Jeff Lynne

“Long Wave”

Pop

Frontiers

Released 8^th October 2012

            "I call this new album Long Wave because all of the songs I sing on it are the ones heard on long wave radio when I was a kid growing up in Birmingham, England," Lynne explains. "These songs take me back to that feeling of freedom in those days and summon up the feeling of first hearing those powerful waves of music coming in on my old crystal set. My dad also had the radio on all the time, so some of these songs have been stuck in my head for 50 years. You can only imagine how great it felt to finally get them out of my head after all these years."

            There, now you know. What he forgot to mention is the fact this sort of nostalgia trip is a bloody huge money spinner as Rod Stewart, Michael Bolton et al… have discovered.

            Not content with rerecording a load of ELO’s greatest hits for the “Mr Blue Sky - The Very Best Of Electric Light Orchestra” compilation, Jeff Lynne has gone and done a second covers album of songs from his youth. To some, this may be interesting but to the rest of us it is rather perplexing.

            Of the eleven tracks here, only one is of interest, Berry’s “Let It Rock”, and even that has had its nuts nipped. The rest are ponderous and rather insipid covers of songs some of which have no relevance to rock at all, Charles Aznavour’s “She” for instance, suggesting Lynne is pondering a jaunt down the Great American Songbook route, or at least his version of it.

            The problem being we know Lynne is more than capable of rocking out. Being a bit of a poptastic genius in his day, he has more than ably demonstrated his rock cred with ELO and The Traveling Wilburys and a song writing and production credit list that is to die for.

 

            There are probably enough Lynne disciples knocking about who will hoover this CD up with glee. However, if like me, you are hoping for something along the lines of “Ma-Ma-Ma-Belle”, “Don’t Bring Me Down” and “Rockaria”, forget it.