(Credits: Far Out / Jeff Lynne)
Tue 9 December 2025 16:30, UK
Jeff Lynne and the concert stage haven’t always made for the best combination.
The music of ELO is gargantuan and deserved to be heard in the largest venues in the world, but if you look at all of the machinery that goes into getting every single person on that stage, it must be a headache for the musical mastermind to even entertain the idea of going back out on the road. That being said, just because Lynne was a child of the studio didn’t mean he couldn’t still appreciate a killer live show.
After all, the greatest rock and roll bands of all time have crushed it before they even made it to the studio. Elvis Presley was already known for shaking his ass and making people melt at the mere sight of him whenever he got onstage, and before Lynne started following every move The Beatles made in Abbey Road Studios, they were a scrappy bar band willing to entertain anyone and everyone that they came across.
But when looking through all of Lynne’s greatest songs, there’s always that certain energy that comes with listening to a live rock and roll band. Not everyone can claim to have success as an opera singer every time they go on tour, but a song like ‘Rockaria’ works all the better when you have the glorious soprano voice over the top of every section to announce those roaring Chuck Berry guitars.
It was inventive when Lynne did it, but it wasn’t something that Pete Townshend considered new. He had been known for blowing out the speakers of any venue that The Who would be booked for, and judging the Marshall cabinets that were behind him, he wasn’t necessarily interested in playing nice with any of the other musical acts that dared take the stage before or after.
Even if Townshend was trying to make high art, that didn’t stop the band from getting louder every single time they played. Many people would have found that comfortable middle ground halfway through their career, but if Keith Moon taught the band anything, it’s that subtlety is for the weak, and from the minute that you listen to Live At Leeds, you can practically feel the sizzle coming from the mix with every single guitar stab and drum hit.
Lynne had wanted to protect his ears for the studio, but even he had to admit that there was nothing that was going to top The Who in a live setting, saying, “Did I ever catch them back in the day? Yeah! The loudest bloody thing I’ve ever heard in my life! They struck up and went BLAAANG! and your earholes would go WOOOOM! and you couldn’t hear a fucking thing! Gradually you could start hearing them again. It was really exciting to hear that when you’re a kid. And the tunes they played were so great. It was beautiful. Fantastic!”
Anyone else would have played as loud as possible like that and called it a day, but the whole reason why people stayed was due to Townshend’s songwriting. Tommy was a stroke of genius, and with that kind of sonic force behind them tearing through songs like ‘See Me Feel Me’ or ‘Go to the Mirror’, they turned the rock band into the modern equivalent of an orchestra, each of them trying their best to paint the picture of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid in front of the audience.
Lynne may not have been nearly as animated as Townshend was whenever he started making his greatest records, but he was never designed to. The Who managed to get the job done with both spectacle and songwriting, but Lynne wanted to create little images in the listener’s mind that they wouldn’t soon forget after taking the needle off the vinyl. He wasn’t recreating a trip to space onstage, but sometimes the music is enough.
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