Although
ELO quickly became
Jeff Lynne's baby, it was launched as a collaboration between
Lynne and his bandmates in
the Move, multi-instrumentalist
Roy Wood, and drummer
Bev Bevan. Indeed, the label on
ELO's first album reads "Move Enterprises Ltd. presents the services of
the Electric Light Orchestra," and most histories claim that the initial idea for the spin-off group combining rock and classical music was
Wood's, not
Lynne's.
Wood and
Lynne split the songwriting duties on Electric Light Orchestra, much as they did on late-period Move albums, but it seems like their visions of what
ELO was were widely divergent.
Wood's songs are clearly more classically influenced, with the string and horn sections driving the songs rather than merely coloring them, as they do on
Lynne's tunes. The difference between
Wood's baroque "Look at Me Now" and
Lynne's hard rocking "10538 Overture" is obvious, and
Lynne never wrote anything as purely classical as
Wood's "The Battle of Marston Moor (July 2nd, 1644)" in his entire career. (The
Gershwin-like piano jazz of "Manhattan Rumble (49th Street Massacre)" is
Lynne's equivalent piece, and suggests an intriguing avenue he unfortunately never explored further.) This dichotomy makes Electric Light Orchestra in some ways much more interesting than later
ELO albums. When
Wood left to form
Wizzard after the release of this album, the tension generated by that clear difference between his and
Lynne's songwriting styles was gone. Later
ELO albums were much more commercially successful, but they were also considerably more stylistically attenuated. As good as they are, all of the later
ELO albums sound pretty much exactly alike. Electric Light Orchestra sounds like nothing either
Jeff Lynne or
Roy Wood did before or after, and therein lies its fascination. ~ Stewart Mason