Nope - I loathe ELO and consider Jeff Lynne’s involvement in anything a very good reason to avoid it.
loved Mr Blue Sky .
My father was working nights as a security guard in the mid 70’s and took a 12-year old me to work with him once to help him stay awake. Around 3am that song came on the radio. He asked me what they were saying and I deadpanned:
“I gotta change my dick”.
My father just shook his head.
I love ELO! Discovered 'em in my teens and still count many of their songs among my favorites. Checking my iPod… I see I have 33 of their songs. I tend to like their later stuff.
Some particular favorites:
“Rockaria”: - YouTube
“Calling America”: elo - calling america - YouTube
“Turn to Stone”: - YouTube
“Fire on High”: - YouTube
“Hold on Tight”: ELO - Hold on tight to your dream (- CONGRATS, Jeff Lynne, to the O.B.E October10, 2010) - YouTube
Xanadu, as a movie, sucked, but it had some great ELO tunes.
ELO is my favorite band, as well; I have every one of their albums.
If you like songs from “A New World Record” and “Out of the Blue”, you’ll probably like “Face the Music” and “Eldorado” (the two previous albums) as well. While I like all of their music, those four albums, from 1974 through 1977, are the core of that sound.
The first two albums are kind of experimental, but still have some interesting songs. “On the Third Day” (the third album) is one of my favorites, but it has a bit of a different sound, and some harder-rocking tracks.
The next album-and-a-half after “Out of the Blue” (“Discovery” and ELO’s half of the “Xanadu” soundtrack) add a more overt disco feel to the ELO sound, but, again, there are still some very enjoyable songs in there.
As others have mentioned, “Time” is a cool (and often underrated) sci-fi concept album, but the string sound that helped define earlier albums begins to get minimized by this point.
The last two albums before the band’s breakup (“Secret Messages” and “Balance of Power”) were made, at least in part, to satisfy a contractual obligation with their record label. Still some good music to be had on these, but I suspect that Jeff Lynne had tired of the band’s concept at that point, and the sound continued to change.
Lynne has released a few new albums in the past decade-plus under the ELO name, though only one (2001’s “Zoom”) is all original music. On the new albums, Lynne plays most, if not all, of the instruments. He’s become a rather slow worker now – in the past 25 years, he’s released only 3 ELO albums, and 2 “solo” albums (arguably, ELO albums are Jeff Lynne solo albums now, too), and he now spends a lot of his time producing other musicians’ work, rather than recording his own stuff.
I think Zoom is actually a pretty good album. I had tickets for a concert on the Zoom tour, but alas, it was cancelled due to poor sales.
I agree; “Zoom” is a very enjoyable listen. It’d been out of print for some time, but Jeff remastered it and re-released it a couple of months ago (with a couple of added tracks).
I, too, had tickets for that tour (I was too young to have been able to see the original band in concert), though, in retrospect, even if the entire tour hadn’t been cancelled, the Chicago date likely would have – it would have been on September 12th, 2001.
Looks like they’ve reunited, and a new album is in the works: Ed Sheeran Performs With ELO at the Grammys – Rolling Stone
Oh, wow! That would be grrrreat!
I never bought any of ELO’s albums, but I enjoyed their singles. I need to purchase the Greatest Hits.
“A New World Record” is for ELO, what “Who’s Next” was for The Who.
Just sayin’.
Aw man…until today, I had absolutely no idea that the Zoom tour had been cancelled. That was/is such a lowdown dirty shame because the Zoom concert DVD is nothing short of sheer bliss and easily, EASILY one of the best concert DVDs of the 2000s. Among the other setlist entries, including the Zoom album tracks (very rare instance of the promoted album tunes actually being decent to quite good for once), I’d argue that the performance of “One Summer Dream” was even more awesome than the already sublime album version.
Can’t wait to see what will come out of this ELO reunion. Makes me really wish all that much more that “Livin’ Thing” had not been cut out of Guardians Of The Galaxy and its Awesome Mix Vol. 1…if it had remained, I feel it would have introduced Jeff Lynne and Co. to an increased audience.
applauds
As I said over in the 1977 non-#1 hit single thread, A New World Record is my ELO favorite album pick. Not a bad song at all on that sucker.
(Oops, thought I was doing an addendum to my original post…sorry for the double response.)
Wiki on the reunion: Electric Light Orchestra - Wikipedia
I like ELO, but they totally picked “Hold On Tight” right out of Melanie Safka’s pocket. It’s such an obvious plagiarism of “Look What They Done To My Song, Ma”.
Kinda sorta similar, I guess, but more different than alike. Hardly plagiarism IMHO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt_Se7BtSQgEven with the fact that they both have their 3rd verse in French? How coincidental can that be?
Coincidentally enough, Lynne has recently been a beneficiary of another minor songwriting controversy: Stay with Me (Sam Smith song) - Wikipedia
and Fire on High. I always crank it up when FoH comes on the radio