NONKINSENSE

Adventures of an Analog Man in the Digital Universe, with a little help from my friends and relations.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Thanks Bev, Roy, Trevor, Ace, Jeff, RP,RIP-CW

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LINER NOTES
The Best Of The Move (A&M SP-3625)
July 1973
by Bev Bevan
Side One
Yellow Rainbow (R. Wood)
Kilroy Was Here (R. Wood)
(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree (R. Wood)
Weekend (B. Post-D. Post)
Walk Upon The Water (R. Wood)
Flowers In The Rain (R. Wood)
Hey Grandma (J. Miller-D. Stevenson)

Side Two
Useless Information (R. Wood)
Zing Went The Strings Of My Heart (J. Hanley)
The Girl Outside (R. Wood)
Fire Brigade (R. Wood)
Mist On A Monday Morning (R. Wood)
Cherry Blossom Clinic (R. Wood)

Side Three
Night Of Fear (R. Wood)
Disturbance (R. Wood)
I Can Hear The Grass Grow (R. Wood)
Wave Your Flag And Stop The Train (R. Wood)
Something (D. Morgan)
Omnibus (R. Wood)

Side Four
Wild Tiger Woman (R. Wood)
Blackberry Way (R. Wood)
Curly (R. Wood)
This Time Tomorrow (D. Morgan)
Lightning Never Strikes Twice (R. Price-M. Tyler)
Brontosaurus (R. Wood)


Once upon a time there were only three bands in the Birmingham, England area getting steady work and it was from these three bands that the musicians who formed the Move came. Trevor Burton was in one, Roy Wood in another and Carl Wayne, Ace Kefford and myself were in the third. All we ever got to do in those bands was play the hits of the day, and by 1966 we were getting tired of it.

There was a club called The Cedars where the five of us would get together every so often and jam. We got on so well that the idea to form a group amongst us began to seem like a good one. When we actually did form up, Roy named us the Move to signify the move everyone was making to join the group.

We began playing around Birmingham and built up a reputation. Managers and other record people would come up from London to see us, and one of them was Tony Secunda. He was a clever fellow, you know, with a lot of aggressive ideas. He recommended that we add dance steps to our stage act to be a little more showy. We did, he came back a few months later, liked us even more and signed us for management.

Secunda kept us working and had us do a four-song demo tape: two songs were current pop hits and the other two were early Roy Wood tunes. Nothing happened with those. The next thing was a Thursday night residence at the Marquee Club in London. We drew good crowds and that's where we really got into all those stage routines, like busting up televisions. Carl used to get all cut up doing that, and I picked up a few scratches as well; it was a crazy thing to be doing with all those kids pressing up against the stage. Luckily, we stopped it before anything terrible happened.

It was during the Marquee period that Secunda put us with Denny Cordell for record production, which brings us to the entire purpose of 'The Best Of The Move.' Tony told Roy he should be writing his own songs for the group to record. We all of a sudden had a record deal and we were on our way.

The first things we cut were two of Roy's early compositions, "Night of Fear" and "Disturbance." The latter was Roy's first serious attempt at songwriting and it was originally going to be the A-side of the single. It has horns and Cordell and Secunda screaming a lot in the background, bur the other side turned out to be more representative of the band's sound, and was a large hit in England. Taking both sides into consideration, it's really a very paranoid record; a lot of people thought they were very acidy songs, but Roy's never been into drugs. He simply locks himself in a room with his guitar and works all night on one song, one line at a time. You can perhaps call "Night of Fear" the distant forerunner of the Electric Light Orchestra, what with the Tchaikovsky and all.

The next single featured perhaps the Move's all time-time favorite Move song, "I Can Hear The Grass Grow." The title line came from a Tennessee Williams play, I think and it was another case of everyone thinking it an acid song. This was the opening number at the very last regular Move gig in the autumn of 1970 and it was just about the only one of our old hits we did that night.

"Wave The Flag" was the flip and was a conscious attempt to do a Monkees record. I mean that we wanted to sound like the Monkees; we were very conscious of the stigma of not playing your own instruments in the studio (that went on in England too) so we allowed the use of session men only when no one in the group could play the necessary instrument.

