Welcome back Mr Blue Sky

Good things come to those who wait. And I had to wait more that 30 years to catch a musical hero doing his thing live. Was it worth it?

Some time in the early 1980s, me and a couple of friends had cycled into the slightly rough end of a nearby town, and were zipping around a block of garages in a high-speed game of “tag” – we didn’t have mobile phones then, so we had to find other ways of entertaining ourselves.

Around a corner was a vandalised car. Some cassette tapes were scattered around on the ground, shiny-brown contents blowing around like synthetic grass, broken free of their cases by cruel stamping.

One of them was pretty much intact, with just a few feet of tape flapping in the breeze. On it was a swirly logo consisting of three letters: ELO.

I sort of knew ELO – I’d heard their late 70s stuff as I started getting interested in music. The album was “Time”, and – dexterous use of a screwdriver, Stanley knife and slivers of sticky tape later - I had a working cassette, with a noticeable jump where I’d had to trim a bit of mangled tape.

It’s still one of my all-time favourite albums. I even made a (truly awful) plate to represent one of the songs in pottery class at school. The tape managed about 20 years, before I finally replaced it with the CD version.

By that stage, I’d long since brought the albums that followed it, and worked backwards to the early 70s prog beginnings, when the hair was big, the lyrics baffling and the glossy production noticeably absent.

It all went quiet for ELO fans after 1986. The man behind the band, Jeff Lynne, disappeared behind the mixing desk for his friends and heroes such as George Harrison, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison, even forming the supergroup The Travelling Wilburys with those three and Bob Dylan.

A solo album was followed by silence for more than a decade. A brief attempt at a tour around a new ELO album in 2001 faltered, and it was another 11 years until a covers album.

During the empty years, a band consisting of a revolving door of former members went on the road as ELO Part II, but without the key ingredient – the man in the shades who wrote the songs, sang them, played guitar and produced them.

Then, in September 2014, Jeff was back for a one off gig in Hyde Park – and the reaction was fantastic. 2015 saw a new album and the announcement of tour.

At 68, Jeff is back on the road, playing to rapturous audiences. True, the fans are largely unable to understand the camera settings on phones, so the reverse of many a bald head gets illuminated as they try and grab a photo of their hero, but the euphoric response seems to the same everywhere ELO goes, despite most seats working out at more than £1 per minute. Nostalgia isn’t cheap.

The songs are amazing. The light show is dazzling. The new songs feel like classics. The old songs feel like a joyful re-acquaintance with a best friend you haven’t seen for years. Mr Blue Sky makes you happy in a way you’d forgotten you could be.

Old me remembers youthful me and that cassette. The troubles of the world are forgotten for a while.

Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Live. Manchester. 10th April 2016.

It was worth the wait.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 22nd of April 2016.

Still nothing on their website, though. I did submit the image above with the column, but it didn't make the print edition, although squeezed down to just a couple of inches wide, it wouldn't have looked that great. Maybe I should have sent the logo one instead...

The gig was, and will remain, one of the greatest events of my life. Whilst I suspect that nothing will ever quite top seeing Queen at Wembley in 1986 whilst still in my teens, no other concert experience has even got close before this. Thanks, Jeff. Really.

Yes, I did buy a T-shirt.

Once again, this column had to be edited down to fit the paper's requirements - what you have here is the full, 80+ words too long, version.

(A break from the CD A-Z today. Currently listening to the Original Television Soundtrack for Doctor Who Series 8, by Murray Gold.)

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