Jeff Lynne

Jeff Lynne didn’t just create a sound—he created a world. A member of the progressive pop band The Move before founding the Electric Light Orchestra in 1970, the Birmingham, England–born Lynne envisioned a place where past met future and synths met strings, where sock-hop memories played out at the frontiers of deep space. Baroque, bombastic and shamelessly epic, the band’s best songs (“Turn to Stone”, “Evil Woman”, “Mr. Blue Sky”) seem to look forward by looking back, setting the course for retro-futurists like Daft Punk and MGMT—not to mention drawing on classical music and disco at a time when rock purists considered the latter a mortal enemy. An accomplished producer, Lynne also had the opportunity to work with several of his childhood heroes, including George Harrison, Brian Wilson, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon, later helping the surviving Beatles record “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” from John Lennon’s demos. And in the late ’80s, Lynne—along with Harrison, Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty—formed the fictional brother-band The Traveling Wilburys, the rare supergroup to earn that distinction. A self-professed studio rat content to spend 14 hours a day inside, Lynne never quite adjusted to the idea of being a rock star, per se. “They dress all flashy and hang out in nightclubs,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “I liked to spend my spare moments at the pub.”