ELO E.L.O. – 18/10/2018 – O2 Arena

Two years after their last gigs at the O2, Jeff Lynne’s ELO revival were back, without original keyboard player Richard Tandy but with otherwise the same band and essentially the same set-list as in April 2016. That month I saw them twice, and the second night was essentially the same as the first, except for one song, and me being in Row G! This year I was half way back on the first block, which is still pretty good.
As I’ve said before, ELO were a favourite band of my childhood. The idea of a string section being part of the band, rather than just session musicians brought into the studio gave them a legitimacy I wouldn’t offer other pop music. What confused me was that the band of ‘Shine A Little Love’ and ‘Diary of Horace Wimp’ was the same band whose cover of ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ was on my favourite compilation cassette for playing in the car on long journeys. The difference was Roy Wood, who after a couple of ELO albums headed off to revisit the sound of The Move by forming Wizzard and penning a Christmas novelty hit. The post-Wood ELO was purely Jeff Lynne’s backing band, and allowed him to indulge his Beatles fixation as a producer and create a decade of pop masterpieces.
For the gig I was joined by Drew who spent the day limbering up with a cassette (!) of ‘A New World Record’. Can’t argue with that. We had a meal and some drinks and made our way into the arena to catch the support act. Whoever he was, we lasted a verse of ‘earnest young bloke with piano’ before I declared the bar to be more entertaining.
One beer later we headed down to our seats. As the audience were filling in, the ELO spaceship bobbed around the top of the video screens like a nervous puppy.
Lights out, heads up, and here come the band. They kicked off with the intro to ‘Concerto for a Rainy Day’. Interesting, I thought – plays side 3 of Out of The Blue and get ‘Mr Blue Sky’ out of the way early. Except they didn’t. ‘Standin’ in The Rain’ went into ‘Evil Woman’ and we were into the standard greatest hits set. Drew was bedside himself when they did ‘All Over the World’, even though Olivia Newton John totally failed to roller-skate onto the stage.
The band is a bunch of seasoned session players who play with enthusiasm and the requisite skill. The string section, which in the original band was a bunch of hairy middle-aged blokes, is now a bunch of young women; with hair, but not hairy. The female backing singer delivers a mean old cadenza for ‘Rockaria’ and her male companion fills in the notes which Jeff Lynne can’t reach. There was a bit of a train wreck in one song, I think it was ‘Sweet Talkin’ Woman’, where half the band paused for a moment and looked confused before picking up on the rhythm section and heading into the verse again. A very smooth recovery.
The set list was in a slightly different order and a few variations. ‘Do Ya’ is one of my favourites and one I used to hammer on guitar as a teenager. ‘Handle With Care’ was a surprise – the Travelling Wilbury’s hit single allowed various singers in the band to do their appropriate vocal impersonations and worked really well.
About this time I started feeling an occasional breeze at the back of my head. Then I leaned back too far and got whopped around the back of the head by the guy behind me. He who was leaning forwards while clapping very enthusiastically, so we grinned and both took more care.
They played the obligatory new song from the 2016 album and all the audience sat straight down. Except for one bloke and his slightly embarrassed mate. We seemed to be in the tall section anyway as a couple of rows in front of us was a man Drew decided was ‘The Mountain’ from Game of Thrones. He was enormous and the poor woman behind him probably watched the video screens all evening.
The staging consisted of giant floor-to-ceiling video screens, showing the same videos as we saw on the previous tour, which is not a totally bad thing (but I’d prefer the original ‘Wild West Hero’ video). For the fourth ‘new’ song, we learned that the ‘Last Train to London’ travels through Battlestar Galactica launch tubes, which I hadn’t noticed on my daily commute! The stage floor was also a video screen, which must be really disconcerting for the players when a bit of solid floor turns into a star-field, or a spinning record.
All-in-all it was a great night out – a pleasure to go to a gig with Drew again, about 20 years since we’d seen Janis Ian in the Basement in Sydney.