This collection sets up the Beatles influence in its very first two songs. Pepper’s-era Beatles led instead to his own unique brand of over-the-top orchestral rock. Whether one believes this is how all art is created, I can’t help but think that in Jeff Lynne’s case, his determination to recreate Sgt. Bloom would site Shakespeare as an example, perhaps most famously in remarking that Freud’s attempts to “solve” Hamlet really just show how his ideas were formed by a strange rewriting of the Bard’s plays. To avoid sheer mimicry, they would have to reinterpret the works of their influence, in essence sort of recreating them in their own images. In effect, writers would draw influence from predecessors, but get them wrong, thus creating something original.
It was Harold Bloom, into kabbalism way before Madonna, who claimed that all forms of rewarding works of literature were the result of creative misreading. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in particular. All Over the World eschews chronology, throwing early hits and later disco numbers back to back, and the liner notes consist of a half-hearted essay by Jeff Lynne where he essentially says, “Hey, cool, we had a bunch of songs on the album charts.” However, the way this collection sets up Electric Light Orchestra’s work is fascinating, because it really brings into focus Electric Light Orchestra’s (really, Lynne’s) obsession with the Beatles in general, and Sgt. All Over the World: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra is that type of flawed collection, favoring weaker album tracks to monster singles such as the gorgeous “Can’t Get It Out of My Head” and the glam-rock gem “Do Ya”. There’s something about flawed collections that reveal something about an artist that you really hadn’t quite realized.
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