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Post by trekkielo on Feb 14, 2021 4:06:25 GMT -5
May Louis Clark rest in peace ELO's 50th Anniversary has sucked thus far! All-time favorites with him for me as conductor/co-string arranger he was an integral part of The Electric Light Orchestra definitive lineup's sound... Eldorado, A Symphony (1974) Face the Music (1975) A New World Record (1976) Out of the Blue (1977) Discovery (1979) Xanadu (1980) Secret Messages (1983) The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Hooked on Classics (1981) ELO Part II Electric Light Orchestra Part Two (1990) Moment of Truth (1995) The Orchestra No Rewind (2001) ELO Tour band member (1981 & 1986) PS-We'll see if Jeff Lynne makes any sorta statement, I'd like to hope so, but I'm not holding my breath! Louis Clark, Who Orchestrated ELO and Later ‘Hooked on Classics,’ Diesby Greg Brodsky Louis Clark, a musician who conducted and arranged the orchestral music for the Electric Light Orchestra in the ’70s, and later introduced pop music to the masses with the quirky Hooked on Classics series recorded with London’s Philharmonic Orchestra in the early ’80s, died Saturday (February 13, 2021) in Ohio. His death at age 73 was announced by his wife, Gloria, on his Facebook page. No cause of death was revealed but he had been ill for months and had suffered from kidney issues. Where preceding records had built orchestral sections with overdubs, ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne opted to live up to the band’s name when he hired Clark as string arranger and utilized a full orchestra in the group’s recordings. Beginning with 1974’s Eldorado and its big single, “Can’t Get it Out of My Head,” Clark conducted the strings and co-arranged the music with Lynne and ELO keyboardist Richard Tandy. Their collaboration continued with 1975’s Face the Music (“Evil Woman,” “Strange Magic”), for which Clark also began to work on the choral arrangements; 1976’s A New World Record (“Livin’ Thing,” “Do Ya,” “Telephone Line”); 1977’s two-LP set, Out of the Blue (“Mr. Blue Sky,” “Turn to Stone,” “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”), 1979’s Discovery (“Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Shine a Little Love”), and the 1980 soundtrack for the film, Xanadu. Clark then took his talents to a series of albums that offered uptempo disco-fied pop treatments to classical songs. The series, Hooked on Classics, first introduced in 1981, was a huge success. The title cut, a medley of such compositions as Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” was an unlikely pop hit, reaching #10 on the Hot 100, #2 in the U.K. and Top 10 in many other markets. The album, on RCA Records, reached #4 on the Billboard 200 Albums chart. It was marketed via K-Tel’s ubiquitous TV commercials and reportedly sold ten million copies. Its success led to multiple follow-ups. Louis Clark in 2014 Clark was born February 27, 1947, in Bedfordshire, England, and graduated from Leeds College of Music, with a degree in orchestration and arranging. During his career he also contributed string arrangements on such recordings as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” and Roy Orbison’s final album, Mystery Girl. Since 2000, among other endeavors, Clark has also performed with The Orchestra, which features former members of Electric Light Orchestra and ELO Part II. In her post announcing his death, his wife Gloria wrote, “This morning he watched premier league soccer and listened to The Beatles, two things he loved. This afternoon I told him I loved him, he said I love you too, and we kissed. He was gone five minutes later.” Watch Clark conduct the English Pops Orchestra in 2014.
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Post by mrjukebox on Feb 14, 2021 20:10:45 GMT -5
Indeed,"Hooked On Classics" was a surprise hit when it was released towards the end of 1981-I thought it was rather cool.
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 16, 2021 16:11:23 GMT -5
I'd like to hope Louis Clark could be included on In Memoriam during the March 14th, 2021 Recording Academy/GRAMMYs broadcast by CBS, unlike Kelly Groucutt, Mike Edwards & Hugh McDowell!
Remembering Louis Clark
THE ORCHESTRA Starring ELO Former Members
"THE ORCHESTRA Starring ELO Former Members has lost a treasured brother and bandmate. Louis Clark may be gone, but his creative legacy is a light that will continue to shine. These are some of our many memories with Lou from over the years, set to his composition "Lullaby" recorded by him and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
Video editing by George Reed."
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 16, 2021 16:12:43 GMT -5
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 16, 2021 16:14:33 GMT -5
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 16, 2021 21:30:04 GMT -5
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 19, 2021 15:57:27 GMT -5
Team Jeff's thoughts are not with Louis Clark, but Alex Trebek and Jeopardy!
