Monocled Alchemist

Article published in Rave magazine – July 1967

Alan Freeman in an exclusive RAVE Heart-to-Heart interview

The Move: A Musical Revolution of the 60s | When news of five Birmingham boys with dynamic musical ideas filtered through London a few months ago, it was the first step in their big move to success. Here three of the Move, Carl, Trevor and Chris, talk about the unique ideas that set them moving.

When you’re stuck in a rut, stock-still and stagnant, what do you do? If you have sense – you move.

That’s the situation big, thoughtful Carl Wayne found himself in just eighteen months back. Christmas 1965 was coming on, and his native Birmingham seemed to be closing in around him until he could hardly breathe.

Carl was fronting a group called Carl Wayne and the Vikings. But musically the Midlands scene wasn’t happening for him. All the local wheels seemed to be grinding out was mechanical pop, all head and no heart. Cynical, calculated stuff with only one aim – to hit the Charts and make money.

As he wandered past the department stores, with their commercialised gaiety and their synthetic Santa Clauses, it became clear to Carl that he had to make a break. He had to move.

There were others who felt the same way. Among them were young Trevor Burton and Chris Kefford. Trev, whose deceptively baby face hides a shrewd mind, had been four years on the claustrophobic circuit of Brum beat, and had begun to feel like an ingrowing toenail through frustration.

The Move: A Musical Revolution

Chris, with a blinding white coiffure that reflects his former skills as a barber, had played the same soul-killing pub circuit with Carl for two years, and he’d had enough too.

There was quiet, multi-talented Roy Wood, one-time art student who had graduated from repairing musical instruments to playing them. And there was Bev Bevan, a rather moody drummer who harboured a love of the Goons, and Arab music – and had a startling ambition to own a private Boeing 707.

Carl, Roy and Trev lay in the sun on my roof-garden now, digging the lazy warmth and the long drinks. Below, the bad-tempered traffic rumbled and ground through the streets, carrying from one worry to the next thousands of people who resented the pressures of their lives – but who would never make the move that could free them.

“I spent that Christmas thinking of one thing,” Carl said. “Progress. The problem was to work out an act that would be totally different and that nobody could imitate, and then to find the right places to put it on.

Progress

“We decided we’d give up playing the pubs and spend a month working in places where the best of the record-buying public were likely to be. We made a list of about twenty places, and we picked one called the Belfry, which is in Wishaw, near Birmingham.”

Trev nodded. “Looking back on it,” he said, “that was the best show we ever did, because it wasn’t just a matter of proving ourselves to the audience. We had to prove to ourselves that we’d progressed, and that it wasn’t all just chat.

“But the reception we got was fantastic. They just couldn’t get any more people in there. It was packed.”

Beach Boys influence

For a group that has since acquired a reputation for violent assault on the senses, that experimental debut looks a little sedate from here. “We used a lot more harmony then,” said Roy, the group’s musical mainspring. There was a big Beach Boys influence in the early things we did.

A welcome tinkle of ice on glass announced the arrival of my secretary with a tray of reloads. “Hey, look at this, Alan,” said Carl, surveying the world through the bottom of the amber tumbler. “Ever see such wild shapes?”

I looked at him through it. His head was six feet long and he had tiny feet a thousand miles away. Trust the Move not to miss a new possibility of using sound, colour or light.

Surfacing to a normally-dimensioned world, I asked: “Who has been the biggest influence on the Move?”

“Everybody,” they said in unison.

Jimi Hendrix and the Stones

Roy said, “There are just a few groups that are progressing the way we’ve tried to, and all the rest are going to be left behind. The Cream, us, the Who are all sort of moving in one direction. So’s Jimi Hendrix.

“It’s bringing back the excitement of the old rock ‘n’ roll days, but in a modern way.”

Carl sat up on the sun-lounger and said with intensity, “Jimi Hendrix and the Stones are exactly what we wanted to be. They’re outrageous to the older generation.” I could sense the old resentment against the dull-eyed, unresponsive crowds they had played to in the pub days not so many months.

“Unless you’re eccentric today you’ll get nowhere. Why should anybody conform? Why not set your own trends? I believe that young people today are completely revolutionary.

They live for the present and don’t give a damn about what happens when they die and don’t live for the future any longer. They just change with it when it comes.

“I have to take the musical community as I see it. And I don’t think the youngsters of Britain nowadays have enough gall to get up and fight for what they believe in. Because they don’t really know what they do believe in!”

