By the spring of 1975, the Electric Light Orchestra had a problem that no amount of cellos could disguise: they had finished an album, and there was not a single on it. Face the Music was complete — eight tracks of the band’s most sophisticated work — but as Jeff Lynne listened back at Musicland Studios in Munich, he reached the conclusion every songwriter dreads. “There’s not a good single,” he decided. So he sent the rest of the band out of the studio and wrote one, on the spot, in a matter of minutes. The song was “Evil Woman,” and it became the group’s first worldwide hit.
The Quickest Thing He Ever Did
Lynne told the story himself, years later, in Rolling Stone: “I wrote this in a matter of minutes. The rest of the album was done. I listened to it and thought, ‘There’s not a good single.’ So I sent the band out to play football, and I sat at the piano and played the opening piano riff, which became the basis of the song. The first three chords came right to me. It was the quickest thing I’d ever done.” The exact stopwatch reading has wobbled in the retelling — the song is often reported as a thirty-minute composition, and other accounts are shorter still — but nobody, least of all Lynne, has ever suggested it took longer than an afternoon’s panic.
There is a lovely paradox in the speed. “Evil Woman” does not sound dashed off. It sounds engineered: a strutting piano riff, stabs of strings like slaps, a clavinet worrying away under the chorus, and a melody so inevitable that Cash Box, reviewing the single, heard in its recurring hook the four notes of “Anchors Aweigh.” Lynne himself described the intention with a craftsman’s calm: “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.” The quickest song of his life was also one of the most deliberately polished.
Backwards Strings and a Borrowed Hole
The band returned from their football game and cut the backing track that same day; Lynne wrote and recorded the lyrics the next. Face the Music was the group’s fifth album and their first recorded at Musicland — Giorgio Moroder’s Munich studio, with its engineer Reinhold Mack, known to everyone simply as Mack — and the facilities suited Lynne’s mania for layering. Around him stood the classic line-up at full strength: Bev Bevan’s drums, Kelly Groucutt’s bass and high harmonies, Mik Kaminski’s violin and the cellos of Hugh McDowell and Melvyn Gale, with Louis Clark conducting the orchestra. Richard Tandy, Lynne’s right hand, played piano, Moog and clavinet — it is Tandy’s funky clavinet that spars with the vocal through the chorus, the R&B grit inside the posh arrangement. The strings were added later at De Lane Lea Studios in Wembley, and the female backing vocals — a small choir that included the legendary Ellie Greenwich — were recorded in New York, with the young Jimmy Iovine involved in the final mix. Nothing in that brisk itinerary hints at the strangest thing on the record.
In the instrumental bridge, the strings surge and swirl with a flanged, underwater quality — because the passage is not “Evil Woman” at all. It is the string section of “Nightrider,” another track from the same album, played backwards and treated with flange. Lynne, the one-man cottage industry, was recycling his own orchestra. He did it again in reverse: a reversed slice of the “Evil Woman” strings opens “Fire On High,” the album’s instrumental curtain-raiser, so the record quite literally begins with the hit single running backwards.
The lyric hides a quieter borrowing. “There’s a hole in my head where the rain comes in,” Lynne sings — a direct nod to the Beatles’ “Fixing a Hole,” from a writer whose career was a lifelong conversation with the Beatles’ catalogue. As for the woman herself, Lynne has guarded her identity for fifty years. “It was inspired by a certain woman,” he told Rolling Stone, “but I can’t say who. She’s appeared a few times in my songs.” Whoever she was, she has outlasted almost every named muse in rock — precisely by never being identified.
Number Ten on Both Sides of the Atlantic
Released as a single in late 1975, with a live version of the band’s first single “10538 Overture” on the B-side, “Evil Woman” did exactly the job it had been written to do. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-November 1975 and climbed steadily through the winter, holding at number ten for two weeks in February 1976 across a seventeen-week chart run; Cash Box put it one place higher, at number nine. In Britain it entered the chart in January 1976 and likewise peaked at number ten, and it went top ten in Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. It has since been certified platinum in the United States, and its pulling power was still obvious in 1978, when it was reissued as the lead track of The ELO EP. The band that had been a cult proposition — rock and roll with a string section, beloved by critics and tolerated by radio — suddenly had a record that no programmer could refuse.
On the album, sequenced third on side one, it had been the afterthought; as a single it became, in the phrase every history of the band uses, ELO’s first worldwide hit. Earlier successes had been regional or accidental — a hit in America here, a devoted following in Britain there — but “Evil Woman” charted everywhere at once, and it changed what the band believed about itself.
Timing was everything. “Evil Woman” arrived months before A New World Record turned ELO into one of the biggest bands on earth, and it taught Lynne the lesson that would govern that imperial phase: the orchestra was not the obstacle to a hit, it was the hook. The string stabs, the futuristic sheen, the piano that sounded like it was wearing sunglasses — all of it was road-tested first in three and a half minutes written during a football game. Lynne would never again finish an album without asking the question Face the Music had taught him to ask: where is the single? From 1976 onward, he usually had the answer before he started.
The Sample, the Cover, the Afterlife
The song’s strangest second act came thirty years later. In 2006 the Pussycat Dolls released “Beep,” built on a sample of “Evil Woman” — and not just any part of it: the sample is the flanged, backwards “Nightrider” string interlude, the recycled orchestra Lynne had smuggled into his own record in 1975. Lynne received a co-writing credit, and the splice travelled around the world all over again, a snippet of a Munich studio experiment anchoring a twenty-first-century pop hit. The original recording turned up in a jail scene in Austin Powers in Goldmember — although, in a final twist worthy of the song’s own history of substitutions, the film’s soundtrack album carried a cover version instead. In 2024 Duran Duran recorded their own “Evil Woman” for the deluxe edition of Danse Macabre, and it returned Lynne’s panic-born riff to the American charts one more time.
Lynne, who re-recorded the song solo for his 2012 collection Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra, has kept it in the set list ever since the band’s return — it remains one of the nine ELO songs he named among his own favourites. There is something fitting in that: the perfectionist who once spent weeks layering an album into shape owes his breakthrough to the one time he did not have the chance. The band went out to play football, the piano produced three chords, and the evil woman — nameless then, nameless now — walked straight into the charts.
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