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Ten times ELO's Jeff Lynne secretly saved rock 'n' roll

Jeff Lynne has lived an exceptional life by anyone's standards. The frontman of Electric Light Orchestra, the producer of Roy Orbison and the reformed Beatles, and a member of the most super of all supergroups, his achievements are many.

Ahead of ELO's appearance in the 'legends' slot at Glastonbury, Lynne met up with BBC 6 Music's Matt Everitt to discuss some of those achievements with typical humility and dry humour (you can hear The First Time With… Jeff Lynne on Sunday at 1pm). Here are 10 pivotal pop moments, picked by Fraser McAlpine, that might not have happened without the intervention of Mr Blue Sky.

1. ELO invent the rockestra

Jeff Lynne on new versions of ELO classics

Jeff Lynne tells us why he has gone back to re-record some of his most memorable ELO tracks.

The modus operandi (with the emphasis on 'opera') for ELO is fairly straightforward. Keep adding stuff until you get to the kitchen sink, then add some more. "I'm an overdub fanatic," says Jeff in The First Time With... "I always used to have a joke with the rest of the guys in the band. I'd say, 'Don't worry, you won't hear any of this,' when we'd just laid the backing track down… I'd have a bloody big orchestra come in, like a 30-piece string section."

Not that Jeff didn't have moments of doubt, even with his best-loved creations. "I was doing the single Mr Blue Sky in the cutting room somewhere here in England. And I remember the cutting engineer not taking any notice while he was cutting it... usually the cutting engineers go, 'Ooh, I like that,' but this guy didn’t say anything. And I thought, 'Oh, it must be crap then.'"

2. Wizzard's eternal Christmas

Jeff Lynne enjoyed his first taste of success when he joined psychedelic pop band The Move and penned their first US billboard Top 100 hit, 1971's Do Ya. The Move soon evolved into Electric Light Orchestra, although Lynne quickly fell out with co-founder Roy Wood, who went off to form Wizzard. Without this turn of events, we may never have had Wizzard's perennial festive stomper, I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day. Imagine that!

3. Led Zeppelin's final triumph at Knebworth

In 1979, with ELO at their absolute peak, Jeff was offered the headlining slot at the annual Knebworth Concert, a 200,000-capacity outdoor event at Knebworth House, Hertfordshire. He turned it down, and promoters managed to secure the services of Led Zeppelin instead. This would bring the band back to a UK stage for the first time in four years, and proved to be their last hurrah - it was the final time the band played in the UK with John Bonham, who died a year later.

4. George Harrison's return to the charts

The Beatles' influence over Jeff's music is clear and deep, so it wasn’t that strange that he would end up producing three former Fabs - he's the only producer to have worked with Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr on respective solo albums. He began with George, working on the 1987 album Cloud Nine that returned Harrison to the upper reaches of the chart with the singles Got My Mind Set on You and When We Was Fab. The latter song was written by the pair at a house in Queensland, Australia, following a trip by helicopter to the Adelaide Grand Prix.

5. Traveling Wilburys up the stakes for supergroups

During the sessions for Cloud Nine, George realised he was a song short for a B-side, but rather than write it himself, he and Jeff decided to create a group of like-minded friends. George suggested Bob Dylan, Jeff suggested Roy Orbison, and they both agreed on Tom Petty. Within 24 hours, the supergroup that became the Traveling Wilburys was formed and ready to commence writing what became their first single, Handle with Care.

"There was no ego problem at all, because everybody loved the idea," says Jeff, going on to describe the subsequent hit album as being one of his easiest projects: "It just flowed so well, it was incredibly easy going, no problem to make."

6. Roy Orbison's late-career revival

Jeff admits that his first big musical crush was the singer with whom he later recorded a career-transforming album, Mystery Girl, which included the hit You've Got It. "My first obsession was actually Roy Orbison, when I was about 13," says Jeff. "I heard Only the Lonely, and that was like the biggest blast of wonderment to me. It was like, 'What the hell's that!?' It was beautiful."

Roy, the owner and operator of one of rock's most distinctive voices, recorded what became his final album with Jeff straight after the Wilburys experience rejuvenated his career. Tellingly, he had also re-recorded his greatest hits, just as Jeff would do later with his ELO back catalogue.

7. Tom Petty's ascent to the classic rock summit

As of this moment, the only member of the Traveling Wilburys not to have gone on to work with Jeff as a producer is Bob Dylan, and even he must have cocked an ear to Tom Petty's first solo album Full Moon Fever and thought about giving him a go. It's a warm and sparkling production, giving the hits Free Fallin', I Won't Back Down and Runnin' Down a Dream a sound that is sharp and pugnacious, and not unduly overshadowed by nostalgia for classic rock. As Jeff says, "I love the sound of that. That's my favourite album that I ever produced."

8. The Beatles' big reunion

The quietly spoken and studio-obsessed Jeff is blessed with the right kind of natural diplomacy (and supernatural competence) it must take to take on the mantle of producer for a reunion of three of The Beatles. And that is what he did in 1994 to help them prepare for the release of their autobiographical TV series Anthology. He also helped them make new music, thanks to a home-recorded cassette of John Lennon singing and playing the piano. Free as a Bird and Real Love may not be as acclaimed as In My Life or Yesterday, but they're far better records than they had any right to be, and that’s largely Jeff's doing.

9. Paul Weller's coronation as godfather of Britpop

Paul Weller

Highlights of Paul Weller's set at Glastonbury 2015

The guitar riff from Paul Weller's musical mission statement The Changingman owes something (i.e. everything) to ELO's first single, 10538 Overture. Paul's producer Brendan Lynch sampled the ELO song, on the understanding that if Jeff Lynne sued, the settlement would come out of his share of the royalties.

But the original recording was far from straightforward, with Jeff and Roy Wood breaking a cardinal rule of pop music: "It was done in a very strange way, it was myself and Roy Wood just playing it all, and then we put the drums on last… We'd already made the record, see, and we didn't want to do it all again. We'd got that great guitar sound and Roy's brilliant cello that he'd learned in a week… and Bev put the drums on last."

10. Daft Punk’s AOR disco breakthrough

And Paul wasn’t the only one raiding the Lynne vaults for treasure. During the early 2000s, ELO's sumptuous musical feasts were being sampled by dance acts looking for a little disco, cut with some classy 70s rock. Lovefreekz made a club classic out of Shine a Little Love, The Pussycat Dolls took some of Evil Woman and made Beep, and The Hives sampled Don't Bring Me Down to make Go Right Ahead. But Daft Punk managed to pay homage on multiple levels. Their song Face to Face used a sample from Evil Woman, which appeared on their album Discovery (also an ELO album title), and they went out on tour with a huge lighting rig based on a pyramid, where ELO had a spaceship.