MR BLUE SKY
JEFF Lynne arrives a few minutes late for the interview, which comes as a surprise. Fastidious would be one word to describe the venerable songwriter, arranger, producer and singer. Casually dressed in pressed jeans, a blue bomber jacket, blue shirt and Vans trainers, he walks into a suite at The Victorian – a clubby hotel in Santa Monica – apologising for his tardiness. It’s only a half hour drive from Jeff Lynne’s home high in the Santa Monica mountains, where he has lived in a rambling Spanish colonial since 1995, but he got snagged in today’s lunchtime traffic. You sense such a delay – although only 20 minutes, no great shakes – is anathema to an artist as careful and precise as Lynne.
“I’ll sit here,” he says, pulling a chair towards him. “I can hear you better. This is my good ear.” He indicates to the left side of his head. “It’s from having infections when I was young,” he explains. “I have to wear [an in-ear apparatus] on stage because you don’t have any monitors on the floor, you see. It comes straight up your back and then you plug ’em in. I’ve been using them for about five years now. Since I started playing live again.”
He is referring, of course, to Jeff Lynne’s ELO, inaugurated in 2014 and the latest remarkable iteration of the band he co-founded with fellow Brummies Roy Wood and Bev Bevan in 1970. The band’s history since is often complicated and soapy; it includes various separations, reformations, rifts and lawsuits. Along the way, though, ELO sold over 50 million records worldwide – pioneering grand, musical fantasias involving mythical cities, wild west outlaws and moon tourism. “Some of them were a bit silly, yeah,” he concedes now. “But they were fun and lots of people liked them.” But such self-deprecation is typical of Lynne, who has always seemed a reluctant star. “I had no real plans to do any more ELO after we stopped in 1986,” he admits. “I disbanded it because
