Hollywood never learns. Hot on the heels of box-office failures Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Can't Stop the Music, comes the roller-skating Olivia Newton John in Xanadu. This soundtrack is fluff stuff to be sure, but some pearls float amongst the mire. Lead-off "Magic" remains a fine single…
5CD package containing albums from Electric Light Orchestra and Jeff Lynne's solo career. Albums are packaged in cardboard replica vinyl sleeves and bundled in a card slipcase. Albums featured: Armchair Theatre, Zoom, Mr. Blue Sky The Very Best Of ELO, Longwave & Electric Light Orchestra Live.
This is the long awaited critical review of the music of the Electric Light Orchestra during the Roy Wood era. This unique independent film traces the development of the band from the tail end of the Move era through the creation of the legendary debut album and on to the birth of Wizzard. The original and classic line up of the band featured the combined talents of Jeff Lynne, Bev Bevan and Roy Wood. Drawing on rare footage of the original ELO in performance previously unreleased on DVD, this powerful film features the frank and incisive views of a team of leading critics and working musicians. Essential viewing for every ELO fan this is the definitive retrospective of the birth of a legendary band.
ELO Part II were a band formed by Electric Light Orchestra drummer and co-founder Bev Bevan. The band also included former ELO bassist Kelly Groucutt, and violinist Mik Kaminski for most of its career, along with conductor Louis Clark who toured as a guest with ELO in its later years. After Bevan left the band in late 1999, he sold his half of the rights to the Electric Light Orchestra name back to Jeff Lynne, and the band changed its name to The Orchestra. Electric Light Orchestra Part Two is an album released by ELO Part II in 1990. "Kiss Me Red" was originally from Cheap Trick's album, The Doctor. In March 1991 "Honest Men" charted at number 60 on the UK Singles Chart, and 36 on the Dutch Top 40 chart.
In the early '80s, another wave of backward-masking hysteria hit the national scene, with unfounded claims that popular rock bands intentionally hid Satanic messages in their records. ELO had already been hit with this rumor for a song on their album ELDORADO, and on the following album's "Fire on High," Jeff Lynne deliberately placed an obvious backwards message. Because the initial prank worked so well, Lynne did not only did it again in this album's opening–the message is simply the album's title–but named the album in honor of the hysteria. SECRET MESSAGES proves that Lynne's artistic vision, like his sense of humor, was undimmed. Tracks like the psychedelically tinged "Loser Gone Wild" and the delicate "Bluebird" are as strong as anything he'd previously done, and the rockabillyish "Rock and Roll Is King" even pays tribute to the '50s-influenced style of his former bandmate Roy Wood.