Electric light orchestra time6/25/2023 The VanderMeers note, “it only makes sense that the 80s bands most conversant with time travel were comprised of actual 70s holdovers”. 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”. It was also a concept album about time travel, which couldn’t have been more pre-punk had it been focus-grouped that way. Time was unmistakably a response to the electronic and synth waves that rose in the wake of punk. It’s unusual that an album manages to be at once so much of its moment, yet so much outside it. Time is no Trans Lynne’s record company was never going to sue him for sounding too little like himself. Or it could be he sees it as simply too off-brand – but there, again, that sells his own work short, because Time is as ELO-y an album as Lynne ever made, and as strong a set of songs as he ever wrote. Maybe he’s embarrassed about it having been a rare attempt to keep up with fashion but then, having entirely and doubtless sensibly ignored punk and new wave, ELO did embrace disco on Time’s delightful and much undervalued predecessor, Discovery (1979), and that remains in the Lynne-approved catalogue. But in truth, all of ELO’s work is eccentric, and that’s a large part of its greatness Time was just differently eccentric to an eccentricity that had become so familiar it started to feel normal (see also: Fleetwood Mac in the Lindsey Buckingham era). Perhaps it’s the eccentricity that bothers him. What a shame, then, that Lynne should have chosen to forget Time – a terrific, eccentric sci-fi electro/synth-pop album – when he’s had a chance to revive its reputation. It’s just our selectivity doesn’t matter as much as that of an outstanding pop musician. Lynne evidently remembers what he chooses to remember. This is not to blame its director, Martyn Atkins, who surely had his terrain mapped out for him by his subject. The title of a 2012 BBC-screened documentary, Mr Blue Sky: The Story Of Jeff Lynne & ELO, was a blatant piece of bait-and-switch mis-selling Mr Blue Sky: The Story Of Jeff Lynne's Production Career And Some Plugs For The Redundant Re-Recorded ELO Albums With Which He Presumably Intends To Improve His Rights Situation, But Next To Fuck-All About ELO Itself would have been less pithy but more accurate. Lynne does have form for cutting out chunks of history. What, one wonders, has Lynne got against it? Even its genuinely iffy follow-up, Secret Messages (1983), gets as much stage time. If setlist.fm has it right, since reviving ELO as a going concern in 2014, Jeff Lynne has played just one full song (‘Twilight’) from Time, and that on only four occasions out of 94 shows. Not that it’s overlooked by posterity, but that it’s overlooked by its originator. That’s the remarkable thing about Time, the ninth album by Electric Light Orchestra (henceforth, as we all call them anyway, ELO), and the final chart-topper of their original run of hit LPs. But it's hard to think of many that are lost because, despite being successful in their day, they are then consigned to the memory hole by their still popular creators. Great Lost Albums become lost for all manner of reasons.
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