ELO Greatest Hits: 14 Top Tunes

Electric Light Orchestra, or ELO, was every teen musician’s dream, offering up a blend of rock ’n’ roll, classical music, and pop in a string of hits throughout the '70s. Their music was accented as much by violins and cellos as it was by guitars, enabling the British band to score big at home and in the States with their impressive sound, landing more than 20 tunes on the Top 40 charts and selling more than 50 million records worldwide.

Jeff Lynne and fellow Birmingham-based musicians Roy Wood and drummer Bev Bevan helped form ELO, based on Lynne’s and Wood’s goal of creating a contemporary band that utilized strings. After their debut album was released in 1971, Wood departed the group while ELO continued, bringing aboard keyboardist Richard Tandy, bassist Michael De Albuquerque, violinist Wilf Gibson, and cellists Mike Edwards and Colin Walker.

A longtime Beatles fan, Lynne recalled the thrill of working on 1972’s ELO 2 album and having the Fab Four’s famed producer, George Martin, pop into the studio. “He was doing [Paul McCartney’s] Live and Let Die in the studio next door, so he came in and gave ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ a thumbs-up, Lynne told Louder's Classic Rock. “He actually sat and listened intently to it all the way through, because it was a bit of a strange arrangement with all those classical things in there. It was a great experience.”

The band continued to hone their sound, peppering classical elements all over their unique brand of rock on albums such as 1973’s ELO 2 and On the Third Day, 1974’s Eldorado, 1975’s Face the Music, 1976’s A New World Record, and 1977’s Out of the Blue, as new members took their place within the band, including bassist Kelly Groucutt, violinist Mik Kaminski, and cellists Hugh McDowell and Melvyn Gale. “We seemed like such a strange group for an American audience, with two cellos, a violin, Mellotron and a bit of French horn. It was just an odd sound,” Lynne told Classic Rock of the unlikely but successful symphony that played throughout their peak years.

All about ELO

Among ELO’s high-profile fans was John Lennon, who played their “Showdown” during a 1974 guest appearance he made at a New York radio station. They’re “a nice group — I call them ‘Son of Beatles,” Lennon told listeners, according to Far Out magazine, and the “Imagine” singer had also noted that ELO’s music was what the Beatles would’ve sounded like if the Fab Four continued deep into the 70s.

ELO’s otherworldly concerts and visual effects impressed audiences as their innovative tunes. The band’s shows featured a gigantic spaceship that, according to the Jeff Lynne Song Database, was “one of the biggest stars of the show…[It] opened up at the beginning of the [concert] with lasers, fog machines and taped music of an excerpt of Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, Op. 20…blasting out to the audience.” Oftentimes, the site adds, an excited Lynne would exit “the stage after the performance and [rush] out to stand with the audience so he could watch [the spaceship] close.” As Lynne explained to The Guardian, “It made our classical music feel like a science fiction movie.”

After success in 1979 with their Discovery album, ELO headed into the 80s as a pared-down lineup of Lynne, Tandy, Bevan, and Groucutt. Following three other albums, Lynne sent the band into hiatus in 1986 and focused on producing big-name artists such as George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty, who, along with Bob Dylan, eventually became his collaborators in the all-star, Grammy-winning Traveling Wilburys project, which led to two critically-acclaimed albums in 1988 and 1990.

A new future for ELO

ELO resurfaced in 2001 with Zoom, though the band eventually rebranded as Jeff Lynne’s ELO as the musician became the clear driving force of its future projects, 2015’s Alone in the Universe and 2019’s From Out of Nowhere. Along the way, there was a successful 2014 live show in England’s Hyde Park that found Tandy re-teaming with Lynne. “I was really worried before the show. I was thinking, what the hell is it gonna be like after all these years? I thought the crowd would all disperse and go their own sweet way, but they all loved it,” Lynne shared with The Guardian of the comeback.

He, Bevan, Wood, and Tandy would go on to be inducted as ELO into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. Bevan, who didn’t attend the induction, did tour for 10-plus years with another outfit he dubbed, ELO Part II, and his rift with Lynne fueled the latter’s drive to put his name — and stamp — on the original band’s assets. “All me. I play every single instrument. And do all the background vocals and all the lead vocals. All the drums, the bass,” Lynne explained to the Financial Times of ELO’s recordings after the name change.

Lynne, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023, is now gearing up for ELO’s Over and Out Tour, launching Aug. 24 in Palm Desert, California, and trekking all over the U.S. before wrapping up in Inglewood, California, on Oct. 26. It’s billed as their “final tour,” and he’ll be doing it without his closest musical partner. “It is with great sadness that I share the news of the passing of my long-time collaborator and dear friend Richard Tandy,” Lynne, now 76, announced on social media on May 1. “He was a remarkable musician & friend and I’ll cherish the lifetime of memories we had together.

Here, a collection of some of ELO’s greatest hits. Which Electric Light Orchestra tunes light up your personal playlist?

14. “Last Train to London” (1979)

This disco-tinged track is said to be one of the ones that helped inspire Daft Punk, the French electronic music duo. ELO “embraced electronics, piled on the keyboards, and included its fair share of vocoders” on this song, which boasted “sharp edges and insistent rhythm,” according to the site Spandex & Synths. British girl group Atomic Kitten borrowed heavily from it, too, sampling it in their 2002 hit “Be With You.”

