Vinyl diary, part 2: The Birthday Party

For a nerdish young music-obsessed Glaswegian in the late 70s and early 80s, the 'Lost Chord’ record shop had an almost mythical status. It was located in the bohemian West End, the part of town where poets, intellectuals, posh kids and people who played in bands hung out. If -like me- you lived on the dull south side, getting there required not only dedication, but an ability to decipher bus timetables which openly mocked the restrictive notions of linear time. Once inside that little shop, I’d spend hours fingering through rows of obscure or rare vinyl: rare imports, Japanese picture discs, bands I’d only read about in reviews and bizarre compilations of bands I’d never heard of; ‘Lost Chord’ had everything that the tragic obsessive might dream of. 

On one such visit, armed with all I had saved up from my shelf-packing job in a supermarket, I almost fainted when a flick-through one of the sections revealed a copy of ‘The Birthday Party’ by The Idle Race, an album I had been dreaming about for months. Having become a massive ELO fan, I was working my acquisitive way backwards through Jeff Lynne’s recorded catalogue. A previous visit to the shop had unearthed an American compilation of songs by The Move and, these being the days before the internet, I knew of Lynne’s first band, The Idle Race, only in mythical terms; their albums might have existed somewhere in the same way that Bigfoot might have existed somewhere.

I can't remember what I paid for it, but if the bored assistant with the long hair (they always had long hair) had asked for one of my kidneys, I would probably have considered it a bit of a bargain. But when I got the album home, it was not -to paraphrase PG Wodehouse- that I was underwhelmed by it, but I wasn’t exactly whelmed either. The issue was not so much that the songs were unlike either ELO or The Move, because there were times when you could clearly trace the musical lineage. It was more that they committed the sin of excessive frivolity. When you’re young and serious and you pay attention to what is said by the high priests of taste in the music press, there is perhaps nothing more heinous than music lacking in that quality beloved of immature males: heaviosity. And The Idle Race clearly lacked heaviosity. According to the New Wave Taliban, jolly-sounding tunes were OK, but only if (for example in the case of Talking Heads or XTC) there was perceived to be an ironic or subversive edge to the sound. The way that XTC, for instance, sang ‘Bap-ba-oo’ on ‘Radios in Motion’ with tongues firmly in cheek, was nothing like the way that, say, David Essex might have sang ‘Bap-ba-oo’. 

It bugged me somewhat that ‘The Birthday Party’ featured sound effects and vaudeville clips, as if it was some kind of novelty record. And as for the lyrics … who the hell writes songs about a man working as a skeleton on the ghost train, or a man in his thirties playing with children’s toys? Or how about a song about someone sitting in a tree? Consider, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, these lyrics as exhibit A:  

I often sit alone up in a tree
Waving to the ones that wave at me
I think well just how stupid can they be
Waving to a man up in a tree?

What they don't know is I am counting them
I even count the ladies and the men
I put the numbers in my little book
And only me can ever have a look

What the hell was Jeff on about? Having been introduced to his work through the wondrously lush and tuneful album ‘A New World Record’, I struggled to connect this weird Jeff Lynne – that young bloke on the cover without a beard- with the one I knew and loved, the master orchestrator and symphonic tunemeister, the bearded musical genius behind ELO. 

But had I listened without prejudice, I would have noticed that some of the motifs that would make him famous years later were evident here in nascent form; lush strings, layered harmonies, beautiful melodies and deft chord changes. It took me a while to get over myself and appreciate that the songs were just fine; in fact, some of them were much better than fine. Despite the gimmickry and the music-hall jokes, it was obvious that even this beardless and callow young Jeff knew where the melody monkey lived.

There is a muscularity and vigour in the playing and production (courtesy of Eddie Offord and Gerald Chevin) which prevents even the most whimsical material from sounding effete. As you might expect, there is a strong Beatles influence, but there are also one or two nods to The Kinks (particularly on ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘Mrs. Ward’). ‘The lady who said she could fly’ is beautiful and melancholic, while ‘Morning Sunshine’ is a lovely psychedelic pop ballad which would anticipate some of Lynne’s future triumphs. ‘End of the Road’ is so unremittingly jolly and English that it sounds almost parodic; in fact, it is simply a song that comes from the age before irony, from the days before pop music became aware of itself. The great thing about material like this is that it is exactly what it appears to be.

