(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 3 January 2026 19:15, UK
There aren’t many pieces of rock and roll history that Jeff Lynne wasn’t able to master.
As much as he loved going back to his favourite Beatles records for inspiration, there are often those few pieces of ELO’s discography that have taken the best from everything from pop to classical music to progressive rock bombast and turned them into classic tunes. Lynne could do a lot of things so long as he had the right tools at his disposal, but sometimes a song is simply too perfect for him to be able to add anything to it.
Then again, it’s not like Lynne couldn’t take songs in his own unique direction whenever he performed. The ELO version of ‘Johnny B Goode’ sounds absolutely nothing like what Chuck Berry had started out with back in the day, and yet, for a band that seemed to be a space-age version of what rock and roll was intended to be, it fits surprisingly well with the rest of their discography as a trip through the musical cosmos.
A lot of that came from him trying to use the studio as an instrument the same way that his idols did, but there’s a lot more to be said about someone who could make a song that put all the greatest hooks in the world together in one place. ‘Mr Blue Sky’ might be one of the more impressive productions Lynne ever came up with, but outside of the lavish production behind everything, what makes it one of the finest songs of their career is because of how well it sounded when played on the piano.
That kind of knack for hooks was what endeared him to The Beatles when making their new songs for The Anthology, but when Lynne decided to fly solo, he was looking to do something much different in the 2010s. He had his own perfect solo record with Armchair Theatre, but Long Wave was his excuse to work outside of his comfort zone and bring in the kind of songs that he had heard as a kid.
And for someone who had been known for purely rock and roll, Lynne’s voice works shockingly well over these arrangements. It was going to take a while for his brand of rock to translate over to easy listening, but his takes on tunes like ‘Beyond the Sea’ sound perfect, especially since his voice hadn’t lost an ounce of shine since the days of Out of the Blue. But given the standards he set for himself on that record, he figured it would be one of the most boneheaded moves for him to match what Nat King Cole did on ‘Smile.’
The song is among one of the best vocal performances Cole ever made, so the only way Lynne could think about it was to reimagine it in his own way, saying, “I wasn’t going to worry about who sang it before. The arrangements on that original were big and fluffy and flowery – not that that was a bad thing, especially in those days. But I couldn’t do it like that. So again, I had to get the chords down and just simplify it, more like a pop song than a big epic.”
To his credit, the version that Lynne does actually manage to sound pretty good, even with the song’s lineage in the back of everyone’s mind. There have been other versions of the song done by people like Michael Jackson, but there’s a certain innocence that Lynne captures in his version that feels much more authentic to what he did back in the day than trying to outright copy what the legends did.
But maybe that’s why he got so much respect from his peers back in the day. Anyone could have tried making their own version of their favourite songs, but even if you could hear The Beatles’ influence dripping off of Lynne, he wasn’t going to try and make a carbon copy of their sound. They had given him a template, and he was left to carry on in his own way on whatever record he was making.
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