When I wrote and recorded these songs originally, I never would have expected the fantastic audience response all these years later; it’s amazing.’ – Jeff Lynne

Written by John Van Der Kiste, this book traces Jeff Lynne's career from his early days with The Idle Race, The Move, Electric Light Orchestra and up to recent times and his live performances. Definitely a 'must read' for fans and music lovers alike. ELO is short for Electric Light Orchestra. Light Orchestra was a name given to small orchestras in England in the 60s, and the group got their name because of their use of electric and orchestral instruments. Where are they from?

Who is Bruce?

It’s unusual that an album manages to be at once so much of its moment, yet so much outside it. Time was unmistakably a response to the electronic and synth waves that rose in the wake of punk. It was also a concept album about time travel, which couldn’t have been more pre-punk had it been focus-grouped that way. According to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s book The Time Traveller’s Almanac (2013, or so it claims), it is – surprisingly – “the first major concept album devoted entirely to time travel”. The VanderMeers note, “it only makes sense that the 80s bands most conversant with time travel were comprised of actual 70s holdovers”. Certainly, you can see why, at the dawn of the 1980s, the idea of a man trapped in an age not his own would resonate, even if subconsciously, with a bandleader accustomed to performing mega-gigs with an in-house string section from a giant spaceship rig.

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously cited the ancient Greek poet Archilochus thus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Some artists are foxes, some hedgehogs. The hedgehogs tend to have a single great subject, and in Jeff Lynne’s case, that subject is loneliness. The story of a man lost in time, separated by the years from all that he ever loved, makes for the most sustained expression of that subject he ever effected. But a stripped-down band didn’t mean a stripped-down sound. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Lynne gotta do Jeff Lynne ’til he die – and God love him for it. Strings were out, synths were in, but by and large it was business as usual. Everything that had marked out the band’s sound to that point – lushness, grandeur, a vast and delicious frothiness – remained in place. They were still a giant cappuccino of a pomp-pop group. Perhaps that’s why Time has been displaced from their oeuvre, given fashion dictated they try to fit it all into an espresso shot cup. But interesting though it might be to those of us who care about such things, what with the telescoping of cultural history – the past compressed, its depth of field flattened, its eras foreshortened and compacted against one another – there’s surely no reason for that to matter now to Lynne himself. As an ELO fan of 37 years plus, and a major fan of the groups and musicians within the whole BrumBeat circle from the 1960s to the present day, this book was a must-have for me. As an ELO follower for a long long time, there were many insights here that were new to me, and lots of exclusive pictures from Dave's personal collection too." Fans of The Move, ELO, Steve Gibbons, Jeff Lynne, Magnum and many other Birmingham groups or indeed anyone who has in interest on the inner workings of life in bands or the music-biz as a whole have a great deal to enjoy here.

However, there has been an additional 11 members of the Electric Light Orchestra over the years including, Richard Tandy, Bill Hunt, Steve Woolam, Andy Craig, Hugh McDowell, Mike Edwards, Wilfred Gibon, Mike de Albuquerque, Colin Walker, Mik Kaminski, Kelly Groucutt and Melvyn Gale. Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra: Before and After is a biography about ELO frontman and mastermind Jeff Lynne. The book does a nice job anthologizing Lynne's beginnings as a Birmingham guitarist in critically-acclaimed but commercially-unsuccessful Idle Race to his status as the creative director and producer of England's successful orchestral pop outfit, Electric Light Orchestra. There are three original band members of the Electric Light Orchestra. These are songwriters/instrumentalists Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, as well as drummer Bev Bevan. They became regulars on famed British TV show Top of the Pops, and had the first ever single to be played on BBC Radio 1. Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Roy s replacement in the Nightriders, Jeff Lynne, had formed a band of his own - The Idle Race - taking Lynne s musical vision into more psychedelic territories. These two brilliant songwriters were also close friends, and Wood persuaded Lynne to join the Move followed by a new project, the Electric Light Orchestra, before a parting of the ways led to Wood forming Wizzard. The one criticism I did have mainly stemmed from the fact that I would have preferred that van der Kiste relinquished some of the passages about critical reception in favor of some more inside stories of Jeff Lynne's various works. At times, the prose came off a little more dense and a little less anecdotal than I like my nonfiction--though this may be down to personal preference.