If you’re trying to remember what happened between Jeff Lynne and his earliest partners in the classic-ized Electric Light Orchestra—itself a tear-off from the pre-glam pop of the Move—don’t bother. By the time you work out all of their offshoots, firings, buyouts and lost albums, Jeff Lynne’s ELO will be gone. Its current tour, titled “Over And Out,” is promised to be its last.
That’s a shame, as Lynne’s revival of the Beatles-ish ELO brand (re-started in 2001) yielded that same year’s Zoom that managed to feature actual Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr (Lynne produced Paul McCartney’s Flaming Pie and worked on the Fab Four’s late-Lennon song “Free As A Bird”), along with sterling dance/prog/pop albums such as 2015’s Alone In The Universe and 2019’s From Out Of Nowhere. Lynne’s high-flying compositions and lonely spaceboy lyrics still had teeth and bite in its latter-day iterations.
But with longtime Lynne collaborator/multi-instrumentalist Richard Tandy having passed away earlier this year, perhaps ELO’s centerpiece is ever-so-slightly disconnected from the stringed work Lynne’s been creating since 1970. (1968 if you count his time with Roy Wood and the Move.) To some extent—without insulting the epic contagion of Jeff Lynne’s ELO’s musical output at the Wells Fargo Center—you could sense that disconnect within the portrayal of its hit catalog within 90 minutes.
I don’t know the status of Lynne’s health or well-being—and, we all get older, assholes, because the opposite to that is death. But the 76-year-old Lynne did move more slowly and sing more softly than in 2019 (the last of his tours with ELO) as well as allow his additional guitarists to take his leads and other vocalists to enrich his phrasing. Then again, between a full head of hair and what seemed to be a lineless face, Lynne looked great.
The music itself, however—opulent, winged, deeply earworm-y melodic in ways you may have forgotten from your FM-radio childhood—had little inner life or (com)union within—or among—its players in its occasionally rote execution.
That said, the uplifting orchestration on “Evil Woman” and “Turn To Stone” (a chamber trio worked the strings) and the swing of its rhythms (bassist Lee Pomeroy, drummer Donavan Hepburn) propelling the groove on “Showdown” and the ABBA-like disco of “Last Train To London” were joyful rewards. The re-production of every little signature click, buzz and boing of Lynne’s recorded output—the clavichord shuffle of “Evil Woman,” the cheesy synth doodle on “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”—allowed your unnamed seat mate a chance to act out their keyboard fantasies. And my guess is that Philadelphia’s second night of a sold-out crowd never felt a thing as they enthusiastically applauded every hit.
Plus, there was genuine passion to be found throughout the set in surprising ways. Along with operatic background vocalist Melanie Lewis-McDonald doing her Madame Butterfly finest across the chugging “Rockaria!” her singing partner Iain Hornal filled in Lynne’s high notes spectacularly. Then again, Lynne didn’t need any help essaying the lyrical dreams and freedoms of “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” in its lovelorn-ballad form. He sounded dramatically sad and lost within his fantasy—that’s skill. And forging forward with a concise, sharp set of rarities and classics, from the Move’s “Do Ya” to the hammering “Don’t Bring Me Down” to soaring encore “Mt. Blue Sky,” too, is no simple feat.
What was lost in this live version of Jeff Lynne’s ELO and its missing inner life was gained in precision, its surprise bouts of passion and a history of compositional craft that won’t likely be equaled.
—A.D. Amorosi; photos by Chris Sikich
