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.

No Stairway? Denied!

Like finding the source of the Nile, identifying the true origins of pop music is not straightforward. We all know - or should know - that much of what we listen to today shares genetic code with the blues and its derivatives including jazz, rock and roll, country, gospel, R'n'B, soul, hip-hop and, of course, rock.

Identifying how these genres evolved would require a forensic examination of notes, scales, chord structures and all the things absolutely nobody is bothered with as teenagers posing in front of the bedroom mirror with a tennis racquet. What we do know, however, is that with every new iteration of the form as it developed out of spirituals sung in southern cotton fields to become the most important culture of the 20th century, and every teen transplanting his racquet for making an actual racket, that what came before has been infused in what came after.

All this said, it still baffles me how, given that there are only so many notes, octaves, chords and time signatures, we still get lawsuits by one songwriter claiming another has nicked their work. As early as 1954, Johnny Cash was forced to pay Gordon Jenkins $75,000 for the use of lyrics and even melody from Jenkins' Crescent City Blues which it was claimed found its way into Cash's Folsom Prison Blues.

Some cases are less obvious than others, some more so. For example, Jeff Lynne once tried to sue Paul Weller for allegedly stealing the descending guitar riff from ELO's 10538 Overture for Changin' Man. There's little doubt that the riffs in question are almost identical, but does that mean Weller went out of his way to steal from a band you would hardly charge him with as being an overt fan?

I'm no lawyer, but at what point do you prove a deliberate act of wanton plagiarism? Plus, while we're at it, you could argue that Lynne leaned heavily on The Beatles' Dear Prudence, given that the descending guitar motif is the same, just in a different tempo.

There are many, many more I could cite, and it's perhaps not surprising how often The Beatles would figure in such a list. Actually, I would argue that bands as varied as Oasis, The Chemical Brothers and Tears For Fears all dabbing their brushes at the Fab palette could be held guilty of musical pilferage, but then where does homage stop and petty larceny begin? After all, The Beatles themselves were once taken to task by rock'n'roll's pioneer, Chuck Berry, after his publishing company sued that Come Together contained elements of Berry's 1956 song You Can't Catch Me.

It's this assumption that playing the same set of notes, in the same or similar order, no matter how briefly, constitutes plagiarism. I've heard Sam Smith's Stay (not willingly, you'll understand) and not once did I think: "The scoundrel's gone and ripped off Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down" (co-written by Lynne, it should be mentioned). And, yet, Petty and Lynne have now been credited as co-writers of Smith's song because Petty's publishing company noticed "a likeness" between the songs. Even Petty himself didn't believed that Smith had ripped off his song willingly. The matter ended quite amicably, with Petty brushing the issue of as "these things happen". For their trouble, Petty and Lynne are now entitled to 12.5% of Stay's royalties. Not a bad result for one of the best-selling and most-played singles of the last couple of years.

There are, inevitably, examples of too much similarity going on for mere coincidence. Rod Stewart even held his hand up freely when Brazilian musician Jorge Ben took to the courts over a very distinct similarity between the chorus of If Ya Think I'm Sexy and his rootsy 1976 song Taj Mahal. While Stewart stressed that it hadn't been a cynical lift, he said: "Clearly the melody had lodged itself in my memory and then resurfaced. Unconscious plagiarism, plain and simple." Oasis may have fallen into the same trap when The New Seekers' noticed how similar Shakermaker was to their hippy-dippy Coke advertising I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing, a song from Noel Gallagher (and my) childhood. For that, they trousered $500,000.

But then we get to a case of blurred lines - literally. In March last year a California jury concluded that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines was too close - and therefore unlawfully close - to Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up, which resulted in the duo handing over $7.4 million to Gaye's family. At stake was the argument over whether Willams and Thicke copied Got To Give It Up notationally, or whether the production, vocals and overall vibe of the track were suitably similar to warrant the charge. Even now, it is still one that can be contested.

So step up Led Zeppelin and Stairway To Heaven, or specifically the distinctive notes picked out of an A Minor chord that, 45 years ago, Jimmy Page turned into the one of the most played riffs in guitar shops on Saturday afternoons the world over (alongside Smoke On The Water, of course). A US judge has ruled that Page and Zeppelin's Robert Plant will have to face a US jury trial over a claim that Stairway's opening chords were stolen from Taurus, a 1967 instrumental by the band Spirit, who toured with the British group at the end of the 1960s, when - it is alleged - they were exposed to the song.

