Shortly after The Move's formation, Move manager/scam artist Tony Secunda took Roy Wood aside and told him that the band needed more original material. Wood confessed that he was having trouble coming up with ideas. Don't worry, said Secunda; just write about what you know. A week later, Wood showed up at rehersal with a brace of new songs - all of them about going insane.

While the above story may be apocryphal (especially considering that Wood allegedly left Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders because they wouldn't use his songs), it seems as good a place as any to start. There was always something creepy about The Move, something slightly off; many of their best songs - Night of Fear, Disturbance, Wave the Flag and Stop The Train, Lemon Tree, Cherry Blossom Clinic - were indeed about paranoia, insanity, and mental overload, and while Mick Jagger or Phil May could have easily pulled off more misogynistic numbers like Wild Tiger Woman and The Girl Outside, their lyrics sounded somewhat grotesque when sung by a bunch of ugly fuckers with questionable moustaches (ditto times 10 for the pedophilic lullaby Beautiful Daughter.)

The band itself was a mess of contradictions. Wood wrote most of the material, and possessed an arresting singing voice, but from 1966 to 1969, The Move's nominal frontman was Carl Wayne, a smarmy, over the top vocalist with a penchant for cabaret (and who may well have provided the unwitting inspiration for Viv Stanshalls unctuous crooner schtick). At least 2 members, Ace Kefford and Trevor Burton, conspicuously overindulged in the lysergic treats of the day, yet Wood apparently never touched the stuff, but often based songs like I Can Hear the Grass Grow upon Burton's acid ventures. If The Move's complex, classically tinged arrangements and sparkling high harmonies owed plenty to the Beatles, and their explosive live show was obviously inspired by the Who, their unbelievably heavy rhythm section presaged the coming of Birmingham bruisers Black Sabbath (irony of ironies, drummer Bev Bevan did briefly play with Sabbath in the Eighties). And though The Move made some of the greatest pop music of their time, and though their entire catalog is remarkably consistent, the fact that it was spread across a number of different UK labels (Deram, Regal Zonophone, Fly, Harvest/EMI) has ensured that no one has yet been able to construct the perfect Move compilation or boxed set.

The 3 disc Movements isn't it, either, though it is a step in the right direction, containing The Move's first 3 LPs in their entirety, plus the hard to find Something Else EP and a handful of singles, alternate versions and outtakes. (Fans of Message From the Country and Split Ends are, unfortunately, shit out of luck; looks like Westside couldn't get the rights to the Harvest/EMI stuff).

Disc One is virtually flawless, tracing the band's career from December '66 (with the debut single Night of Fear b/w Disturbance) to August '68 (when Wild Tiger Woman b/w Omnibus mysteriously failed to move record buyers). All of The Move is here; with the exception of the occasional nod to their rock and roll roots (Weekend, Zing...), it stands with Piper At The Gates of Dawn and Kaleidoscope's Tangerine Dream as the most perfectly realized debuts of the era. I mean, how can you argue with the perverse bubblegum of Fire Brigade, the power pop apocalypse of Yellow Rainbow, or the evil dwarf jig that is Flowers In The Rain?

Wild Tiger Woman b/w Omnibus, the first single released after the album, sounds great in this context; with its massed vocal harmonies, Looney Toons blues licks and risque lyrics about tying tying women down, Wild Tiger Woman was obviously a huge influence on Queen, while Omnibus takes the driving pop of Useless Information to the next level, throwing in an awesome raga wah wah solo for good measure. The one rarity here, an "undubbed alternate version" of Disturbance is exactly the same as the single version, only without the screaming. Oh well.

Disc 2 begins with 2 of the band's jauntier singles, Blackberry Way and Curly, along with their considerably weaker B side ballads, Something and This Time Tomorrow (composed by a friend of Wayne's, This Time Tomorrow is redeemed only by it's gorgeous backwards guitar solo). Then comes the entirety of '69's Shazam, easily the Move's heaviest album. In his liner notes, John Platt writes that Shazam "is still a hard record to listen to," but I'll take the sheer brute force of Hello Susie and the mesmerising guitar intro to their cover of Tom Paxton's The Last Thing On My Mind over Looking On's prog rock bullshit.

The second half of the disc features stereo mixes of The Lemon Tree and Cherry Blossom Clinic (both nice, but hardly revelatory), an Italian language version of Something (your life has hardly been incomplete without it), a marginally interesting backing track to a never finished song called Second Class and early mixes of Fire Brigade, Curly, and Wild Tiger Woman that are notable mostly for their lack of backing vocals. Only Vote For Me, the Who like rocker that was supposed to have graced the flip of the withdrawn Cherry Blossom Clinic single, is really worth hearing more than once.

Disc Three is the spottiest of the bunch, partially because 1970s Looking On is such a fucking chore to sit through. The first Move album with future ELOer Jeff Lynne, it's sunk by meandering melodies, lumbering arrangements and overlong songs. Only on When Alice Comes Back To The Farm (the cranky granddad of ELO's Rockaria) and Brontasaurus (which sounds like a Shazam outtake) does the album really connect. The rest of the disc comprises 1968's Live at the Marquee Something Else EP, which gives a pretty good indication of what an awesome band The Move were in their prime, even with its out of tune 12 string, their cover of So You Want.....totally cooks, as does their spot on arrangement of Love's Stephanie Knows Who. Three previously unreleased covers from the Marquee show - Erma Franklin's Piece Of My Heart, Denny Laine's Too Much In Love and Jackie Wilson's Higher and Higher - are interesting, but not nearly as mindblowing as the various covers that wound up on the Live At The BBC collection from a few years back. The unedited cover of Spooky Tooth's Sunshine Help Me is pretty worthwhile, though, thanks to its newly re-instated psych-guitar freakout.

While the music on Movements paints a vivid picture of the band's evolution between 1966 and 1970, the same cannot be said for its shoddy packaging. The collection's 12 page CD size booklet features only a small handful of black and white snaps from 66 to 68, while John Platt's liner notes touch on the basic facts of the band's story with little in the way of new insights or anecdotes. A discography and/or a list of session dates would have been nice too, as would an essay or notes from Roy Wood himself.

Make no mistake, Movements is highly recommended to those who haven't yet made room for The Move in their CD collections; throw in Live On The BBC and EMIs Great Move comp from a few years back, and you'll have all the Move you'll ever need. It's just that the crappy presentation and the preponderance of forgettable "rarities" conspire to make the band seem less important and far less magical than they actually were. Considering that I'm writing this from a country that only dimly remembers The Move as "Jeff Lynne's band before ELO", one really can't be blamed for feeling that they deserved something better.

© 1998 Ugly Things

Transcribed by Greg Weatherby

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