1. Electric Light OrchestraFace The Music
When I was sixteen, my parents went on holiday to Greece, leaving me with some money for use in an emergency. I went to Andy’s Records in Lancaster and bought a gold-plated CD of ELO’s Face The Music along with the Labyrinth soundtrack. The rest of the money went on alcohol at the Water Witch and I woke up the following morning on the bathroom floor covered in vomit and wearing a t-shit and a tie.
Actually I already had copies of all the ELO albums on vinyl since my earliest years. So formative was ELO’s presence in my life as a boy that the concept of Jeff Lynne held at least as equal a weight and centrality to human existence as the concept of a car or a cauliflower. Plato might say that there is a Form of Jeff Lynne. Even the Jet Records label logo has a magic about it on the turntable. In truth I could have picked any of their albums from On The Third Day to Time as they are all fabulous but I have a particular soft spot for the mid-70s sound, just after Kelly Groucutt had joined but before they got massive with Out Of The Blue. It’s quite strange music but they managed to reach that huge level of success. I think it’s probably what I subconsciously want One More Grain to be like eventually.
I spend a lot of time reading comments about ELO on YouTube. There was a cracker recently. A woman said, in earnest, that Jeff Lynne’s voice on ‘Do Ya’ spoke to her on some primal level and commanded her to start a family with him. I often wonder what I would think of Jeff Lynne if I were a heterosexual female.
