Swansong from the Brummie Poppers turned Rockers, The Move, contains surprises and points to the future directions of flow.

Release Date: 28th February 2025

Label: Esoteric (Cherry Red Records)

Format: CD

CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO STOOLS

1971 was a busy/complicated time for The Move, literally caught between two quite different stools. With the band down to a trio of only two originals, Roy Wood and Bev Bevan, together with new boy, Jeff Lynne, plans were well under way for the new project that Wood and Lynne were especially keen to bring to fruition. So much so that The Move, had almost been forgotten, bar the awkwardness of an outstanding contractual obligation, for what would become this, their final album. Therefore, at the same time, in the same studios and often within the same sessions, not only were they polishing up what would be the debut by Electric Light Orchestra, they were also hurriedly cobbling together this curious mix of disparate songs.

As a result of this double tasking, there was not always the clarity of knowing which song should fit where. Add in the fact that erstwhile bassist, Rick Price, was still on board as the sessions began, and the recipe for chaos was ripe. This meant that, just as Price walked away, so Wood elected to redub the majority of his bass lines. (The only remaining Price bass, oddly enough, remains on a song originally conceived as a Move b-side, but ultimately transferred, for the reason below, to E.L.O., becoming thus their only Wood penned hit, 10358 Overture.) And should there be any lasting doubt as to the final decision making criteria, the delineation was that Wood’s penchant for saxophones would delineate Move releases, with cellos reserved for E.L.O.

TOP 30 HITS

Despite the situation, the trio were determined to maximise the outcome of what, under any other circumstance, might seem a doomed project, and pushed the associated non-album various singles hard, with Tonight, Chinatown and California Man becoming top 30 hits, despite all being decidedly rockier fare than the earlier releases by the band. Indeed, California Man made a very credible #7 in the UK chart, as well as preparing the way for the imagery of Wood’s next band but one, Wizzard. I distinctly remember relishing the Top of the Pops appearances.

The sessions begat the 10 original album tracks, 3 singles and their respective B-sides, and these are all included here, as well, in true Cherry Red fashion, a handful of alternate versions. Wood wrote and sang 4 songs, Lynne likewise, although later suggestions claimed they were possibly all co-writes, the differentiation more to suit the publishing side of things Despite that, one “official” Wood-Lynne credit was allotted to song number 9, and one song came from Bevan. The A sides of the singles were, interestingly, all Wood compositions. Wood was responsible for, deep breath, guitars, bass, pedal steel, recorders, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and saxophones. Lynne took responsibility for more guitars and all keyboards, some percussion and even some drum parts, leaving Bevan to ply drums and add backing vocals, taking the lead for a couple of inadvisable instances.

JANGLING GUITARS, TWANGY BASS

The title track opens proceedings in a delightful jangle of guitars. The trebly, twangy bass sound is mixed high and proud, some later seeing this a s a possible pointer for the bass stylings of JJ Burnel in the Stranglers. The vocals, despite the sparkling 2025 remastering, remain a little distant and hazy in the mix, but it is a cracking song that, courtesy the jangular assault, stands up very well for a song over 50 years old. Some Beachy Boy type harmonies grace the prolonged outflow of the song, and it is a striking opening salvo.

A Lynne song, Wood then pipes up for the somewhat pastiche-y Ella James, one of his, which is a meat and potatoes blues-rocker, again not without some appeal. In fact, squint your ears up a little, and the seeds of glam are here, echoes both of T.Rex and even David Bowie in the muscular rhythm track.

A BIT BONKERS

It then goes all a bit bonkers, with Lynne’s No Time, awash with Fool On The Hill type recorders, Lynne’s love of the Liverpool band already a distinct fingerprint in his writing. Superior psychedelic whimsy, but coming a little unexpectedly on the back of the two rowdier tracks ahead it. Bevan’s Don’t Mess Me Up is, frankly, a nonsense, less cod-Elvis, more of a pilchard, redolent with a mess of doo-wop vocals that would shame even Showaddywaddy. A crueler person than me might even blame the existence and idea of Showaddywaddy on this song. If you wanted Wood to pick things back up with the last track on side one, his Until Your Mother’s Gone possibly isn’t that track.

It’s OK, I guess, very much of the day, a root bass plodding rawk song that sounds nothing much like anything the polymath performer had written ever before or has written since. (Remember the thumbs in waistband biker dance, where two fellas would headbang, hopefully without contact, opposite one other? Well, you could do a cracking version of that to this!)

