(Credits: Far Out / Jet Records / ELO)
Mon 8 December 2025 18:30, UK
The author Graham Greene once wrote, “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.” For many of us, that’s the moment when you realise that music isn’t just something to wallpaper over a background of silence. Jeff Lynne has never forgotten the moment it changed his world.
The working-class lad from Birmingham was a quiet observer of a family conversation when something pricked his ears, not that you could tell beneath his thatch of fuzzy hair. A good half a century later, he can still recall it all with the stirring clarity of a Charles Dickens novel, though the content differs rather wildly.
“The first time I ever heard ‘Only The Lonely’ on the radio was…,” Lynne remains so flabbergasted that he runs out of words in his recollection. “I couldn’t believe it,” he told Record Collector about the Roy Orbison classic from 1960. “My mum and my auntie said, ‘Ooh, he’s so sexy, he is!’ I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’. Not that I knew anything about it – I was 12 or 13.”
However, he was quite certain that there was something about this music that he wasn’t quite old enough to fully understand. Yet he was thrilled by the precipice of depth that it presented. He dived right in. Roy Orbison was now his enigmatic hero. The perturbing music he made was his mystic North Star to adulthood.
As Lynne added, “They’re going, ‘Ooh, but he’s too sexy… I don’t like it’. And I went, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’ And it was. Probably still is. Pure magic.” The song had moved him beyond measure. The door to his future was now ajar. As a happy accident, he’d secured his first guitar about a year earlier. Now he was determined to use it.
Maybe what he recognised in Orbison’s anthem was expression’s ability to heal. While Orbison would face plenty of tragedies in his life, music always remained a vehicle to catharsis. As he put it himself in an interview with NME, “I’ve always been very content when I wrote all those songs.”
Orbison added, “By this I’m saying that a lot of people think you have to live through something before you can write it, and that’s true in some cases, but I remember the times that I was unhappy or discontent, and I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t communicate, and I certainly couldn’t write a song, no way. All the songs I wrote that were successful were written when I was in a contented state of mind.”
That sentiment provides a beautiful counterpoint to ‘Only the Lonely’. It’s simultaneously one of the saddest songs ever written, and yet there’s an undercurrent of bouted artistry that can inspire young teenagers, and set aunties gossiping about sex appeal. It’s orchestral to a showtune nth yet as humble as pop played by one man and his piano.
In short, Lynne’s future Wilburys buddy conveys a hell of a lot in a few simple minutes, and Lynne has been trying to emulate that sentiment ever since. As he said of his own musical ethos, “I take pretty complicated stuff and simplify the hell out of it.”
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