Better Scene

I disagreed with Carl. “The Move is based on progress,” I said. “How can you have progress if you only believe in the present? There must be things you want to get rid of if you want to make a better scene.”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he replied. “But, like I said, we’re talking about the musical world. You see, we’re in the public eye, but in a restricted way. What we say doesn’t have a lot of influence on a lot of people. We have to reach them through our music.

“But we try to reach them directly. You know we said earlier that the Beach Boys were an influence on us when we were getting started? Well, what I meant was the natural side of them, their harmonies and so on.

Today our concepts of the Beach Boys have completely changed . They’ve turned into a kind of fake, doing something which is thought up and carried out in a recording studio in California and sent over here and sold. It’s just goods. That’s not reaching people directly.”

The chance of making their personal impact on a wider audience came to the Move when Mexican-moustached recording manager Tony Secunda picked up a buzz about them which had filtered through to London.

He went to Birmingham, listened, and was immediately convinced of their enormous potential. He signed the boys to a contract and brought them to London.

Soon the stars were swarming into the Marquee Club to experience the Move’s dynamic performances. Carl, who had once been an assistant to an explosives expert in the Midlands, found his background useful for their stage effects!

The Happening

At the famous session at London’s Roundhouse on New Year’s Eve they made national headlines by wrecking a car, old television sets and images of Hitler and Ian Smith, while smoke bombs and thunder-flashes burst, and weird bits of film were projected on to the acrid, swirling fog.

Similar happenings added to the Move’s notoriety at Wolverhampton, Leicester, the Slade School of Art and Wimbledon Palais, where the action added a large and unscheduled hole to the stage.

Despite the extravagance of these proceedings, Carl is hostile to the whole idea of psychedelic music. Though the Move’s exuberant shows attracted very stroppy police and fire brigade contingents during the peak of this phase, Carl insisted that the intention was never psychedelic. It was simply anti-conformist.

Psychedelic bit

The psychedelic bit, he has always claimed, was merely a con on the music public and really belongs in fairground sideshows. In any case, said manager Secunda after the astonishing Roundhouse caper, the Move’s destructive era was over and they would be progressing to new fields.

By the Spring the promise had been honoured. The Move graduated and matured from bashing and splintering to a more constructive mood, which laid a more respectable emphasis on Roy Wood’s musical innovations.

Roy’s creative restlessness wasn’t being satisfied by the nightly explosions and volcanic upheavals on stage. He wanted to concentrate on modest projects such as what he calls “an electronic opera in the ninth dimension” – and to get on at the same with compositions more likely to achieve his business dream of owning a skyscraper block of flats.

Roy found satisfaction in writing most of the tracks for the Move’s first LP. The success of “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” persuaded the boys that they were right to concentrate on gentler, more harmonic numbers.

The only concession that the reformed Move has made to visual kicks is the giant rig of dazzling, flashing coloured lights which flank them with high-speed stroboscopic effects. And throwing allegedly “electronic” bananas at audiences who wanted to know how they could hear grass grow.

The Move: A Musical Revolution

Carl admits that much of this space-age larking about isn’t to be taken too seriously, for he abhors conformity by young people as much as by their elders. He has no time for anyone who relies on others all the way for livening up life.

“If you look at a thing properly you’ll be able to conjure up in your mind exactly what it looks like,” he said. “Too many people don’t want to know what reality is. They want to exist on imagination all the time.

“It may sound funny, but the big difference between ourselves and young people today is that we are bound to follow a pattern of life which they don’t have to. Here we are, talking about their freedom to live how they want, and yet we have to stick to routine in work, on tour and so on.”

The sun was getting low in the evening sky. Carl looked at his big, yellow-dialled watch and stared up at the white clouds.

“It’ll be nice weather for the run home,” he said. “We’re driving to Birmingham tonight. A little rest, then we rehearse. Then Scandinavia and the States. And there’s a guy who wants us to do a far-out film in Tangier. More recording. Plenty of work for Roy, writing and all.

Physical training instructor

“I suppose you could say we’ve got it made. Once I thought I was going to be a physical training instructor. But when I thought it out I realised I’d be 24 or 25 before I qualified, and I’d only be making a lousy twelve or fifteen pounds a week. So I said no thanks, I’ll take a chance on music.

“I’m glad I did. It worked out and we’re doing well now. But, believe me, Alan, you learn that you can’t always do what you want in a group. That’s why I think people who’re really free are fools if they don’t take advantage of that freedom.”

The boys put down their glasses and stood up. “One last question,” I said. “What’s the short secret of the Move’s success?”

“Confidence,” they said, with one voice. And they were quite definite about that!

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