Jeff Lynne Net Worth

About Jeff Lynne

Lynne’s production career began to soar after his collaborations with the Everly Brothers, Duane Eddy, and roots rocker Dave Edmunds in the early 1980s. As a member of the Grammy-winning Traveling Wilburys ensemble in 1988, Lynne quickly began producing for Wilburys Roy Orbison and Tom Petty, who went on to record the critically acclaimed and financially successful albums Mystery Girl and Full Moon Fever, respectively.

Jeff Lynne was born in Erdington, Birmingham, to Nancy and Philip Lynne. He still possesses his Birmingham accent as well as an acoustic guitar purchased for him by his father for an alleged £2. His first piece of studio recording gear was a stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder from Bang & Olufsen called the “Beocord 2000 De Luxe,” which allowed him to multitrack between the left and right channels, sometime in or around 1965. According to him, it “taught me how to be a producer”.

After responding to an advertisement in the Birmingham Evening Mail, Lynne became the guitarist for the Nightriders in 1966. While touring with The Idle Race in 1968, Lynne and the other band members received an invitation to a Beatles recording session at Abbey Road Studios. While there, he encountered the Beatles for the first time and saw them working on The White Album as a group. Before returning to the sessions with the Idle Race, he spent an hour at the session.

Roy Wood, the frontman of the Move, invited Lynne to join his reformed group in 1970; the two had a common ambition of mixing electric rock & roll with classical orchestrations, a concept that eventually led the Move to become the Electric Light Orchestra. Lynne accepted Wood’s invitation.

The Electric Light Orchestra was supposed to be created by Wood and Lynne concurrently with their work on the Move albums. No Answer, the group’s debut album released as ELO, was favorably welcomed in Great Britain, where the song “10538 Overture,” became a smash single in 1972.

A year after the band’s debut album was released in 1972, problems caused Wood to leave ELO, creating the band Wizzard in the process. Lynne then became the band’s primary creative force. In 1972, Lynne wed Rosemary, his first wife; they later divorced in 1977.

The group’s first American hit came in 1973 with the Lynne song “Do Ya” Shortly after that, Wood left the group to found Wizzard, leaving Lynne in command. He led the band into the 1980s, achieving several US Top Ten songs and albums in addition to providing music for the Xanadu soundtrack in 1980.

For All This and World War II in 1976, Lynne performed covers of the Beatles’ songs “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Nowhere Man” The disco-inspired “Doin’ That Crazy Thing”/”Goin’ Down to Rio” was Lynne’s debut solo song, which was published in 1977. Despite ELO’s high-profile at the time, the song didn’t chart and had minimal exposure.

The band’s grandiose “space ship” set and laser light show were highlights of their 1978 global tour. The band utilized additional pre-recorded backing tracks during live performances in order to replicate the intricate instrumental textures of their albums. Even if that behavior is now standard, the press at the time found it to be highly amusing.

Led Zeppelin took the stage at the Knebworth Concert in the UK after Lynne turned down an invitation from ELO. Lynne had time to add five tracks to the soundtrack for the 1980 musical film Xanadu as he wasn’t touring in support of Discovery at the time. He wed Sandi Kapelson in 1979, and the two of them have two daughters.

With the science-fiction-themed album Time (1981), Lynne led the band in a slightly different direction. It peaked at number one in the UK for two weeks and resulted in the second Top 3 single in less than two years. The violins were still prominent, but the soundscapes were greatly synthesized. Lynne maintained this basic strategy with Secret Messages (1983) and a last ELO album required by contract, Balance of Power, after a lukewarm tour (1986). Two original songs, “Video!” and “Let It Run” were donated by Lynne and Tandy to the 1984 movie Electric Dreams.

Lynne worked with ex-Beatles members on a number of projects in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the release of their debut album, Please Please Me, in 1963, the band has had a significant influence on Lynne and has continued to do so throughout his whole career. The Beatles had a significant effect on Lynne’s work with ELO, and when Lynne produced George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, the relationship to the Beatles was further cemented.

The Traveling Wilburys, a studio “supergroup” that also included Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and Roy Orbison, were founded in 1988 as a result of Lynne’s relationship with Harrison. Harrison and Lynne co-produced each of their respective albums (Vol. 1 and Vol. 3). Lynne also contributed to Orbison’s 1988 album Mystery Girl, co-writing and producing two more songs in addition to “You Got It” which was the artist’s final big hit.

The 1989 Tom Petty album Full Moon Fever, co-produced by Lynne, featured the hit singles “Free Fallin'” “I Won’t Back Down” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” all of which Lynne co-wrote. The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and this album were both nominated for the 1989 Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year.

While working on the Wilburys’ second album, Volume III, Lynne also released his debut solo album, Armchair Theatre. With his primary influences, the Beatles, on their Anthology series, Lynne produced some of his most notable work; the reconstructed “Free as a Bird” had his unmistakable imprint, and he also collaborated with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney (Flaming Pie) separately.

The Heartbreakers’ 1991 album Into the Great Wide Open, which included the singles “Learning to Fly” and “Into the Great Wide Open” was co-written and produced by Lynne once again in the studio with Petty. He contributed two songs to Roy Orbison’s posthumous album King of Hearts the next year, including the tune “I Drove All Night”

The second half of the 1990s saw little activity from Lynne as a legal battle over the right to use the term Electric Light Orchestra made its way through the system. After acquiring the rights to ELO, Lynne released Zoom in 2001 under the name Electric Light Orchestra. Zoom was largely his own recording. Despite favorable reviews, the album failed to become a hit.

For Julianna Raye, a singer-songwriter, Lynne produced the album Something Peculiar in 1993. He also produced or wrote songs for Joe Cocker’s Night Calls album, Roger McGuinn’s Back from Rio, Aerosmith’s Lizard Love, Tom Jones’ Lift Me Up, Bonnie Tyler’s Time Mends a Broken Heart, the soundtrack to the movie Still Crazy, Hank Marvin’s Wonderful Land and “Nivram,” Et Moi’s Drole De (“Action”).

Lynne revived ELO in 2000 and put out the retrospective box set Flashback, which featured a lot of recently finished but unreleased songs. The first brand-new ELO album in fifteen years, Zoom, was released by Lynne the following year. Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Richard Tandy made cameo cameos on the record, with Lynne multi-tracking the majority of the instruments and voices. George Harrison and Lynne started collaborating on what would become Harrison’s final album, Brainwashed, earlier in 2001. After Harrison passed away from cancer on November 29, 2001, Lynne went back to the recording studio in order to complete the unfinished album.

Lynne acknowledged he was collaborating with Joe Walsh on a new album in an interview he gave to the Daily Express newspaper in March 2010. Walsh’s Analog Man album, which Lynne helped produce, was released in 2012. On The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles in 2014, Lynne performed George Harrison’s “Something” with Joe Walsh and Dhani Harrison as well as “Hey Bulldog” from the Yellow Submarine soundtrack alongside Dave Grohl to mark the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Lynne sang “Evil Woman” and “Mr. Blue Sky” with Ed Sheeran at the 2015 Grammy Awards.

Dublin, Amsterdam, and Zurich were among the cities visited on the 2016 European tour. Notably, Lynne’s medical advise caused the Dublin concert to be postponed by a week. 60,000 people watched Lynne perform at Wembley Stadium on June 24, 2017, during which he sang 24 songs, including “Xanadu,” “Do Ya,” and “Twilight.” Wembley or Bust was the name given to the DVD and CD releases of the show. A North American tour by Jeff Lynne’s ELO featuring Dhani Harrison got underway on June 20. In the 2020 Birthday Honours, Lynne was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his contributions to music.