Mr. Secunda was very keep on keeping up with trends and he would periodically urge Roy to write a tune to fit with the times, while at the same time dressing us up in whatever clothes would grab attention for a month or two. During our flower-power phase in early '67, Roy wrote "Flowers in the Rain," which almost made it in America as well as being a major hit in Britain. Unbeknownst to us, Tony had a promotional postcard with an unfortunate picture of Prime Minister Harold Wilson printed up to push the single. A copy was actually mailed to 10 Downing Street, and lo and behold, we lost the royalties from the record in a lawsuit. Wilson was supposed to give the money to charity, though I can't remember which charity.

We recorded our first album in late 1967, and released it in early '68. The entirety of it comprises disc #1 of 'The Best Of The Move,' and it includes "Flowers" as well as nine more Wood songs and three group favorites written by others.

"Yellow Rainbow" shows Roy's lyrical knack again with its weird apocalyptic lines. This is Ace Kefford's lead vocal; usually, he functioned as the group's pouting glamour-man, and this is the only record on which he sang lead. "Kilroy Was Here" is a fine song derived from the phrases soldiers wrote all over walls in World War II.

"Lemon Tree," besides being our third B-side, was also the first song the Idle Race ever did. The Idle Race, by the way, is another Birmingham band and grew out of Roy's pre-Move aggregation. Jeff Lynne replaced Roy when the Move formed and later collaborated with Roy to form the ELO, joining the Move in the process.

Curiously enough, Dave Walker, the bloke who later sang lead for Savoy Brown and Fleetwood Mac, replaced Jeff in the Idle Race when Jeff joined us. Anyway, "Lemon Tree" is very much like their style of that time, and the Idle Race sound had a definite bearing on ELO through Jeff.

"Weekend" is an Eddie Cochran number Trevor used to sing on stage. He was a rocker and sang this stuff well; every band has its oldies and sundry favorites, right?

"Walk Upon the Water" is another misinterpreted song. It uses its imagery very well, but there's a blatant "don't drink when you drive" message at the end, and that's basically what it's all about. "Hey Grandma" comes from that great first album by Moby Grape and features Nicky Hopkins on piano. We played it on stage and I don't quite remember what it's doing here.

"Useless Information" is one of my favorites by Roy. It's a social commentary about all the garbage we have to deal with in modern society to gain its so-called benefits. Americans especially should relate to this very well. Appropriately enough, my first vocal effort comes next; our rip-off of the Coasters' version of "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart." For my big follow-up, you have to look to "Ben Crawley's Steel Co." on Message From the Country. I've promised all my fans I'll never sing on stage again.

"The Girl Outside" is one of Roy's first quiet tunes. I'm the only Move member featured on the final instrumental track, since it's all strings with a little bit of percussion. Roy played acoustic guitar, but that was ruthlessly excised somewhere along the line.

"Fire Brigade" is one of our classics. Its guitar line was inspired by Duane Eddy and it was lusty enough to get to #2, which was typical for our singles...only one of them ever made #1.

"Mist on a Monday Morning" is about a hobo's life and hard times. That considered, it's remarkably pretty. Finally, there's "Cherry Blossom Clinic" which would have been a single except for the fact that people were offended. They couldn't accept a song that seemed to take mental hospitals in anything but the most serious light. It's a strong number though, and we worked it into an elongated epic on stage, the studio version of which can be found on our second album, Shazam. The B-side of the proposed "Clinic" single was a political tract called "Vote For Me," the current whereabouts of which is a mystery. After our album was reasonably successful in England and buried alive in America (because we couldn't get it together to tour, the album was not released, and thus began a vicious circle which we are only now beginning to break), we looked into a couple of different things. We taped a live show at the Marquee for the purpose of determining how good we sounded. It wasn't for a concert album or anything like that, but we eventually released a five-song LP featuring a Byrds song (we liked the Byrds), a Love song (we liked Love), a Spooky Tooth song (we LOVED Spooky Tooth), another Eddie Cochran song and something we'd heard done by both Cliff Richard and the Shadows and by Jerry Lee Lewis. The LP, called 'Something Else From The Move,' has long since disappeared in England, along with the master tapes, hence its absence from 'The Best Of The Move.' Sorry.

