'Get well soon, Jeff' - the heartfelt message from fans of ELO's Lynne

The Herald Scotland

14 hours ago

Lynne had to cancel a show at Manchester's Co-op Live on Thursday evening at short notice. In a message posted on X the band said the show had been cancelled "due to illness".
Though hugely disappointed, fans of the group took to social media in the hours after today's announcement to express sympathy for Lynne. Many simply said: "Get well soon, Jeff".
One fan, posting on the Jeff Lynne's ELO fan group on Facebook, said: "In honor of Jeff trying his best to put on a final show for us during his time of illness, I think we should all gather around the Hyde Park Rose Garden at 2 PM tomorrow to sing a few ELO songs. Maybe it could be something we all need right now. I'm sure Jeff would love our support too since he can't perform tomorrow".
Tomorrow's Hyde Park show, which was sold out, would have been a fitting swansong for the hugely successful group.
The 'Over and Out' tour saw them group play 27 dates in North America between August and October last year. The British leg was considerably smaller in scale. There were two nights in Lynne's native Birmingham last weekend, two in midweek in Manchester, one of which was cancelled, and Hyde Park tomorrow.
The set-list in Birmingham and Manchester was a glorious exploration of a superb catalogue of hit songs in all their pop/classics grandeur: Evil Woman, Showdown, 10538 Overture, Sweet Talkin' Woman, Can't Get It Out of my Head, Livin' Thing, Telephone Line, All Over the World and Turn to Stone among them.
People were travelling to Hyde Park from all over the world. One woman had flown from Melbourne, Australia. Others made their way from Finland and Denmark, from Argentina, the Netherlands, from France. Two next-door neighbours in a quiet street in Shieldhill, Falkirk, had, independently of each other, booked tickets. Many fans in London would have been seeing ELO for the umpteenth time; others for what would have simultaneously been the first and last time.
Various ELO tribute bands, who between them do a fine job of replicating Lynne's songs, paid tribute to him before news of the dual cancellations broke. One, the ELO Experience, sent via Facebook their best wishes to Lynne 'and all of his team' for the farewell tour.
The post continued: 'Have a great set of shows and to everyone attending, treasure this time, as one of, if not, the greatest song writers and performers of all time is taking his final touring bow. Thank you for everything Jeff'.
Lynne caused a minor stir in Birmingham last Saturday when he took to the stage despite having a broken hand, sustained during a taxi crash in London. 'I've had a guitar in my hand all my life but not tonight', he told the audience at the Utilita Arena, insisting that 'nothing would keep me away from you'.
Jeff Lynne's songwriting abilities had been evident from his earliest days as part of a Birmingham group, The Idle Race, before accepting, in 1970, Roy Wood's invitation to join him and drummer Bev Bevan in The Move, who had enjoyed chart success with I Can Hear the Grass Grow, Blackberry Way, Flowers in the Rain and Fire Brigade.
'We stayed as The Move for a couple of years while we made this album, Electric Light Orchestra, which was what we'd decided to call it when me and Roy used to hang out at clubs in Birmingham and discussed this group with strings', Lynne told a 2012 BBC documentary, Mr Blue Sky: The Story of Jeff Lynne and ELO.
Music writer Mark Beaumont, in an article about ELO in a recent magazine publication, Ultimate Genre Guide: Soft Rock, describes how Wood and Lynne saw different chamber-rock possibilities in the Beatles' classic, Eleanor Rigby.
Lynne, he writes, 'particularly would take the orchestral tendencies of late-60s Beatles and Beach Boys and focus them into sci-fi melodies designed to dominate all earthly radio waves.'Electric Light Orchestra would come to represent the greatest sonic excesses of the soft-rock era, but they also brilliantly realised the logical endpoint of a journey begun by 'A Day in the Life' and Brian Wilson's teenage symphonies to God. [John] Lennon himself would describe them as 'Son of Beatles'.'
Beaumont notes that as The Move gradually wound down, it became something of a shell company for ELO. ELO's debut album, The Electric Light Orchestra, was released in 1971, opened with 10538 Overture and showed the full extent of Wood and Lynne's musical ambitions.
Wood, however, 'frustrated that his strings were inaudible during live shows', departed in 1973 to launch his latest project, Wizzard. This left Lynne as the sole producer and songwriter.
The next albums came at a steady pace, all of them bearing Lynne's distinctively melodic stamp: ELO2 and On the Third Day in 1973, Eldorado in 1974, Face the Music in 1975, A New World Record in 1976, and the ambitious double album, Out of the Blue, in 1977. Eldorado breached the Top 20 in the States.
A New World Record and Out of the Blue went Top 10 in the UK. Along the way there was a constant stream of captivating, bestselling singles: Roll Over Beethoven, Showdown, Ma-Ma-Belle, Evil Woman, Strange Magic, Livin' Thing, Telephone Line.
Reviewing an ELO concert in Madison Square Garden in 1977, a New York Times critic observed: 'The Electric Light Orchestra... is the most commercially successful of the classical rockers at the moment, and it's easy enough to hear why. The secret is that [it] incorporates its classical elements in as painless a manner as possible.'
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In 1978, the year after the ten-million-selling Out of the Blue, Lynne was interviewed by Melody Maker. The question was put to him: ELO has always thought in grand ideas. Was he finding it hard to come up with the goods? 'Not at all', he responded. 'I'm just eternally grateful that I can go into the studios and that people say 'There's a studio. Do what you want.' I mean. I find that f – unbelievable. We've done eight albums now and I just feel completely happy about everything.
'I don't find the inspiration harder to come by. Quite the opposite. I'm getting more excited now about this new album – the one we'll do next year – than anything I've ever done. I just want to get into the studio and do it, mix it and put everything down. I just love being in a recording studio. Absolutely love it. That's my forte, recording things. It's a great and exciting thing to do'.
The next album, Discovery (1979) saw the band embracing the disco sound that was then in vogue but nevertheless gave them their first UK number one album.
The band's sound evolved further in the Eighties, with such albums as Time, Secret Messages and Balance of Power. Time (1981), described by at least one critic as the band's best album in years, was a concept record about time-travel, and emulated Discovery in its UK chart position.
A fair-minded assessment in The Quietus online culture site in 2021, by David Bennun, described Time as 'a terrific, eccentric sci-fi electro/synth-pop album' - the headline said it was ELO's forgotten masterpiece - and wondered why Lynne had tended to overlook its songs when putting together concert set-lists.
ELO broke up in 1986 and apart from a brief flourish in 2000-2001 remained dormant until reforming as Jeff Lynne's ELO in 2014. Lynne had in the meantime joined the Travelling Wilburys supergroup with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison and Roy Orbison, and also produced albums for Harrison, amongst others. Harrison's son Dhani, incidentally, was to have been one of the support acts at Hyde Park tomorrow, alongside Steve Winwood and the Doobie Brothers.
Lynne was made an OBE in the 2020 Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to music, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in 2015. The band were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2017.
Had things worked out as planned, the final notes of the ELO classic, Mr Blue Sky, would have sent some 60,000 fans home happy at roughly 10.20pm tomorrow night. Sadly, it was not to be. "The legacy of the band and his longtime fans are foremost in Jeff's mind today – and while he is so sorry that he cannot perform, he knows that he must focus on his health and rehabilitation at this time", read the BST statement. Ticket holders will now be refunded.