JEFFLYNNE

“Iwas worried that there weren’t enough people who knew about us,” says Jeff Lynne, explaining his anxiety over reviving ELO to headline at an all-day festival in London’s Hyde Park in September 2014. “We took a big chance. The crowd could’ve gone home any time, they didn’t have to wait around for us at the end. But it was still full. I remember looking through a little gap in the curtain and going: ‘They’re still here!’”

Of course they were. The festival was a sell-out, shifting its full quota of 50,000 tickets in just a quarter of an hour. It seems ridiculous that one of the most bankable stars of all-time ever doubted he still had an audience. But then Jeff Lynne isn’t your typical rock star. Modest and self-effacing, it’s difficult to equate the soft-spoken 71-year-old – his Brummie accent still intact despite living in Los Angeles for many years – with his status as the head of ELO, with record sales of well over 50 million and counting. Indeed, from 1972 until their original dissolution in 1986, ELO scored more transatlantic Top 40 hits than any other band on the planet.

There’s more to Lynne than just ELO, of course. Since emerging with the Idle Race in the late 60s, the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has passed through The Move, co-founded supergroup the Traveling Wilburys (with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison) and produced a host of A-listers, including the three remaining Beatles, both on solo projects and 1995’s Anthology, for which Lynne oversaw a fresh version of John Lennon’s ‘lost’ demo Free As A Bird.

Although Lynne re-formed his old band for that Hyde Park show and beyond, the studio remains his preferred environment. Nowadays billed as Jeff Lynne’s ELO, their latest album,  , is essentially a