When Jeff Lynne wrote “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” he probably didn’t mean to be setting up some meta prophetic proclamation. But a few days shy of the 50th anniversary of that song coming out as a single, there it stands as unshakable earworm, along with at least two or three dozen more just as indelible — a good portion of which are making up the setlist for the farewell tour by Jeff Lynne’s ELO. In the 1970s, Lynne was the King of Pop, or at least the king of hooks that popped into your head and never popped back out. And now he’s been offering fans of the Electric Light Orchestra (as the act was first known) a chance to bid this playlist farewell as a livin’ thing.
The L.A. area’s Kia Forum shows Friday and Saturday night shows were scheduled to be the wrap-up to the American leg of the Over and Out Tour, before Lynne does his truly final-final concerts in the U.K. at Hyde Park next summer. The domestic finality didn’t work out exactly as planned: a recent sick day and the rescheduling of the affected Phoenix date means Lynne’s U.S. touring will now conclude in Arizona on Tuesday. Because of that, maybe there was slightly less emotion attached to Saturday’s gig than anticipated. Not that any ELO show in history was ever destined to be a teary affair, given the music’s emphasis on sugar rushes over sentiment, and given the unlikelihood of Lynne — never a verbose or expressive stage performer — delivering any Elton-esque goodbye speeches. The gig was a giddy blast of joy, from start to tight-90-minutes finish, to the point that had to work a little at feeling sad about it. (Some of us are willing to put that work in.)
One reason for not taking Lynne’s live retirement any harder than we have to is that touring was actually kind of a recent development for him; we hadn’t grown accustomed to his face. The Electric Light Orchestra played somewhat like a normal band when it actually was a band in the ’70s, before Lynne became an official full-time studio rat. ELO played the pre-Kia, then-Fabulous Forum in ’77 and ’81, and then that was just about it for shows in L.A. (or anywhere else) for the next 35 years. There was a TV taping in advance of an aborted tour in 2001, a Fonda gig in 2015, a Hollywood Bowl Orchestra event in 2016, and finally… a return to real, full-scale touring in 2018, including a stop at the Forum. The reasons for Lynne letting his recessive traits come to the fore for the better part of four decades are likely multiple: waning interest in his own spectacular run of hits, a real inclination to get a studio tan, stage shyness and — most of all, the way he’s presented it — the inability to make all those elaborate pop confections and mini-symphonies sound right without resorting to excessive, unnatural enhancement.
Those with long memories may recall that ELO’s ’70s tours were greeted with some controversy when it seemed that some of the parts were on Memorex… the sort of thing people stopped batting an eye at about a quarter-century ago. Whatever the truth of that was, there was a deep, delicious irony in the fact that Saturday night’s Forum show might’ve been the live-est thing to hit that stage in all of 2024. He has put that down to manpower, crowing when the previous tour launched that “we can actually cover any song that I’ve ever done with this amount of people, with three keyboards, two cellos, violin, four guitars, bass, drums, percussion, backing vocals — everything’s covered.” Truth be told, he probably had the budget to make that many executive hires a few decades earlier than he did. But ELO fans have not felt the need to look this gift horse in the mouth, however late-arriving.
It shouldn’t be as pleasantly surprising as it is to hear music this rich with real players in evidence doing their thing throughout. Drummer Donavan Hepburn did the biggest share in making sure the audience knew they were keeping things real. He emphasized thunderous tom-toms nearly as much as original drummer Bev Bevan did back in the day, even on the later songs when Bevan got toned down some. Backup singer Melanie Lewis-McDonald earns some VIP stripes, between being able to duplicate the slightly strident sound of the original female vocalists on “Evil Woman” and her ability to sing the lead operatic part on the cheeky rock-classical crossover tune “Rockaria!” A string trio (Amy Langley, Jess Cox and Jessie Murphy) is able to bridge the gap between ELO’s earliest art-rock days, when Lynne was copping an “I Am the Walrus” cello feel for “10538 Overture” to the group’s eventual disco-violins era.
Lynne himself was clearly not just “Steppin’ Out” (to name a song that has unexpectedly made its way back into the sets) but stepping up to the mic, and generally hitting his mark in good fashion. On a few scattered verses or for a few trade-off lines, the lead was kicked to a male backup singer, but not often. His sweetest vocals of the night came in “Strange Magic,” a song that (strangely) he had not done on the previous tour, and that it would have felt wrong to do without. Although you don’t necessarily look to ELO for overt expressions of deep emotion, there was a tenderness to his take on this that felt affecting. The same could be said for the even more wistful “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” the other major balladic highlight of the night — as beautiful a song as came out in the 1970s, and just as heart-melting now.
Jeff Lynne’s ELO
Jason Stoltzfus
One notable change since ELO last toured before the pandemic is that Lynne no longer plays electric guitar, and although he strums an acoustic throughout the evening, nothing of that is audible in the mix. It’s not surprising that, at 76, he might no longer be able to peel off the rockabilly licks in, say, a “Roll Over Beethoven,” which is no longer in the set. There are three other guitarists to fill that role for him, anyway — a veritable six-string orchestra — and no one is going to begrudge him if he’s focused on his vocals at this point in his career. (He’s definitely not focused on ramping up the stage patter, although he seemed in genuinely genial spirits as he flashed the crowd frequent thumbs-up.)
There’s a joke somewhere in how ageless Lynne is, mostly looking and sounding from a distance exactly like he did 40 years ago, compared to the deteriorating portrait of Dorian Gray that is some of us in the audienc. It didn’t hurt that he somehow had the foresight to future-proof himself, between the obfuscating beard, moptop and shades; looking just a little bit older before your time has a way of coming in handy later. With Lynne being the ultimate master of vocal stacking, it would be easy with this big a crew to build a show around any deficiencies a 76-year-old singer might be experiencing, but the choral support he got felt organic, and the amount of time we were getting his voice alone in the mix felt rewarding, for a fan who always felt the tone of his voice was as underrated as it was difficult to define.
His place in history? Listening to the better part of ELO’s run of top 10 singles being played back, it was hard not to feel that Lynne was the pop-meister of the 1970s. Even if you’re a McCartney maniac, there’s an argument to be made, at least, that during this era, the pupil was up to and even surpassed the master. The Bee Gees, another obvious influence on what Lynne was doing, have to be considered part of the equation, too, so here in 2024, it may still be too soon to leap to hasty conclusions. But hearing this much pop greatness compacted into such a fleeting set sure felt like proof that when it came to melodic and arranging genius, nobody did it better.
And the fact that records really were the thing, for ELO — and live performances, lately, have just been a wonderful cherry on top — is the only reason to not get mournful about how the touring part of Lynne’s legacy is “a terrible thing to lose.” Still, coming off the high these Forum shows provided, and knowing there are a few more in the offing next July, it’ll be hard for L.A. fans coming off that buzz to not consider booking a last plane to London.
Jeff Lynne’s ELO setlist at the Kia Forum, Inglewood, Calif., Oct. 26, 2024:
One More Time
Evil Woman
Do Ya
Showdown
Last Train to London
Believe Me Now
Steppin’ Out
Rockaria!
10538 Overture
Strange Magic
Sweet Talkin’ Woman
Can’t Get It Out of My Head
Fire on High (excerpt)
Livin’ Thing
Telephone Line
All Over the World
Turn to Stone
Shine a Little Love
Don’t Bring Me Down
(encore) Mr. Blue Sky
