Guilty Pleasures: Electric Light Orchestra’s Eldorado

ELO’s grandiose 1974 monstrosity is an over-the-top masterpiece, according to long-time appreciator GARY STEEL.

I can still feel the shame. It was 1972 and I had just turned 13 when I wandered into the only record store in Hamilton with the intention of spending my pocket money on the Electric Light Orchestra’s self-titled debut. My elation at finding this import turned to embarrassment at the counter, where the two male shop attendants openly scoffed at my choice. I turned bright red and wanted to shrink away to nothing, to cease to exist.

How could I have got it so wrong? The few reports I had read about the Electric Light Orchestra made them out to be the best thing since… well, The Beatles. The idea of combining progressive rock ideas with orchestral instruments and arrangements appealed immensely. I skulked home with my purchase, feeling very unhip, and ventured to place needle on platter. It sounded great!

Sure, there were things I didn’t like about it. Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood took turns at the vocals and their thin, nasal expression sounded manufactured to emulate the naturally pinched sound of John Lennon. I didn’t at first quite understand the tendency to write songs with historic themes, and then there was ‘the orchestra’.

I knew that ELO was a rock band with a small string section, but I was expecting the rather quaint and subdued violins and cellos of The Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and what I got was fervid scraping of horsehair across cello strings. It turned out that, having found it impossible to employ the services of classical catgut manglers, Roy Wood had set about learning how to make a serviceable noise on string instruments. (He’d also performed the required parts on crumhorn, bassoon, clarinet and multiple other instruments). It wasn’t perfectly to my taste, but the record was a frequent companion and its audacious mix of melodic pop, rock, medieval and nostalgic styles and flavours from other eras made for a rich listening experience.

It took me a while to figure out what it was about this kind of music that some terminally hip rock and roll fans might find so risible, but by the second ELO album, the aesthetic transgressions were more obvious. Roy Wood had possibly driven himself close to exhaustion with the first album, so by ELO II he’d left, which made it Jeff Lynne’s baby. While Wood was already a respected member of The Move at the time of ELO’s birth, Jeff Lynne’s connections to greatness (a past steeped in the pleasant psychedelic pop of The Idle Race) were more tenuous. ELO II was a daft, bombastic album that saw Lynne searching for his muse on a series of overlong progressive-leaning dirges. I loved it. On The Third Day, their (natch) third album, seemed unadventurous by comparison although, in retrospect, it led a clear path to the group’s masterwork.

The terrible, wonderful Eldorado (1974) would forever seal my appreciation of Lynne’s dazzling yet bemusing talents. The creamy putrescence at the heart of this giant conceit of an album makes it one of the greatest guilty pleasures in the history of recorded music and concept albums in general.

Eldorado (pretentiously subtitled A Symphony by the Electric Light Orchestra) was in fact the first ELO concept album, and it worked a dream. The idea behind it was that a rather bored and depressed chap dreams up a bunch of fantasy worlds including that of Eldorado, the possibly mythical pre-history empire of the Americas.

While On The Third Day had shown that Lynne was now a confident writer who had largely emerged from the expectations of the progressive rock era to write slightly disco-fied and melody-rich songs like ‘Showdown’, it had lacked an overarching theme. What gave Eldorado its spectacular and seductive artifice was the drama afforded by the dreaming/fantasy theme together with the spit and polish and sheer impact of the hired Hollywood strings.

While Jeff Lynne would never escape his massive debt to the Fab Four, he was skilled enough to take those influences and forge an album that had its own thing going on. The Beatles, of course, no matter how chemically altered they were on songs like ‘I Am The Walrus’, were somehow never bombastic, pretentious or preposterous. Eldorado was all three, in spades… and yet it was a fabulous confection that held you to your seat for its 38 minutes and 42 seconds just like a movie for the ears. You would never want to play it for your cooler than cool school Lou Reed-loving friends or even have it on display but it would be reserved for those times when you needed an escape. It didn’t have a still from The Wizard Of Oz on the front cover for no reason. Eldorado would whisk you away from your black-and-white agrarian existence to a full-colour world full of munchkins and tin men and friendly lions.