The claim first surfaced in 1997 when Spirit's guitarist Randy California complained about the similarities in an interview, shortly before he drowned while attempting to rescue his son from difficulties in the sea off a Hawaii beach. His trustee Michael Skidmore decided to take up the case against Led Zeppelin, arguing California deserved a credit. Lengthily, this has now led to US District Judge Gary Klausner ruling that a jury could find "substantial" similarity between the sequences of Stairway and Taurus in question, which he called "arguably the most recognizable and important segments" of the songs.

Led Zeppelin have argued that the chords used were so "clichéd" that they did not deserve copyright protection, no doubt drawing on the oft-heard argument that it would be like copyrighting air. However, the judge, showing a certain degree of musical knowledge, ruled that: "While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure. What remains is a subjective assessment of the 'concept and feel' of two works ... a task no more suitable for a judge than for a jury."

And so Case No. 15-03462, "Skidmore v Led Zeppelin et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California" will open on May 10 with a jury of 12 asked to make thedecision. You can judge for yourself, below: certainly there's a tonal similarity between the songs, and the contested guitar sequences do share the same notes, but that to me would be like arguing that any song in the key of D Minor ("the saddest key of all"), is the same as another. In fact, if anything the Spirit sequence sounds more like Is There Anybody Out There? from Pink Floyd's The Wall (interestingly, many of Roger Waters' songs have been written on an acoustic guitar in this same key).

The issue, then, is always going to be one of subjectivity. The Pharell/Thicke case did at least examine the mechanics of the songs in question, while others have held up their hands to admit to the subconscious at work. But in the case of Stairway? I think the mighty Zeppelin have a very strong case for dismissal on their hands.

Barefootin' - Steven Wilson at Palais des Congrès de Paris

© Marjorie Coulin - https://www.facebook.com/marjoriecoulinphotography/

I don't want to get, like, all down and gloomy and stuff, but the beginning of 2016 has been utterly depressing for music fans. That having said, the deaths of Lemmy on December 28, David Bowie on January 10 and Glenn Frey eight days later, could have been accepted by the wider world as, simply, any other 70, 69 or 67-year-olds getting caught short by nature's cruelty.

The difference is that their passing has drawn attention to the inevitable dwindling of a generation of performers who came out of the post-Elvis, post-Beatles boom, and introduced us to 'event' music. The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick described this age as the "Twilight of the Rock Gods", forcing us to respect that those responsible for the music that defined the latter third of the 20th century won't be around forever, and that those who safely survived their 27th summer are now becoming old men.

And thus, we accept Paul McCartney's hair dye, Pete Townshend's deafness, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards' arthritic hands and even John Lydon reaching 60, as those of us who came of musical age in the 1970s and 1980s creep into our own fifth and sixth decades, with fond memories of buying their records and listening to them from start to finish as we embraced their enduring greatness, rather than a fleeting stardom.

Luckily, however, there are still plenty of acts out there who continue to resist the lazy acceptance that we live in a Spotify age and "the kids today" are only interested in Autotuned singles streamed for as long as their attention span allows.

Because, thankfully, there are still artists like Steven Wilson who take time to write and record songs with the highest application of craftsmanship, who care about how it is packaged and presented, and who believe in putting on shows that leave the audience departing from the venue having been emotionally, aurally and visually satisfied. No surprise, then, that the 48-year-old Wilson is someone who grew up in an era when buying, say, ELO's Out Of The Blue, wasn't regarded as an ironic guilty pleasure, but an all-embracing experience, of which the music and artwork were all part and parcel of the same theatre.

Having been writing and recording professionally since he was 15, Wilson has built up a formidable reputation in the industry, via his band Porcupine Tree, and via myriad side projects that have spanned everything from industrial European metal to ambient drone music, as well as being entrusted by King Crimson, Yes, Tears For Fears, XTC and others to produce surround sound remixes of their classic recordings.

While he has been saddled with the "prog rock" label for much of his career, Wilson's most recent albums in particular - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), last year's Hand. Cannot. Erase and its recently released coda, the "mini album" 4½ - have demonstrated a arch talent for material that would give Coldplay or U2 a run for their money, in terms of melodicism, musicianship, textures and, yes, even hooks.

