Guilty as charged: Jeff Lynne’s ELO at the O2 Arena

Picture: Jeff Lynne/Carsten Windhorst

Being, obviously, a metropolitan elitist, I’ve never fully understood those cultish British provincial practices like line dancing. Quite what makes folk living in, say, Droitwich want to dress up as farming types from the great American frontier before driving home in a Vauxhall Astra is genuinely baffling. But, then, this is clearly a somewhat snobbish statement on, basically, people having fun. Same goes for those who dress - still - as teddy boys, mods, rockers, headbangers or any other sub-culture deemed uncool by tastemakers. They’re having fun, it’s harmless and most of these pastimes are, at heart, celebrations of music. I defy all but the most curmudgeonly to not go to a party and singalong to classic pop, to Hey Jude or Club Tropicana or, I don’t know, you name it, so these purveyors of guilty pleasures are entitled to knock themselves out to whatever is their thing.

If I was to be a little critical, the problem with patronising a music cult is that they are, for the most part, self-satisfying and comforting. You want to hear the hits that made the genre your own, you want to test your ageing memory by singing along (or, in that tradition of Dad participating, at least mumbling along to an approximation). Thus, the entire reason we were at the O2 Arena last night was for Jeff Lynne’s ELO to deliver an hour-and-a-half of the familiar. Nothing else. No “here’s a suite of thematically-linked songs from our new album”. No thank you. Such is our affinity with Lynne’s ELO work that I could have just posted the set list here and you'd get a pretty good idea of the evening. No shocks, no surprises, and not much experimentation, either. This was, as Lynne’s musical director/guitarist Mike Stevens explained during the band introductions, “a celebration of the man who wrote all the songs, Jeff Lynne”.

You will notice that this was “Jeff Lynne’s ELO”, not “Jeff Lynne” or “ELO”. Legalities, no doubt, have played a part here. The ‘classic’ ELO line-up of Lynne, Bev Bevan, Richard Tandy, Kelly Groucutt, Mik Kaminski and others is long gone. But, then, after Roy Wood left the band at its outset, it largely became Lynne’s own entity. Lynne himself has always been something of a musical brand in his own right, with his writing and production for ELO almost indistinguishable from his production work with the surviving Beatles or The Travelling Wilburys. This is underlined by the latter’s Handle With Care being seamlessly segwayed between ELO’s Livin’ Thing and Rockaria!, and Do Ya from Lynne and Roy Wood’s ELO predecessor The Move the sandwich filling between Showdown and When I Was A Boy.

For the most part, this was an extended version of the Glastonbury heritage slot, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Even the snippiest of Glasto patrons have lapped up sets from Barry Gibb or Nile Rogers’ Chic, putting cynicism and even irony aside to just have a good old singalong. And so Lynne’s extraordinary history of hits kept coming: Evil Woman, All Over The World, Last Train To London (somewhat inappropriate yesterday if you’d been trying to get to Paddington…), a particularly rocky 10538 Overture (with that guitar riff shamelessly plundered by Paul Weller on Changingman), Shine A Little Love, Wild West Hero, Sweet Talkin' Woman, Telephone Line, Don't Bring Me Down, Turn To Stone… Of course, this was about nostalgia - these were songs from mid-70s albums like Eldorado, A New World Record, Out Of The Blue and Discovery that were part of my musical upbringing. ELO were, then, a band lumped in with prog giants of the time like Genesis, perhaps due to their conceptual album artwork but also because they were pretty unique. Even now, thinking about last night’s show, I can’t think of another rock band to combine orchestral instruments, 4/4 disco, Beatley melodies and rock and roll traditions and not come out like some awful end-of-pier novelty act. Perhaps that is, then the absolute definition of 'guilty pleasure'.

If there’s one ELO song that captures that phrase perfectly, it’s Mr. Blue Sky, the closest Lynne ever got to recreating Sgt. Pepper. Frankly, I would have paid to hear Mr. Blue Sky alone. I’m not ashamed. As it turned out, save for an apparently obligatory encore of Roll Over Beethoven (before which, much of the late-middle age audience had already started heading for the pre-drive home toilets), Lynne could have left it at that. This had been a perfect evening’s music, performed fastidiously by the 12-piece backing band. Even if muso types had hoped for a little variation, Lynne stuck to the script and delivered largely what, over the last 48 years, ELO had committed to record. Lynne himself is a slightly odd character: visually, he looks no different than he did in the 70s, with that shaggy mop of hair and the aviator sunglasses (I once came across a photograph of Lynne without those glasses - it was profoundly weird). Audience interaction was kept to a bare medium - no Phil Collins-style banter or Paloma Faith gobbiness. Just a jukebox evening of songs I now realise are hard wired into my consciousness. And all the more enjoyable for it.

A journalist once described ELO as “arguably the most uncool, even defiantly anti-cool, of the lot”, and if you had to examine that statement, he was probably right. But sometimes, what’s wrong with that? After all, one man’s Mr. Blue Sky is another’s Achy Breaky Heart.