13. “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” (1974)

Peaking at No. 9, this was ELO’s first Top 10 hit here in the States. The wonderfully wistful track is about “a guy in a dream who sees this vision of loveliness and wakes up and finds that he’s actually a clerk working in a bank,” Lynne revealed on VH1’s Storytellers, adding, “[but] he hasn’t got any chance of getting her or doing all these wonderful things that he thought he was going to do.”

12. “Showdown” (1973)

“I knew it was going to be a hit even after I had just done a few notes of it. When we cut it the engineer said, ‘This is a classic.’ I was thrilled to bits. It’s one of my favorites,” Lynne told Rolling Stone of this tune, which was also a favorite of John Lennon. Lynne admitted to Rolling Stone, though, that “the lyrics don’t mean anything, really. It’s just a story, a made-up scenario.”

11. “Shine a Little Love” (1979)

“A bit of a disco beat on this one, and quite a lot of things going on, forty-piece string section and all. It’s very jolly and bouncy and I must have been in a very good mood when I wrote it!” Lynne posted on social media in 2022 about this up-tempo, feel-good No. 8 hit.

10. “Do Ya” (1976)

Both Todd Rundgren and KISS’s Ace Frehley would go on to cover this Lynne-penned song, which Record World said featured “Beatlish harmonies and riffs” when it was originally done in 1972 by The Move, Roy Wood’s band prior to ELO. The tune didn’t crack the U.S. Top 40, however, until ELO’s version five year later.

9. “Telephone Line” (1976)

“I sound really desperate and lonely on this one, and maybe I was. It’s about trying to find a girl every night and you just can’t get through to her,” Lynne told Rolling Stone of this No. 7 chart hit, which he noted was inspired by “the plaintive songs of Del Shannon and Roy Orbison. They wrote songs that were really sad and those were the best.”

8. “Turn to Stone” (1977)

“I just felt like it needed something simple in the middle of the song,” Lynne told Far Out about the rapid-fire speaking part in the middle of this winner, which earned a BMI Million-Air certificate for achieving 1 million radio airplays. “I often used to put a funny little piece in a song just in case I get bored with it. I’d go, ‘Well, maybe this is going on too long. I’ll think of something daft to put in there.’”

7. “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” (1977)

This fun entry is “one of ELO’s greatest group performances” according to Ultimate Classic Rock, which calls it Out of the Blue’s “biggest pop explosion [that’s] all strings, synths, guitars and call-and-response backing vocals.” It then, as the site notes, “effortlessly [glides] into that one-of-a-kind chorus.”

6. “Strange Magic” (1975)

This spellbinding track “[demonstrates] Lynne’s mastery of tension and release,” Stereogum insists, noting that “the keyboards and strings swell throughout the verses, giving way to a chipmunk falsetto choir on the choruses — exactly the kind of expert contrast Lynne would refine even further throughout the decade.”

5. “Evil Woman” (1975)

Success struck quickly for Lynne, who told Far Out magazine that he “wrote this in a matter of minutes” for ELO’s Face the Music after realizing “there’s not a good single” on the LP. “Evil Woman” went on to hit No. 10 on the charts. “We kept it slick and cool, kind of like an R&B song. It was kind of a posh one for me, with all the big piano solos and the string arrangement,” said Lynne, who teased that “it was inspired by a certain woman, but I can’t say who.”

4. “Xanadu” (1980)

Even if ELO caught some heat for going disco with this song from the silly film of the same name starring Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton-John, it still roller-skated its way to No. 8 on the Hot 100 charts. “Essentially it’s Olivia taking Jeff Lynne’s usual spot as lead singer of ELO. The combination is a winning one,” Billboard wrote at the time. Olivia’s charming vocals on the upbeat track never fail to lift our mood.

3. “Livin’ Thing” (1976)

This gem “had an augmented chord. George [Harrison] used a lot of those chords, too,” Lynne told Goldmine of what the former Beatle dubbed “naughty chords.” “Trying to put those funny old Victorian chords into a new song gives it a good lift,” Lynne added, explaining how “it makes it more of a special song, because it’s got a weird chord in it, and nobody knows how to play it.”

2. “Don’t Bring Me Down” (1979)

This No. 4 hit forces Lynne to explain over and over again why he sings the name “Bruce!” “It was supposed to be Grooss!,” Lynne revealed to The Guardian. “But then we went on tour and everyone was singing ‘Bruce.’ So I joined in and sang ‘Bruce’ and I’ve sung it ever since. ‘Grooss’ was just to fill a hole in the song. It’s easier to join in than to explain that it’s not Bruce, it’s actually spelled g-r-o-o-s-s…so I [just] sing ‘Bruce’ instead of explaining.”

1. “Mr. Blue Sky” (1977)

Even though it only hit No. 35 on U.S. charts, this is a favorite of most ELO fans who “[tell] me something different about it. It’s even got crazy appeal to kids since it’s like a nursery rhyme,” Lynne told Rolling Stone, revealing he wrote it at a Swiss chalet “and it was all misty and cloudy all the way around. I didn’t see any countryside for the first four days or so, and then everything cleared and there was this enormous view forever and the sky was blue.”