THE FULL LYSERGIC

If you thought side one was getting weird on you, It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance goes then the full lysergic, with a full reed section parping an oboe heavy English country dance tune, over clangy bass and clappy drums. Either years ahead its time, or years behind, it appeals to my sense of (baroque and) bizarre. The Minister returns to a more standard template, with the sort of guitar intro that Ian McNabb has always relished, before becoming a relatively complex Stranglers/Icicle Works type fusion, with Status Quo vocals. A Lynne song, it has an infectious energy that wins through, despite the somewhat contradictory parts. A coda of rocking clarinets adds to the overall confusion.

Quite WTF Wood was thinking for Ben Crawley Steel Company is open to question. To be fair, it isn’t that bad song, if at a time when this sort of fairly orthodox country was far from popular. True, the Byrds may have been adding country to their West coast tropes, but this is nothing like that, with more akin to the then deeply unfashionable Johnny Cash, with a girly (type) chorus to boot. However, the sin is to bring Bevan back to the mike stand, to offer a maninblack vocal, that is rather more maninbeige. The arrangement is better to conceive now, where country and Cash have both become more acceptable, but the temptation to skip is still strong.

BASS MOOG SQUELCHES

Much stronger is Lynne’s Words Of Aaron, which matches harmony vocals with a catchy guitar and piano progression, into which some early adopter Moog bass squelches filter in, a recorder than carrying off the song to its close. The match of a catchy song with novel arrangements might not quite marry, but its still a mighty fine engagement.

My Marge closes the second side, a music hall/1920’s piano piece that offers just a little too much debt to Martha My Dear, if garnished by silly voices, clarinet and kazoo. No, ta, but thankfully short. By contrast, Tonight, the first of the 3 stand alone singles, is classic early Move in style, Wood’s voice so familiar reminiscent from the choruses of Fire Brigade and the like. It got to 11 in the charts, and apart from the guitar solo, actually belies the fact it was written initially for the New Seekers. Better still is Chinatown, which fared less well, but is a far better song, one of their best singles, if the lyrics might not stand too much reference today: “I could find a good time girl in Chinatown…….”

A STONKING RIOT

The flip of Chinatown was Down On The Bay, a Lynne rock’n’roller with a similar construction to E.L.O.’s later Rockaria (and, indeed to Roll Over Beethoven. It’s a reliable recipe, if not up to the cartoon like magnificence of California Man, the final and 3rd single, where Wood relishes the full piano and honking saxes he was later to more fully realise in the future. It is a stonking riot of a song, hopefully in more than just the rose-tints of nostalgia, which are certainly present. It even cracked, just, the U.S. chart, their only hit there, in the low 90s.

Having said, that chart position may well have been as a result of the flip side, up next, a song that Lynne, the writer, later revived for E,L.O.’s A New World Record, in 1976, the song being Do Ya’, a somewhat more original and forward looking song. I have to say I prefer this version, from 5 years earlier, with the rawer sound of the then trio.

The rest of this new edition is made up by alternate versions of Don’t Mess Me Up, The Words Of Aaron, Do Ya’ and My Marge. The first dispenses with much the backing, becoming almost acapella, but still fails to convince, Similarly, The Words Of Aaron maximises the vocal parts, only to emphasis their shrillness, and My Marge the overall silliness of it all. Do Ya, however, brings up the riffing, at the expense of the guitar melody lines, becoming an interesting companion piece. But, as is rather too often, the main outcome of alternate takes seems to be allowing a vote of confidence around those originally chosen.

FLAWED BUT GOOD

Message From The Country was/is a deeply flawed album, but is still a good one, for those moments when the band take themselves seriously. Certainly the better for tacking on the singles, it serves a decent tail to the top of any earlier Move compilation (which, for me, would probably be Flyback 3: The Best Of The Move, which stops ahead any the songs here, but includes most of the singles leading up to this album.) Surprisingly, I think I prefer it now to then, as I had zero tolerance for anything other than the singles back then, never really considering them an albums band. I think I gave it one listen, all those years ago, and can’t see I would have thought it a keeper.

For reference, E.L.O.’s 10358 Overture was released a month after California Man became the last release by The Move, at least within the lifetime of the band. After the parent album was released, Wood left, forming Wizzard, Lynne maintaining the E.L.O name and becoming way more successful than earlier expectation might have decreed. History, as they say.

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