Live music review: ELO at 3Arena, Dublin
Jeff Lynne’s ELO represent the missing link between The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and the closing 20 minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was clear from the beginning of the group’s 3Arena show, rescheduled after the 68-year-old band leader came down with a sore throat a week earlier. Swirling stars glimmered on video screens as power chords chimed into the infinite. You half expected a flying saucer to hover into view and disgorge the musicians.
It was a suitably seismic introduction to an evening of music that ventured where The Beatles never dared. Through the 1970s, Birmingham-born Lynne self-consciously picked up the mantle of McCartney, Lennon et al with songs of dizzying ambition and irresistible melodic power. They were ridiculous in a way only a UFO-obsessed 1970s progressive rock could be — yet so catchy their ludicrousness was beside the point.