The other different thing was doing a non-original tune written especially for the Move. Carl, who at the time seemed to want to be a balladeer, had a friend who wrote nice ballads, one David Morgan. His songs, "Something" and "This Time Tomorrow" were done by us as B-sides in 1968 and 1969 respectively. They're both good, but they suited a cabaret style more than the rock and roll Move. Morgan is still active and wrote all the songs for an obscure album by a band called Wishful Thinking; it was called 'Hiroshima,' I believe. He also performs a bit.

Our unreleased-in-America next single was "Wild Tiger Woman." It failed to hit in England, probably because it was too heavy. I never really listened to the lyrics very closely, perhaps because they were poorly mixed, along with the rest of the track. it was the last thing Cordell produced for us, and the mix may have something to do with that. It was supposed to be the B-side for "Omnibus," which in retrospect probably would have done quite well. Unfortunately, radio people in Britain rarely even listen to B-sides let along play them on the air. "Omnibus" has one of our first extended instrumental passages at its end, and combined with the raunchy guitar leads on "Wild Tiger Woman," it certainly made for an ambitious single.

In keeping with our press image of the era, we parlayed the failure of that single into headlines by giving interviews which stated the Move would pack it in if "Blackberry Way" did not go to #1. So, naturally, it turned into the only English #1 the Move had. It was quite a pop song, and it scared off Trevor, who wanted to get heavy. He unexpectedly quit the band something like the week the single hit the top. Very odd. He's still active (he recently played around Brum with a couple of ex-members of Fairport Convention) and has had his fingers in a lot of music over the years. He's a great musician, but he's never really found himself.

"Curly," our next single hit, Rick Price's first disc as Move bassman, and the only new product A&M happened to have when we surprised them by touring the US for three weeks in October, 1969, was a bit commercial for my taste, but good for what it was. The opening bit featured a recorded, and I think this song could have done with a little more power. A lot of rumors were spread that the song concerned Carl's pet pig; that was pure hogwash.

During this phase, we temporarily succumbed to Carl's Englebert urge. We played some cabaret clubs, doing medleys of our hits, "Walk On By," Gene Pitney songs and Carole King songs, all at low volume. It was fun, but hardly what we wanted to do, so we put a stop to it after a couple of weeks. Some of the songs we did, like "Goin' Back" and "The Last Thing On My Mind," made it to America in heavier versions, but basically it was a short-lived phase. Our second album, recorded shortly after the US tour, was more like us at the time. 'Shazam' was the effort that brought us from total obscurity in America to merely relative obscurity.

'The Best Of The Move' thunders to its conclusion with both sides of a single which must be termed as our overt reaction to our meteoric cabaret career, Rick Price's "Lightning Never Strikes Twice" and Roy's weighty classic, "Brontosaurus." I didn't think Rick's song was quite our style at the time, though some people really like it, and it does have a bit of our chunky sound. We very occasionally performed this live in our last days, and Rick re-recorded it on his subsequent solo LP.

"Brontosaurus" definitely takes everything to extremes, and is an appropriate finale. The prominent bass, always a Move trademark, is overwhelming, along with Roy's slide guitar. This was Jeff Lynne's first session with us to the best of my memory, though he may have played on "Lightning" (as may have Carl, too), and it was very representative of our live sound with Roy and Jeff on guitars. It, and other material from the 'Looking On' album, made up the bulk of our final stage repertoire. We stopped performing to begin recording the first ELO album, though we managed to get another Move album and some singles done as well. Rick couldn't afford to live in a recording studio like Roy and Jeff, so he essentially faded out of the picture until Roy formed Wizzard. I could, on the other hand, afford the rest because it gave me the chance to open some record shops before we put ELO on the road.

Viewing the Move with hindsight, it's easy to see our mistakes. People tell me we'd have been one of the top bands had we only toured America consistently, and given the critical reaction the Move has received in the last couple of years, perhaps they're correct. 'The Best Of The Move' is a monument to all that; a strong album, fully representing four years during which we simply could not get going in America, and showing the amazing writing imagination of Roy Wood. The Move has been something special, and I hope you'll hear more from them some day.

- BEV BEVAN
The Electric Light Orchestra
July, 1973

© 1973 A&M Records, Inc.

Used by permission of the author

Transcribed by Lynn Hoskins

"I note that it's now nearly 30 years since this album. We're still waiting to hear more from them some day!!"
- Bev Bevan, June 2003


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