E.L.O. Getting the call….

E.L.O. backstage: that's me, third from left and Jeff Lynne's the one wearing sunglasses

I had a phone call a couple of days ago from my old friend and colleague Dave Morgan. I hadn’t heard from him in a while and it was great to catch up. When we said our goodbyes, it put me in mind of another phone call I received from Dave many years ago which (it’s safe to say) changed my life, which was never quite the same again!

The gist of the earlier phone conversation went as follows:

"Hello Mart, Jeff asked me to call you to see if you’d like to join the band".

I went cold and then hot. and then cold again in the space of a nano second!

"What band?" I asked rather timidly. "What band do you think?" said Dave a bit impatiently. "The Electric Light Orchestra, E.L.O."

I think I mumbled something like "That would be great" and "of course I’d love to", and the phone call was over, and my life had changed for ever...

I’d been working with Richard Tandy (keys) and Dave Morgan (Guitar, vocals, Vocoder). They had a separate project going called ‘Tandy Morgan’ which I had been contributing to for some time. Then a local Birmingham charity wanted to use one of Dave’s songs as the theme for the campaign and Dave asked Jeff Lynne to produce it, which he agreed to do. We met one morning in a studio in Birmingham called ‘The Abattoir’ which was owned and run by Birmingham band UB 40. I got on really well with Jeff; we had a great day and made a good record called "Action" for the charity ‘Heartbeat 86’.

And quite soon after that I got the call……

If anybody’s interested in the continuing story I’ll post some more stuff in a while.

All the best, Martin Smith.