perfect, blue sky when you get up in the morning, 73 in the winter. It does make you feel good. I’m not saying I’d never come back, but bloody hell, the prices — £10m for a bloody flat!”
Birmingham, he says, “still seems the same to me, and I don’t feel any different than how I did all those years ago. I’ve never had that thing some people get... you know, ‘I’m not going back there again, because that’s where I came from, and I got out.’ I love it. It gets me thinking of people standing on the street corner, and me playing my guitar, which must have been 50 years ago. I can still see it, there’s that same warm feeling.”
Some of his fondest memories are of working with the Wilburys. “George was always the naughtiest,” he recalls. “Bob was dropping in a line on a song, which he never, ever does. He’ll never go back over something, it’s the work, it’s done. And George says, ‘Um, would you mind doing that bit again, Bob?’ And Bob goes, ‘Why?’ [Lynne affects a born mimic’s wheeze.] And George goes, ‘Well, I thought it was great, but Jeff didn’t think it was very good.’ And I’m disappearing under the mixing desk.”
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Lynne got his first job as a musician when he was 18, with the Birmingham band the Nightriders. Nearly 50 years later, he’s still pinching himself, he says. “When I left school at 15, the two main choices were the Co-op bakers or the Co-op milk round, and I didn’t want to do either. I’d got a plastic guitar and I was ready to go.”
Fast-forward five decades and Jeff Lynne has a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. The pleasure is all his.
Alone in the Universe is out on Nov 13 on Columbia