Eldorado had memorable melodies, stirring vocal performances (even if Lynne does rather stretch his vocal abilities at times), strings-a-plenty, and yet it was still identifiably from the rock universe with Bev Bevan’s plodding drums quite high in the mix, along with guitars and Richard Tandy’s cool synthesizer burblings. The way it was recorded/engineered/mixed wasn’t subtle, but it was clever. By hiring a professional string section, they had betrayed the original idea of rock/pop guys grappling manfully with cellos and violins, but Lynne knew that he wanted something much grander and more dynamic than that.

The album starts with former Dr Who actor Peter Forbes-Robertson’s brief narration underneath swirling clouds of strings, leading into a brief but dynamic overture and then the single release, ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’. Things don’t really take off until the last two songs on the first side with the dramatic ‘Laredo Tornado’ and ‘Poor Boy (The Greenwood)’. Needle down on Side 2 and it’s straight into the reflective mystery of ‘Mister Kingdom’ with its pleasant repetitions and purring Moog and then the uh… mischievous ‘Nobody’s Child’. Sample lyric? “Painted lady, why you loosening my tie?/Painted lady, what’s that twinkle in your eye?/Painted lady, you better stay away from me/Yeah, yeah, oh, oh-oh-oh.”

Lynne seems to have felt that his audience required at least one “rocker” on each album and on Eldorado, it’s ‘Illusions In G Major’, easily the least interesting track here despite its allusions to mental illness and lyrics that namecheck The Rolling Stones and Leonard Cohen. Ironically, when ELO try to rock out, it sounds lumpy and forced, but when they combine those strings with a rock rhythm section and a pop sensibility, they’re on fire. Which brings us to the cascading dramatics and swelling hearts of the title tune and the grand finale.

ELO would go on to make much more commercially successful albums than Eldorado, and albums packed full of hits (neither of the album’s singles bothered the masses, despite it quickly going Gold and proving perpetually popular). What they wouldn’t do again was craft a concept that captivated the imagination in quite the way Eldorado did or provide a concentrated burst of enjoyment that was quite as reliable over 40 or so minutes.

I was to find out just how much of a studio concoction Eldorado was the following year on August 28, 1975, when the Electric Light Orchestra played Auckland’s Town Hall. Attending high school in Hamilton at the time, it was generally impossible for me to get to Auckland for gigs but my father happened to be travelling there for work that day, and dropped me off at the venue. (These days, parents are often seen accompanying their evil spawn to concerts but Dad’s idea of good music was light opera and Bing Crosby, not some noisy rabble).

The group made up for the absence of a full orchestral string section by having a tape of those parts blasting away at certain points of the performance, but regardless, the gig was memorable for the way the two cellists occasionally twirled and cavorted with their instruments. It was loud and certainly by today’s standards certainly rough as guts, with the odd squealing microphone or equipment hum coming through the PA system. Somehow, as a live entity, the group was energetic and thrilling in a fashion that the records failed to capture. It probably made up for the lack of finesse.

Somehow, my LP of Eldorado survived the punk purge of ‘77/’78 where many of my prog-leaning albums got traded in for spiky-haired and more down-to-earth options.  It’s a testament to Jeff Lynne’s audacity, ingenuity and probably, genius. I’m not big on nostalgia but on that rare occasion I put that happy platter on my gramophone, it never fails to amuse. Just don’t tell anybody, okay?

Postscript: Cut to the mid-‘90s when Satanist film-maker and author of the scurrilous Hollywood Babylon book Kenneth Anger turns up for a screening of his critically acclaimed short films at Auckland’s Civic Theatre. His 1954 film Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome is soundtracked by Eldorado and afterwards, I get to ask him why he used a 1974 album on a silent 1954 film. It turns out that he was great friends with Jeff Lynne and loved the music. There’s no evidence that Jeff Lynne ever did a deal with the horned one, but some of his music is devilishly great.

 + While Eldorado is nobody’s idea of an audiophile album, it’s packed with sonic thrills nevertheless, and the 2001 remastered CD sounds splendid. Meanwhile, streaming services like Qobuz offer FLAC files of the album up to 192kHz.