The Move’s explosive second album: Remastered, recut and reissued.

Release Date:  24^th November 2023

Label: Esoteric/Cherry Red Records

Formats: Vinyl

Often regarded as the best album The Move ever made, their second album, Shazam! Is the latest 60s artifact to receive the loving attention that is the hallmark of Cherry Red Records.  This remastered vinyl edition of their February 1970 opus has been cut at Abbey Road Studios and is presented in a package that features fully restored versions of the album’s original artwork, including Mike Sheridan’s cover painting of the band.

Formed in late 1965, The Move were, by early 1970, enduring a turbulent time.  Founding member Trevor Burton had left the lineup following an on-stage fracas with drummer Bev Bevan during a 1969 Swedish tour.  He’d started to fear that The Move were headed in an overly-commercial direction, a view that was cemented by the mega chart success of the band’s 1968 hit single, Blackberry Way.  And, as new manager Peter Walsh was steering the band towards the cabaret circuit, Burton wasn’t the only one within the band’s ranks to experience a feeling of disquiet.  Bevan, vocalist Carl Wayne and, particularly, the band’s principal songwriter Roy Wood were all uncomfortable with the band’s direction; indeed, Wood was already starting to lay the seeds for his next planned venture – a band that would integrate hard rock with classical instruments and influences.  And we all know where that led, don’t we?

Of course, ever since The Move had first entered public consciousness, they’d experienced success.  Their debut single, Night Of Fear, hit the higher reaches of the UK singles chart and, with high-charting follow-ups like I Can Hear The Grass Grow, Flowers In The Rain (famously the first record played on Radio 1 in September 1967) and Fire Brigade, it seemed as though The Move had hit upon the perfect blend of heavy psychedelia and pop appeal.  But, it was perhaps that pop appeal that was causing such frustration within the band’s ranks.  I recall a late-sixties radio interview with Roy Wood in which Wood accepted that The Move were, perhaps, stuck in some kind of rut, but suggested that albums were a medium in which the band could be more adventurous.  Potentially, the audience for a more progressive version of The Move was ready and waiting – after all, their musicality was never in question and it had only been a couple of years since The Move had been sharing tour and festival bills with the likes of The Nice and The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

When the time came for The Move to assemble in London’s Advision Sound Studios to record Shazam!, their lineup comprised Carl Wayne (vocals), Roy Wood (guitar and vocals), Bev Bevan (drums) and Burton’s replacement Rick Price (like all the other band members, a veteran of the Brummie rock scene) on bass and vocals.  They’d been touring hard and, as a result, they didn’t have much newly-written material ready to go.  In fact, the only song that they had ‘on the blocks’ was Roy Wood’s chamber-psychedelic opus, Beautiful Daughter.  Shazam! Is, therefore, a curious album, heavily based upon the band’s then-current live repertoire, featuring numerous strongly-adapted cover versions and laced with proto-metal and West Coast psychedelic trimmings. 

Critical reaction to the album was, at the time, mixed, but the best summary of Shazam! that I’ve come across is the retro-review by AllMusic editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine, who called the album a “Short-yet-sprawling [offering] that reflected the band’s growth into a ‘muscular and weirder’ group.”  That’s a description that really does capture Shazam!

Shazam! did see a CD reissue back in 2007 and, then, the package included eight bonus tracks, including alternative versions of hit singles Curly and Blackberry Way.  Here, we’re very much back to basics, and that’s no bad thing, and the album’s original running order and layout is restored.  Side 1 kicks off with Hello Susie, a song that most listeners will associate with Amen Corner, who enjoyed a 1969 version of the song.  Indeed, many listeners were probably surprised to learn that Hello Susie was actually written by Roy Wood and The Move’s version of the song certainly reflects how Wood would have envisaged it.  It’s infinitely rockier than the Amen Corner version – verging upon heavy metal, in fact – but it’s not without its poppy charm, and it’s undeniably The Move.  The phasing to Wayne’s voice on the chorus and the crazy stereo tracking give the era away, and there’s even a drum solo!

Future Bowie mentor Tony Visconti steps in on bass for Beautiful Daughter.  The whimsical English psychedelia of the song wouldn’t have seemed out of place two or three years earlier, but the strings – and particularly the cellos – are a sure-fire signpost to where Roy Wood’s thoughts were heading… 

Reflecting the dearth of readily-available material, Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited is a slower-paced re-recording of a song from The Move’s eponymous debut album.  The band’s default heavy psychedelia does sound dated nowadays, but it’s interesting nonetheless.  In parts – and helped along the way by Bevan’s spoken-word interludes – they sound uncannily like The Bonzos, and I mean that as a compliment!  But it’s the second half of the track that I find thoroughly mystifying: it’s a medley of classical pieces from Bach, Dukas and Tchaikovsky – quite well played, particularly the guitar rendition of Bach’s Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring, but it’s hard to think of any reason for the medley’s inclusion, other than a need to fill vinyl grooves.

Perhaps the highlight of Shazam! is the version of the Ars Nova song, Fields of People (Wood was a big fan, apparently.)  Carl Wayne’s vocal is way up front in the mix, with the signature heavy psychedelia wheeling along in the background.  The track is peppered with stereo tracking and passages of spoken word from Bev (“Ha ha ha – there’s a bloke here looking for the boat” he says in his unmistakable Brummie accent…) and – the best bit – concludes with a fantastic guitar raga from Roy.  It’s probably the closest that The Move ever got to prog rock and, taken as a whole, it’s the album’s best example of what they were really capable of.

Originally recorded by Frankie Lane and later covered by The Shadows, Don’t Make My Baby Blue is a country ballad, given a heavy metal makeover and – you know what? – it almost works.  This is The Move as we’d later get to know them with songs like Brontosaurus – ponderously heavy.  Carl does overdo the vocalizing a bit, but, altogether, it’s a success.

But maybe the strangest track on Shazam! is the album’s closing track.  It’s a psyche-soul interpretation of Tom Paxton’s The Last Thing on My Mind, and it needs to be considered in two ways.  Instrumentally, it features some of the best stuff on the album, particularly Wood’s psychedelic guitar solo, but I couldn’t convince myself that the song sits comfortably with the treatment.  It’s a worthy experiment, I guess, but grafting one of the best songs of all time onto this particular psychedelic voyage just doesn’t seem to work. So, it’s a mixed bag, maybe, but Shazam! doesn’t fail to hold the listener’s interest.  Some of the experimentation on display here might not have worked too well, but the bits that did gave a clear vision of the future.  Next stop: ELO!

Listen to Hello Susie – the album’s opening track – here:

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