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 19, 2021 15:58:52 GMT -5
It was 12 years ago today, 2/19/2009-2/19/2021, but on a Thursday, that American Renolit laid me off, when I came home to find out Kelly Groucutt, bass player of my all-time favorite band, Electric Light Orchestra, had tragically died from a heart attack at only 63 years old, then no In Memoriam tribute for him by The Recording Academy/GRAMMYs in 2010 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame snubbed him in 2016-2017, along with his son Chris Groucutt dead just over 4 years ago now!
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 19, 2021 22:18:16 GMT -5
www.ftmusic.com/www.ftmusic.com/news/index.htmlLOUIS CLARK 27 February 1947 – 13 February 2021Louis Clark, bass and keyboard player, arranger and conductor, passed away at the age of 73 on Saturday, February 13. His wife, Gloria made the sad announcement on his Facebook page. His first musical experience took the form of piano and viola lessons at the age of 14. Not long after that, The Beatles happened and he, like many others wanted to be in a band! He started playing in little groups around Bridgnorth in Shropshire and when he finished school he moved to Birmingham where he thought he'd stand a better chance at making it. He joined a band that eventually turned into the Raymond Froggatt Band playing bass and recording several singles and a couple of albums. It was on the second album where he was given a chance to write some string arrangements of which he had no experience. So armed with a few books on the subject, he learned basic arranging! When his arrangements were well recieved, he decided to quit the band to become a full time arranger. However, he found very quickly that his practical experience was not going to be enough to see him through and decided to enrol in a 3 year course at The City Of Leeds College Of Music. Lou first came to Jeff Lynne's attention when Jeff had started work on the Electric Light Orchestra's fourth album ' Eldorado' at De Lane Lea studios in London during 1974... Previously, Jeff had labouriously constructed the 'orchestral' sections by overdubbing ELO's 3-piece string section in the studio to make them sound bigger. Around the same time, Lou had been working on arrangements for a musical based on William Shakespeare for his former bandmate and friend Raymond Froggatt (the album was never released). Jeff heard the 'Shakespeare' tapes and asked if Lou would be interested in working on the Eldorado album. From 1974 through to 1983, Lou co-arranged the orchestra, choir and string section with Jeff and Richard Tandy on ELO's most successful albums: Eldorado, Face The Music, A New World Record, Out Of the Blue, Discovery, Xanadu and Secret Messages. During 1979, he released an excellent LP ‘ Perspektiv’ which re-imagined many of the themes on the unreleased Shakespeare album. In the 1980's, he introduced classical music to the pop masses with the hugely successful Hooked On Classics series recorded with London’s Philharmonic Orchestra. Lou’s work was well respected and his talents were in demand with a number of artists over the years such as Roy Orbison, America, Roy Wood, Carl Wayne, Asia, City Boy, Renaissance, Annie Haslam, Ozzy Osbourne, Kiki Dee and Clout to name but a few. His quiet modesty, quick humour and immense talent will be sadly missed.
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 22, 2021 23:39:22 GMT -5
ultimateclassicrock.com/electric-light-orchestra-balance-of-power/35 Years Ago: Electric Light Orchestra Blow Apart on ‘Balance of Power’Nick DeRiso Published: February 17, 2021 At this point, Jeff Lynne hardly wanted to tour. He had become disinterested in strings. He really didn't even care if Electric Light Orchestra records had live drums. "I don't particularly enjoy playing live at all," Lynne noted years later. "I do enjoy it, but it's nowhere near the buzz I get out of being in the studio and creating a new recording." Released on Feb. 17, 1986, the dark and downbeat Balance of Power proved to be perfectly named. ELO continued to pare down, losing bassist and key background singer Kelly Groucutt before sessions began. They'd already jettisoned the orchestral guys, leaving only Lynne, drummer Bev Bevan and keyboardist Richard Tandy. In truth, Groucutt's influence had been in decline for years: He appeared on only three cuts from 1983's Secret Messages before suing the group for unpaid royalties. An out-of-court settlement put the matter, his tenure and his friendship with Lynne to rest. “A golden handshake would have been nice, having helped to make Jeff a multimillionaire," Groucutt told Mojo in 2001. "I didn't want to sour my relationship with him, but I had a wife and four kids to support. I was advised to sue him – which I did, and which I've regretted ever since. ... I'd love to sit and have a drink with him, but he hates me to death. Nobody's fault but mine, as I instigated the suing, but in retrospect, it was just not worth it." Bevan often didn't have much to do, since Lynne had begun to favor electronic cadences. At the same time, the advent of music videos meant ELO didn't have to doggedly tour in order to reach their audience. Itchy to actually play, Bevan dabbled in live work with Black Sabbath before reluctantly returning. "Basically, the band ended when we decided to stop touring," Bevan