Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra - Before and After

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It’s unusual that an album manages to be at once so much of its moment, yet so much outside it. Time was unmistakably a response to the electronic and synth waves that rose in the wake of punk. It was also a concept album about time travel, which couldn’t have been more pre-punk had it been focus-grouped that way. According to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s book The Time Traveller’s Almanac (2013, or so it claims), it is – surprisingly – “the first major concept album devoted entirely to time travel”. The VanderMeers note, “it only makes sense that the 80s bands most conversant with time travel were comprised of actual 70s holdovers”. Certainly, you can see why, at the dawn of the 1980s, the idea of a man trapped in an age not his own would resonate, even if subconsciously, with a bandleader accustomed to performing mega-gigs with an in-house string section from a giant spaceship rig. Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra: Before and After is a biography about ELO frontman and mastermind Jeff Lynne. The book does a nice job anthologizing Lynne's beginnings as a Birmingham guitarist in critically-acclaimed but commercially-unsuccessful Idle Race to his status as the creative director and producer of England's successful orchestral pop outfit, Electric Light Orchestra.

And I'm absolutely 100% delighted with the exclusive stories, pictures and the fascinating tales Dave has to tell here.There are three original band members of the Electric Light Orchestra. These are songwriters/instrumentalists Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, as well as drummer Bev Bevan. The one criticism I did have mainly stemmed from the fact that I would have preferred that van der Kiste relinquished some of the passages about critical reception in favor of some more inside stories of Jeff Lynne's various works. At times, the prose came off a little more dense and a little less anecdotal than I like my nonfiction--though this may be down to personal preference. Apart from Bev Bevan's 'The Electric Light Orchestra Story' (from 1980) I believe this is the only book written by someone who has been a member of ELO. And strictly speaking, Bev's tome wasn't actually an autobiography ...which make's 'Patterns In The Chaos' a pretty unique publication in my view.

Great Lost Albums become lost for all manner of reasons. Commercial failure on release. Accidents of timing. A label or distributor going bust. Plain collective forgetfulness. But it's hard to think of many that are lost because, despite being successful in their day, they are then consigned to the memory hole by their still popular creators. In truth, I can think of only one. This is it. When I wrote and recorded these songs originally, I never would have expected the fantastic audience response all these years later; it’s amazing.’ – Jeff Lynne When I wrote and recorded these songs originally, I never would have expected the fantastic audience response all these years later; it’s amazing.’– Jeff Lynne

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They became regulars on famed British TV show Top of the Pops, and had the first ever single to be played on BBC Radio 1. Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Roy s replacement in the Nightriders, Jeff Lynne, had formed a band of his own - The Idle Race - taking Lynne s musical vision into more psychedelic territories. These two brilliant songwriters were also close friends, and Wood persuaded Lynne to join the Move followed by a new project, the Electric Light Orchestra, before a parting of the ways led to Wood forming Wizzard.