'Prog' is, in any case, a gross misnomer. Bowie was prog. Sgt. Pepper was arguably the birth of prog. But at some point in time 'prog' became a label with an angle. A recent review in The Guardian said that Wilson is "so progressive that much of his material doesn’t sound very prog at all". Well, exactly. What does 'prog' really mean when you actually listen to the music? With Wilson, the difference is that he simply doesn't get regarded in the same breath as Chris Martin, Dave Grohl or Bono.

But whether Wilson is merely accepting or tolerant of his status, it seems to pass him without obvious  concern. He has spent long enough being successful without being fashionable, respected by peers and even many of those now who created the very ground that Wilson treads. This, he does noticeably without socks and shoes on the stages of venues like the Palais des Congrès, a vast auditorium contained within a multipurpose concrete structure comprising a shopping mall and corporate exhibition space a single-kilometre straight walk down Avenue de la Grande Armée from the Arc de Triomphe.

As someone who takes the risk of tetanus or worse in his stride by performing barefoot Wilson is a remarkably grounded individual, and clearly contented to dance to his own tunes. The very antithesis of manic rock star diva, his philosophy is driven by a love of music - listening to it, collecting it, writing it, recording it, performing it. Not only has this brought him into close proximity of the very legends who inspired him to begin with, but has given him the respect to draw on the cream of session players for his albums and tours.

And thus, for this, his umpteenth solo tour since putting Porcupine Tree on hiatus in 2010, Wilson has gathered around him longtime stalwarts Nick Beggs on bass and Adam Holtzman on keyboards, Dave Kilminster on lead guitar and the supremely talented Craig Blundell on drums, a relative newomer to the Wilson gang. I strongly advise you to look them all up on Google to see just what sort of quality Wilson can attract to his side.

With Wilson there are no distractions of warm-up bands. After a very classy and respectful compilation of Bowie songs as the audience takes their seats, noticeably reflecting the early and Berlin eras of The Dame's career, the show is split into two parts - the first half comprised of Hand. Cannot. Erase. in its entirety, and then a second half featuring odds and sods from Porcupine Tree as well as the 4½. 

The Hand. Cannot. Erase. album - easily Wilson's most successful to date, and rightly so - followed a common construct of his by being losely based around a concept, the story of Joyce Carol Vincent, a London woman who died alone in her flat but whose body wasn't discovered for almost three years. This may sound very dark, but the album played with the variety of Wilson's songwriting. 1 First Regret 3 Years On acts like a traditional orchestral overture, building from video of an east European housing estate and sound effects of children playing to an emerging, pulsing sequenced tone, that cues a surging blast of guitar, that settles down to a beautiful melodic section of Wilson's voice and Kilminster's jangling Telecaster.

As the 'album' progresses, Wilson's knack for both pop and indie hooks is underlined. Hand. Cannot. Erase. chugs busily along, with epic, sweeping finishes, before the the voice of Kathryn Jenkins is heard over a drum machine, intoning 80s alt references like Dead Can Dance and This Mortal Coil, as the haunting opening of Perfect Life, a song equally between this very mechanical introduction and a beautiful chorus arrangement of Wilson and Beggs' voices in harmony, with Holtzman, Kilminster and Blundell providing a huge bed underneath it.

© Simon Poulter 2016

For Routine we are introduced to the Israeli singer/actress Ninet Tayeb, acting out the song's kitchen sink drama with Wilson as a duet. Tayeb (a connection of Wilson's via his work with Israeli superstar Aviv Geffen) returns to the 'story' intermittently, in between full-on band workouts and more gentler passages of the song.

In this piece alone any newcomer to Wilson's work would experience what I think his music is all about - a tapestry of light and shade, gentle vocals and epic blasts of hard rock, and a hairs-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck impact that leaves you wanting a sitdown.

It's easy to understand why journalists have bluntly branded Wilson a fan of Genesis, and he'll hate me for pointing this out, but there is much about the Hand. Cannot. Erase. album that is reminiscent, in a respectful way, of A Trick Of The Tail or Wind And Wuthering. He certainly knows Genesis (and even contributed to Steve Hackett's Genesis Revisited II album), but the influence is more infused than deliberate. Small things, such as the 12-string sound at the end of Routine, Beggs' work high up the neck of his bass on Perfect Life, or the ever-changing topography that on paper sounds mad but made real comes together with a breathtaking landscape.

