John Williamson

track, Nowhere is Home. . .And it is every bit as good as you would hope it to be. . .

And a worthy successor to:

Here’s a re-run of my homage to ELO for the constant source of amusement, Popfessions. They even have a contribution from Slash today!

I started buying records, aged 9, in late 1977. I’d never knowingly heard The Beatles or the Sex Pistols: the former because my dad’s limited record collection was a typically West of Scotland brew of (mainly bad) country, the latter as he switched over to Radio 2 when they came on the chart rundown on Sunday nights.

It was the voice of Tom Browne on the same chart show that first introduced me to the Electric Light Orchestra. They sounded bigger, more colourful and, quite simply, better, than any of their contemporaries. Each of their many chart entries was firstly taped and then subsequently purchased from either Gloria’s Record Bar in Battlefield or Soundtrack in Mount Florida, two worthy south Glasgow record emporia. 7-inch singles in 1978 cost 75p, sometimes 79p, eerily pre-dating the iTunes era.

Why ELO? Well, stop for a minute and consider the run of nine successive top 10 singles between 1978 and 1980. ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ to ‘Xanadu’, via ‘Wild West Hero’ and ‘Shine A Little Love’. Did The Beatles even manage such a consecutively brilliant run of pop singles? Did the Pistols even manage that number of singles, let alone good ones?

There were other reasons for loving them that appealed to the nascent collector/spotter: coloured vinyl; a huge free sticker of the ELO spaceship and those tempting, but largely superfluous first wave of 12-inch singles.

In addition, there were solo projects (Violinski’s Clog Dance, anyone?), vinyl-shaped Out Of The Blue bubblegum (which came in a mini-gatefold sleeve of the album) and the ELO Annual circa 1978. This contained an eye-opening chapter by Bev Bevan called Groupies, with some graphic and almost certainly exaggerated accounts of their on tour activities.

Their two best albums (Out Of The Blue and Discovery) were well out of my reach, at least until they became charity shop staples by the early Nineties, but they stand as testimony to a transient greatness. “The band the Beatles could have been,” indeed.