Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *

In the years to come Birmingham City Council should and must erect a statue to the local lad who became one of its finest musicians and record producers. If they can put up a piece of modern art for the great comedian Tony Hancock then by beyond all reasonable doubt they should put one up of the equally excellent Jeff Lynne.

Jeff Lynne may have kept himself out the limelight for many years but his input and contribution to   the world of music must never be underestimated. Without him, there would be no E.L.O., there would be no final albums from The Move and most importantly, Roy Orbison would not have had a second chance of showing the youth of the time what he could do and George Harrison, one of the finest sons of Liverpool’s back catalogue would be the poorer.

It is his past that is the subject matter of his second album, a full 22 years after his debut solo album, as he transports his fans to the time when he was growing up in the district of Shard End and the love of radio. Fittingly the new album is called Long Wave, not a sound of a man looking back at his long lost youth but homage to the music that was played on the long wave frequency. The music he has bought to the forefront are both timeless but also, in the way that these things work, no longer played as titles on popular radio channels, consigned in the worst possible way to become dusty relics.

Jeff Lynne is nothing but a consummate professional and his own peculiar way of making an old song sound fresh and tantalising is nothing short of miraculous. By picking on songs that he listened to as a child in his bedroom in Birmingham, he has shown that tracks such as She by Charles Aznavour, Chuck Berry’s Let It Rock, Jack Lawrence and Charles Trenet’s superb Beyond The Sea and the composition of Smile by Charlie Chaplin are incredible in their re-worked state. Smile itself has all the hall marks of Lynne’s deep lasting love affair with the guitar and manages to even turn the background music into something that he would have been associated with more than 40 years ago.

The Long Wave is a deeply fascinating album, a perfect respectful piece of work with the genius of arguably Birmingham’s finest ever musician stamped all over it.

Ian D. Hall