Jeff Lynne’s ELO wraps up final US tour with hit-laden LA shows

When Jeff Lynne wrote “Can’t Get It Out of My Head,” he probably didn’t mean to make some meta-prophetic proclamation. But a few days shy of the 50th anniversary of the song’s release as a single, it stands there as an unflinching earworm, along with at least two or three dozen more equally indelible – a good number of which make up the set list for the farewell tour of Jeff Lynne’s ELO. In the 1970s, Lynne was the king of pop, or at least the king of hooks that popped into your head and never popped out again. And now he’s offered fans of the Electric Light Orchestra (as the act was first known) a chance to say goodbye to this playlist of a lifetime.

The LA area’s Kia Forum shows on Friday and Saturday night were scheduled to conclude the American leg of the Over and Out Tour, before Lynne does her truly final UK gigs in Hyde Park next summer. The domestic finale didn’t quite work out as planned: a recent sick day and the rescheduling of the affected Phoenix date means Lynne’s US tour now ends in Arizona on Tuesday. Therefore, there was perhaps a little less emotion attached to Saturday’s concert than expected. Not that any ELO show in history was ever destined to be a tearful affair, as the music’s emphasis on sugar rushes over sentiment, and given the unlikelihood that Lynne – never a verbose or expressive stage performer – would hold any Elton- kind of farewell speech. The concert was a giddy blast of joy, from start to 90-minute finish, to the point that one had to work a little to feel sad. (Some of us are willing to put in the work.)

One reason not to take Lynne’s live retirement any harder than we have to is that touring was actually kind of a recent development for him; we hadn’t gotten used to his face. Electric Light Orchestra played a bit like a normal band when in fact it was was a band in the 70s before Lynne became an official full-time studio rat. ELO played the pre-Kia, then Fabulous Forum in ’77 and ’81, and then that was about it for shows in LA (or elsewhere) for the next 35 years. There was a TV taping before an aborted tour in 2001, a Fonda concert in 2015, a Hollywood Bowl Orchestra event in 2016 and finally… a return to true, full-scale touring in 2018, including a stop at the Forum. The reasons why Lynne allowed his recessive traits to show for the better part of four decades are probably several: waning interest in his own spectacular string of hits, a real propensity for getting tanned in the studio, stage shyness and—most of all, the way he’s presented it – an inability to make all the elaborate pop confections and mini-symphonies sound right without resorting to excessive, unnatural enhancement.

Those with long memories may recall that ELO’s 70s tours were met with some controversy when it appeared that some of the parts were on Memorex… the sort of thing people stopped looking for about a quarter of a century ago. Whatever the truth of it, there was a deep, delicious irony in that Saturday night’s Forum show could have been live– the best thing to hit that stage in all of 2024. He put it down to the crew as the previous tour launched that “we can actually cover any song I’ve ever done with this amount of people, with three keyboards, two cellos, violin, four guitars, bass, drums, percussion, backing vocals – everything is covered.” Truth be told, he probably had the budget to make as many executive hires a few decades earlier than he did. But ELO fans haven’t felt the need to look this gift horse in the mouth, no matter how late it arrived.

It shouldn’t be as pleasantly surprising as it is to hear music so rich with real players proving they’re doing their thing throughout. Drummer Donavan Hepburn did the biggest part in making sure the crowd knew they were keeping things real. He emphasized thunderous tom-toms almost as much as original drummer Bev Bevan did back then, even on the later songs where Bevan had some toned down. Backup singer Melanie Lewis-McDonald gets some VIP stripes, between being able to duplicate the slightly strident sound of the original female vocalists on “Evil Woman” and her ability to sing the lead operatic part on the sassy rock classic crossover tune “Rockaria! ” A string trio (Amy Langley, Jess Cox and Jessie Murphy) is able to bridge the gap between ELO’s earliest art-rock days, when Lynne managed an “I Am the Walrus” cello feel for “10538 Overture” for the group’s eventual disco – violin era.

Lynne herself was clearly not just “Steppin’ Out” (to name one song that has unexpectedly found its way back into the sets), but stepped up to the mic and generally hit her mark in a good way. On a few scattered verses or for a few trade-off lines, the lead role was kicked to a male backup singer, but not often. His sweetest vocals of the night came on “Strange Magic,” a song he (oddly) hadn’t done on the previous tour and which it would have felt wrong to leave out. While you don’t necessarily look to ELO for overt expressions of deep emotion, there was a tenderness to his take on this that felt affecting. The same could be said for the even more wistful “Can’t Get It Out of My Head”, the night’s other big ballad highlight – as beautiful a song as it was in the 1970s, and just as heart-melting now.

One notable change since ELO last toured before the pandemic is that Lynne no longer plays electric guitar, and although he strums an acoustic throughout the evening, none of it is audible in the mix. It’s not surprising that, at 76, he may no longer be able to peel off the rockabilly licks in, say, a “Roll Over Beethoven,” which is no longer in the set. At least there are three other guitarists to fill that role for him – a veritable six-string orchestra – and no one is going to begrudge him focusing on his vocals at this point in his career. (He’s certainly not focused on screwing up the scenery, though he seemed in a genuinely genial mood as he often gave the crowd a thumbs up.)

There’s a joke somewhere in how timeless Lynne is, mostly looking and sounding distant, exactly as he did 40 years ago, compared to the degraded portrait of Dorian Gray that is some of us in the audience. It didn’t hurt that he somehow had the foresight to future-proof himself, between the obscuring beard, mop top and shades; look just a little bit older before your time has a way of coming in handy later. As Lynne is the ultimate master of vocal stacking, it would be easy with this large cast to build a show around the shortcomings a 76-year-old singer might experience, but the choral support he got felt organic, and the amount of Time, where we got his voice alone in the mix felt rewarding, for a fan who always felt the tone of his voice was as understated as it was hard to define.

His place in history? Listening to the best part of ELO’s string of top 10 singles played back, it was hard not to feel that Lynne was the pop meister from the 1970s. Even if you’re a McCartney maniac, there’s at least an argument to be made that in this era the pupil was up to and even surpassed the master. The Bee Gees, another obvious influence on what Lynne did, must also be considered part of the equation, so here in 2024 it may still be premature to jump to hasty conclusions. But hearing so much pop greatness compressed into such a fleeting set certainly felt like proof that when it came to melodic and arrangement genius, no one did it better.

And the fact that records really was thing, for ELO – and live performances, of late, have just been a wonderful cherry on top – is the only reason not to get wistful about how the touring part of Lynne’s legacy is “a terrible thing to lose.” Still, coming off the high these Forum shows provided, and knowing there are a few more coming next July, it’s going to be tough for LA fans coming off the buzz that not to consider booking a last flight to London.

Jeff Lynne’s ELO Setlist at Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, October 26, 2024:

One more time
Evil woman
Do Yes
Showdown
Last train to London
Believe me now
Steppin’ Out
Rockaria!
10538 Overture
Strange magic
Cute talking woman
Can’t get it out of my head
Fire on High (excerpt)
Livin’ Thing
Telephone line
All over the world
Turn to Stone
Shine a Little Love
Don’t bring me down
(encore) Mr. Blue Sky