Although they were well thought of by the music press in the late 60s, The Idle Race failed to make a significant commercial breakthrough, a factor which would surely have influenced Lynne’s decision to join The Move in 1970. Although this album is of its time, there are moments when ‘The Birthday Party’ manages to transcend the gloriously sunny and naïve era from which it emerged; as ever with Jeff Lynne’s music, it’s all about the tunes.

Surfing against the zeitgeist

After their triumphant televised gig from Hyde Park, the critical re-appraisal of Jeff Lynne’s ELO continues apace, with articles appearing in various ‘proper’ newspapers testifying to the quality of their music. Although I’m glad to see them get what they deserve, this kind of thing just reminds me how silly it is to pay too much attention to music journalism, to "fashion-monging boys, that lie and cog and flout".
For those not old enough to remember, it was precisely the opposite of ‘cool’ to like ELO in the late 70s, when the rock cognoscenti would heap opprobrium on them at every opportunity. The fact that they were clearly a quality pop act counted against them. Certain bands (usually accomplished musicians who had paid their dues over many years on the club and university circuit) were seen as the ‘enemy’ by portions of the British music press, some of whom believed that punk had ‘happened’ in order to rid the world of light and shade. Surfing against the zeitgeist, ELO represented the epitome of naff. I remember one particularly silly example when the band was butchered on Radio One's Round Table because -in the opinion of some jerk on the panel- the French bit of the lyric on Hold on Tight sounded more French-Canadian than 'genuine' French (clearly a heinous crime). When I was young and impressionable, it was difficult to own up to liking stuff that had not been approved by the taste-makers in the music press, particularly the resident high priests at Sounds and NME. Nobody wants to betray their own generation and there was a time when admitting that you preferred ELO to the Sex Pistols would have been a hanging offence. 

By today’s standards, the band took the long road to stardom. Their early records showed promise, although some of the songs were overwrought and stodgy and the sound was often grittier than it had to be. After three albums in which they couldn’t make up their mind about whether they wanted to be heavy (always seen as a good thing) or light (almost never seen as a good thing), band leader Jeff Lynne finally hit his songwriting groove on ‘Eldorado’. For the first time, an orchestra and choir were hired to expand the musical palette (on previous albums, the cellists had been overdubbed). That fourth album marked the spot where the focus moved joyfully and unashamedly to the tunes.  

By the time they hit the high spots in their catalogue (‘A New World Record’ in 1976 and ‘Out of the Blue’ just a year later) ELO had graduated from the dingy hinterland of progressive rock to become a sophisticated pop act on the way to selling 50 million albums. The visual template for tribute acts was set at this point, with Jeff adopting that ‘shaggy perm, beard and shades' look. It’s clearly a disguise, because he is essentially a modest and unassuming bloke who chooses to put his art front and centre of our attention. It’s not about him, the image is suggesting; it’s about the tunes. It’s about the sound of the music. 

I can think of loads of acts that I listened to in the late 70s /early 80s that don't do anything for me now; by contrast, the albums from ELO's imperial phase still sound fantastic. There are many things to love about their music (personally, those ‘major to minor’ chord changes on songs like Livin' Thing and Turn to Stone get me every time), but there is no point in trying to analyse why it has taken some people so long to work that out. There was a time when nobody would have admitted to liking them and at least that seems to have changed. It could be that some folk have mellowed with age, or perhaps new listeners are just experiencing the music without having to put it through the 'cool /uncool' cultural filter that was compulsory in the fallout from the cultural revolution of the late 70s. Either way, I'm just happy to enjoy the moment and hope that it encourages Jeff Lynne to hit the road once more, hopefully with something resembling the spectacular combo that featured at Hyde Park.

In the meantime, here’s a link to one of my favourite internet musical discoveries. It’s the Sunflower Orchestra performing their version of one of ELO’s most beautiful songs. Other than the fact they are Polish, I know nothing about the Sunflower Orchestra. It looks like their gig took place in a community centre with maybe twenty folk in the audience, but the performance was measured, dignified and faithful to the melancholic beauty of the original. For someone not noted for being much of a lyricist, Jeff Lynne comes up with a lovely image on the chorus in which he expresses loss, regret, longing and the ebbing away of hope with this single evocative line: 
“My Shangri La has gone away, faded like the Beatles on Hey Jude.” 

Who needs to surf the zeitgeist when you can write like that?