Page 48 - Classic Rock (January 2020)
P. 48
JEFF LYNNE
The Idle Race, circa 1968: (l-r) Bev Bevan, Roy Wood
Roger Spencer, Jeff Lynne, Dave ELO in 1975: (clockwise from left) and Jeff Lynne in
Pritchard, Greg Masters. Melvyn Gale, Bev Bevan, Jeff Lynne, The Move in 1970.
Mik Kaminsky, Colin Walker, Richard
Tandy, Kelly Groucutt.
Some of the songs on From Out at the age of eighteen. It wasn’t long
Of Nowhere have a wistful before we changed our name to the
quality to them, such as All My Idle Race.
Love and Down Came The Rain.
Do you find yourself looking How high were your ambitions
back more nowadays? in the Idle Race?
I think I always have done, actually, I probably would’ve been happy
even in the early days when I had enough just playing club gigs in
nothing to look back at. It was just Birmingham. There were so many
the old-fashioned music that I used of them that you could play
to hear my dad playing on his a month straight without repeating
record player or on the radio. I don’t yourself. You’d play every night of
really dwell on the past, but I try to the week and, for a couple of years,
make a certain type of music that every night of the year. It was
encompasses chord changes that feel a great experience and a great way
almost classical. Great songs by to learn. Then I started writing my
[musical theatre composer of the 1920s/30s/40s] Absolutely. There was nothing I wanted to do in own stuff, and it just developed from there.
Richard Rodgers, for example. I could never the work field, but I did work in a few offices. I had
understand them as a kid, because there was so about fourteen jobs in two and a half years. Some When did your Beatles’ fandom begin?
much going on in terms of arrangements, but of them lasted less than four hours. One job was as Right from the start. Please Please Me turned me on
I wanted to be able to play some of those changes. a window dresser in this big department store, to them and I became a really great fan. I’ve had
Hearing two chords joined together, ones that really which I got through the youth employment office. lots of luck when it comes to The Beatles. When
want to be there, is just a beautiful sensation. I was only fifteen or sixteen at the time. You had to I was recording with the Idle Race in London in
put these dusters on your feet and go into the 1968, a friend of our engineer phoned the studio to
Were you influenced by your dad’s taste window at C&A in Birmingham. I was thinking: say he was working on a Beatles session at Abbey
in music “What if one of my mates comes past?!” Road. He told us we could go down there to have
His favourite composers were I lasted until noon, then I snuck out a look if we wanted. Maybe it was only me who
classical. He couldn’t read or write the back way. I never went back. went in the end, but I saw Paul and Ringo in Studio
music, but he used to be able to There were lots of other silly 3, doing a piano and vocal. Then I got invited into
play Chopin on the piano with jobs as well, some of them very Studio 2, where John and George were in the
one finger. My dad didn’t nice and some were grim. But control room. Down below, in the actual studio,
encourage me that much, you have to go through it. George Martin was hurling himself around this
but he bought me my first Then I got a phone call pedestal, conducting the string section for Glass
guitar for two pounds, so from [singer/drummer] Onion. I was blown away. Nobody had heard it yet,
I had a good initiation, Roger Spencer of The but there I was in Abbey Road, actually listening to
until my fingers bled. Then Nightriders. I went for the it being made. I stayed for maybe half an hour, then
I got him to sign the papers audition, got the job, and I thought it would be polite to leave, because you
on an electric Burns Sonic I was a professional musician feel a bit of a dick in that company. So I went back
and a ten-watt amp.
Growing up in post-war TOP: GETTY x3; BOTTOM: JOSEPH CULTICE/PRESS
Birmingham, the job “ELO seemed like such a strange
prospects were group, with two cellos, a violin,
slim. Was music
an escape? Mellotron and a French horn.”
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