‘Evil Woman’: The ELO song Jeff Lynne wrote “in a matter of minutes”
Across rock music, few figures have the pedigree that Jeff Lynne has. There’s his well-known day job as the frontman of Electric Light Orchestra, the British progressive rock giants who have sold more than 50million records. But if you add in his collaborations with Tom Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison (both inside and outside of The Travelling Wilburys), Lynne stands out as one of the most impactful classic rock veterans of all time.
Lynne even made it to the highest possible peak in music: producing The Beatles. Granted, it was for the 1995 archival Anthology release, but that’s still nothing to scoff at. With his name in the production credits for the re-recorded singles ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Real Love’, Lynne remains the only other producer besides George Martin (and briefly, Glyn Johns) that had worked with the Fab Four.
When Lynne sat down with Rolling Stone in 2016, he had plenty to share about all of the artists above. But he was mostly there to talk about his own creations with ELO. One song that stood out from the conversation was ‘Evil Woman’, the 1975 single that helped propel ELO out of the prog world and into the mainstream pop universe. Appropriately, Lynne didn’t waste any time making it happen.
“I wrote this in a matter of minutes,” Lynne revealed. “The rest of the album (Face the Music) was done. I listened to it and thought, ‘There’s not a good single.’ So I sent the band out to a game of football and made up ‘Evil Woman’ on the spot. The first three chords came right to me. It was the quickest thing I’d ever done. We kept it slick and cool, kind of like an R&B song. It was kind of a posh one for me, with all the big piano solos and the string arrangement.”
“It was inspired by a certain woman, but I can’t say who,” Lynne continued. “She’s appeared a few times in my songs. Playing concerts in those days wasn’t fun. The sound was always bad and we were still playing theatres and town halls, the occasional dance hall. After ‘Evil Woman’, we got more gigs, but it didn’t change my life all that much. You can’t buy a palace or anything after just one hit.”
Luckily, Lynne didn’t have to wait long for his next one. 1976 saw the release of both ‘Strange Magic’ and ‘Livin Thing’, both top 20 hits in the US. ELO would graduate to bigger stages (with better sound), and the true majesty of the band’s classical take on rock and roll began to take off. Check out ‘Evil Woman’ down below.