told Record Collector in 2012. "The last big tour was in 1981 – the Time tour – but after that Jeff never really wanted to tour. Personally, I've always loved that side of things. Playing live was always the thing I enjoyed the most." Tandy made some key musical contributions to Balance of Power, but the rest – including songwriting, producing, electric and acoustic guitars, computerized synths, bass, keyboards, even percussion – was the product of Lynne's new one-man-band approach. "At the start, I probably did most of the keyboards, but as recording techniques changed and synthesizers and electronics came into the picture, Jeff did more and more," Tandy later told Steve Rifkin's Light!, an ELO fanzine. "By the time we got to Balance of Power, the usual way was to have a stack of keyboards in the control room, and me and Jeff playing along to a drum track, and Bev adding his things later." In the same interview, Tandy subsequently described one of his main duties – without any obvious hint of irony – as "watching Jeff lay down a basic string pad." Make no mistake, this was Lynne's band – even if his general ambivalence was made utterly clear on songs like "So Serious." Lynne hid himself away in the studio, reportedly rerecording his vocals (and adding often needless reverb) to the point of distraction. "The perfectionist bit is always there," Lynne told the Financial Times in 2015. "It's a pain in the behind, I suppose, for most people. I love to get it right, you know. I have to go: Yes, that's it. That's exactly how I thought of it. If it isn't exactly how I thought of it, it might be better." As things fell apart, the album became shrouded in melancholy. "Calling America," their final Top 40 song, found Lynne somehow more distant than on its better-executed cousin "Telephone Line." "Without Someone" gets lost in a wash of keyboards; a song called "Sorrow About to Fall" speaks for itself. Less emotional than technical, Balance of Power became cold to the touch. Tandy said his days were dominated by "twiddling the knobs on all of the great toys that we'd got – saving sounds, loading sounds, sitting down with calculators working out the milliseconds. I guess you'll get the picture," he told Light! "I also found time to actually play the odd keyboard." The balance of power had indeed shifted forever. They attempted a half-hearted tour, playing an odd final show as the opening act for Rod Stewart in July 1986 at Stuttgart, Germany. "Getting to the Point" became the last single released by the Electric Light Orchestra for 15 years. Lynne transformed into a studio rat, after guiding ELO down. "I just wanted to start producing other people," he admitted in a 2020 talk with Louder Sound. The new millennium saw a ELO relaunch, but only as a solo vehicle for Lynne. Bevan never worked with the band again, instead focusing on an offshoot project called ELO Part II that only deepened the rift with his old boss. Tandy made studio appearances on 2000's Zoom and 2019's Out of Nowhere, but only as a one-off sideman. A reluctant Lynne stayed off the road until the '10s, but by then Bevan had put their long journey apart into perspective. "Jeff took a long time to come to the decision to start touring again. He went years without touring," Bevan told Rolling Stone in 2016. "But he's written so many great songs, so it's only right he's out there playing his music. And because we had a fallout, I wasn't included and it's Jeff Lynne's ELO. That's fair enough."
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 26, 2021 19:15:10 GMT -5
www.theguardian.com/music/2021/feb/25/louis-clark-obituaryLouis Clark obituary
Keyboard player with the Electric Light Orchestra who went on to create the Hooked on Classics series with the Royal PhilharmonicLouis Clark wielded the conductor’s baton with the Philharmonic Orchestra, rescuing it from impending bankruptcy Adam Sweeting Thu 25 Feb 2021 12.32 EST Many have attempted to fuse classical and rock music, but few have achieved that goal more successfully than Louis Clark, who has died aged 73 after suffering a suspected stroke. His arranging and orchestration work with the Electric Light Orchestra lay at the core of their unusual and hugely successful sound. His subsequent creation of the Hooked on Classics series, in partnership with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, turned vintage classical pieces into huge pop hits, and in turn demonstrated how the works of pop and rock artists such as Queen or the Beatles could be classicalised. “It appears that it has introduced a lot of people to the classics,” he said in 2000. “People come away and say ‘this is different, it’s OK, it’s not as stuffy as I thought’.” Clark’s partnership with Jeff Lynne of ELO came about when he was at De Lane Lea studios in London, working on string arrangements for a musical about William Shakespeare by Raymond Froggatt (though the album was never released). Lynne, also working there, liked what he heard, and asked Clark to arrange and conduct the orchestra and choir for what would become ELO’s album Eldorado (1974). It reached No 16 in the US charts, and Clark’s tenure with the group over their next five albums, collaborating closely with Lynne and the multi-keyboard player Richard Tandy, saw them regularly featuring at the top end of the album charts around the world. Face the Music (1975) took them into the American Top 10, A New World Record (1975) and Out of the Blue (1977) went to the Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic, and Discovery (1979) was their first British chart-topper. ELO’s inventive vocal and instrumental blend, often with a Beatles-esque flavour, also helped them notch up a stream of notable singles, including Evil Woman, Livin’ Thing, Mr Blue Sky, Telephone Line and the Olivia Newton-John collaboration Xanadu. Between 1972 and 1986 ELO scored more Top 40 hits in Britain and the US than any other band. ELO playing Evil Woman Clark, who released the all-instrumental solo album per-spek-tiv in 1979, did not appear on ELO’s album Time in 1981, though he played keyboards on the subsequent tour, because that was the year he branched out into Hooked on Classics. The notion of stringing classical themes together over a rock beat was the idea of Don Reedman at K-Tel records, and he recruited Clark to steer it to fruition on the original Hooked on Classics album and single. The melange of well-known pieces by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mozart, Sibelius and many more was not to the taste of classical purists, but Clark had knitted it all together over the unswerving beat of a drum machine with consummate skill. The Hooked on Classics single reached No 2 in the UK and No 10 in the US, while the original Hooked on Classics album peaked at No 4 in the UK. The second and third albums in the series entered the UK Top 20 in 1982 and in 1983. Huge record sales, combined with extensive world touring, rescued the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from impending bankruptcy, and at the end of 1981 Clark, who wielded the conductor’s baton on tour, had the unique experience of playing with ELO at Wembley Arena and with the Royal Philharmonic at the Royal Albert Hall on successive nights. In 1983 he was made an honorary member of the orchestra, and his other projects with the RPO included albums of pieces by the Beatles, Queen and Abba, plus excursions into opera, baroque music and waltzes. Clark was born in Kempston, Bedfordshire, the third child of Francis Clark, a bricklayer, and his wife, Anna (nee Ruoss), a maid of Swiss and Polish heritage who had come to England before the second world war. When Louis was two his mother died in childbirth and he was sent to live with his aunt Nancy in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, while his older siblings went to boarding school. He attended Bridgnorth grammar school, where he learned the piano and viola in his teens. Then, as Beatlemania swept the country, he found himself gripped by pop music. “The Beatles came out and that was it,” he said later. “I went out and bought a bass guitar and taught myself how to play it.” After taking his A-levels he moved to Birmingham and joined his first band, the Buccaneers. They morphed into the Monopoly, then in 1969 became the Raymond Froggatt Band, releasing 10 singles and two albums, with Clark writing string arrangements for the second album. This prompted him, at the age of 24, to enrol at the City of Leeds College of Music (now Leeds Conservatoire) to study composition and orchestration as well as the flute and keyboards. He married Jocelyn Carter in 1971, and their son, Louis Jr, was born that year, with a daughter, Jemma, arriving in 1974. Clark’s expertise was called upon by many other artists, including Ozzy Osbourne, Roy Wood, America, Carl Wayne, Renaissance and Asia. He made his final appearance on an ELO album with his string arrangements on Secret Messages (1983), then toured with them until 1986. He worked with Lynne once again on Roy Orbison’s album Mystery Girl (1989). Louis Clark conducting the English Pops Orchestra in Hooked on Classics In 1991 he was recruited as musical director for ELO Part II, which was formed by ELO’s former drummer Bev Bevan after legal wrangling with Lynne over rights to the band’s name. Clark was involved in their debut album and wrote orchestrations of ELO’s original hits for a concert tour with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. He also contributed pieces to their second album, Moment of Truth. More recently he had toured with the ensemble called the Orchestra, which featured his former ELO colleagues Kelly Groucutt and Mik Kaminski. In 2015 Louis Jr deputised for him as conductor and keyboard player on a US tour, after he had become ill with kidney disease. Clark made his final appearance with the Orchestra in March 2020. His marriage to Jocelyn ended in divorce. In 1986 he married Gloria Bentley, and she survives him, along with their daughter, Rachel, the two children from his first marriage, his brother Francis and two grandchildren, Loretta and John. • Louis Clark, musician, born 27 February 1947; died 13 February 2021
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 26, 2021 19:20:58 GMT -5
Kelly Groucutt and Louis Clark both died in February almost exactly 12 years apart 2009-2021.
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 27, 2021 11:27:13 GMT -5
Louis Clark would have been 74 today!
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Post by trekkielo on Feb 27, 2021 11:28:07 GMT -5
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Post by trekkielo on Mar 15, 2021 18:28:43 GMT -5
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