With Home Invasion Regret #9, however, the band thunders into heavier territory, with complex guitar riffs, Holtzman letting his jazz keyboard chops rip as he leads the band into a funky groove, and Blundell opening up the traps by lending a very satisfying 'voice' to the rhythm.

Things calm down considerably with the acoustic-led Transience and Ancestral, with its 'Massive Attack-meets-60s spy film' vibe, before the first half is completed - as the album does - with the Happy Returns - Ascendent -- Here On arc, and its emotionally charged finale that closes the story.

Wilson may not possess a rock star ego, thankfully (and indeed none of his troupe, either), he nonetheless conforms to character by emerging from the interval with a generously-proportioned, Dude-sized White Russian in one hand to open the second half with Drag Ropes, a track from the 2012 debut album of Storm Corrosion, Wilson's project with Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt. In the excellent (if slighty sterile) ambience of the auditorium, it jumps about from pastoral choral passages to folky bits, accopanied by an extremely spooky animated video in the style of those Czechoslovakian films they used to show during schools programming on the BBC.

Next, Porcupine Tree's delightfully grungy Open Car noticeably gets some of the balding, greying scalps of the Parisian audience nodding in head banging-lite, before Wilson returns to his solo material and, first, My Book Of Regrets from the 4½ package, followed by the compelling Index and it's disturbing theme of an unhinged individual who collect "things"...

Wilson then returns vicariously to his tribute to David Bowie by performing Lazarus - his own song by that name, not Bowie's now meaning-laden track, but one with an uncanny reference to Bowie himself. It won't be the last Bowie nod of the evening, either, as Wilson and Tayeb later duet faithfully on Space Oddity as a further tribute, with Holtzman and Kilminster adding wonderfully respectful touches on organ and guitar, to render the audience in rapturous appreciation. Despite its apparent simplicity, Space Oddity is far from easy to pull off without sounding like a bad school concert cover. Since trying it out for the first time on the German leg of his tour, Wilson & Co absolutely nail it.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Tayeb returns for Don’t Hate Me, a song originally recorded by Porcupine Tree in 1998 and reproduced on the 4½ album as a call-and-response duet between Wilson and the Israeli singer. It's another rock-solid example of how it's hard to understand how Wilson has been largely ignored by the mainstream music media, including radio. It is followed by Vermillioncore, another 4½ track, and a thundering instrumental, one that wouldn't be out of place on a film soundtrack. If you've ever listened to the soundtrack album for Heat, you'll understand how Wilson's sense of the cinematic wouldn't be out of place in a film.

For all his absence from daytime radio, cover features in Q or Uncut, or showcase appearances on Jools Holland's Later..., there is little in Wilson's latterday catalogue that warrants references to obscurity. That said, there is nothing that suggests Wilson has compromised on what he loves for the sake of being more commercial. It's just, whether he knows it or not, he is, today, and I suspect always has been, gifted with a knack for combining rock and melody, sometimes in an unusual way, but never in a way that justifies the mystification generated by Wilson's lack of stratospheric stardom.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The final two songs underlined this perfectly. The Sound Of Muzak, a track from Porcupine Tree's In Absentia album, has the sort of energy that propelled Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden to their stadium-consuming greatness - anthemic without being bombastic, audience-inviting without prompting pop god cheese.

Wilson closes the show with a song that, I notice, genuinely moves people to tears: The Raven That Refused To Sing, title track of his well received third solo album which was a collection of seven elongated songs built around Edgar Allen Poe-like stories of the supernatural. Illustrated by another powerful film by animator Jess Cope, The Raven live tells a ghostly story of sibling loss with eminent grace, but also with a controlled sense of epic, building to its closing chorus of "Sing to me raven, I miss her so much. Sing to me Lily, I miss you so much" with the entire ensemble playing to their limit, leaving everyone in the Palais des Congrès - band included - emotionally spent but supremely satisfied.

Save for a 15-minute interval, Wilson and his band have been on stage for close to three hours. It's as strong a reflection of Wilson's work ethic as everything.

If, to follow Neil McCormick's hypothesis, we are now in the twilight of the rock gods, we shouldn't forget that there are those, like Wilson, who will be following, bringing with them the same investment in their work, never stopping recording, never stopping touring, applying themselves on others projects and side activities of their own.

This is how it always used to be. So glad that someone is keeping this particular torch aflame.