Electric Light Orchestra – 1st Album (1971)
Obscure – hardly, genius definitely. The brainchild of Roy Wood, multi instrumentalist and main songwriter in The Move, a band whose peculiarly english take on psychedelia kicked off the first broadcast from Radio One with the immortal “Flowers in the Rain”. This album was the only one to feature Roy Wood. The first single, “10538 Overture” foisted massively overdubbed cellos onto a bemused british public who nonetheless bought in sufficient numbers to propel the song to number 9 in the charts. Strange doesn’t even begin to describe the music – if there were such a thing as garage orchestra this record would be both genesis and revelation. By turn haunting, wistful and abrasive the album is a tour de force and marks Roy Wood, a man for whom radical change has been the only career constant, as a maverick genius. The band went on to stratospheric success under the stewardship of Jeff Lynne; Roy Wood went on to found Wizzard, no less strange in their own way, but sadly responsible for the dreadful “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”
