THE MOVE – "Blackberry Way"

Firstly I can’t believe you could not have heard this song before – it’s been played regularly on radio since it was a hit.

The Move had already had some near misses Night of Fear, Flowers in The Rain & Fire Brigade all of which got to 2 or 3 before this. It only topped the chart for 1 week though. Roy Wood demonstrates his love of kitchen sink production aka The Wall of Sound which he would fully explore next on ELO then Wizzard. Its drenched in Mellotron giving it that gritty string sound (used on a number of psychedelic hits before becoming a key component in prog – although this could be the first time its been used on a No1 single). Being a fan of KS productions and picking up on the desperate lyric I think its the first worthy No1 in a long time and another record that fits into the impending doom nature of 1969 singles.

The Move evolved into Wizzard and we’ll be hearing more from them in a couple of years.

Thinking of Wizzard reminds me, the Christmas Shopping season is almost upon us. Pass the earplugs and the paracetamol please…

The Move were infamous for their riotous stage act which would regularly include the smashing of TVs. That is until they employed Jeff Lynne and his perm. He had more than a song or two to contribute and his own aggenda where production was concerned which is what eventually led him to part company with Wood in the fledgling ELO. Unfortunately for Lynne he wont feature here until he teams up with ONJ by which time he was past his best.

“Blackberry Way” makes more sense if you consider it the first ELO number one…

Johnny Black in I think “Mojo” called this “as lame as Blur”. It does sound like Blur I think, tho that needn’t mean lame.

I wonder why the Move never made it in America. I never heard anything by the pre-Jeff Lynne version on the radio; I think I heard the original “Do Ya” once or twice. That’s puzzling to me.

My favorite description of the band’s sound comes from Robert Christgau: “No other band better evokes a giant mechanical lizard.” (He meant that affectionately.)

Er, they did, but it wasn’t, shall we say, one of their better singles…

Blackberry Way is redolent of what life was like in the UK in dreary late sixties’ winters, at least in the provinces. I’m sure that opening chord progession is distinctly Monty Norman/John Barry, and that Mr Wood threw this nod to Bond into the mix quite deliberately.

“Absolutely pouring down with rain”… Tom’s spot on, it’s the grey and murky dislocation of a break-up in song, the bleakness of the verse (mellotron to the fore, always so sad) set against the jackboot forced jollity of the chorus.

As for “goodbye blackberry way” – wouldn’t that be a tribute to (rather than piss take of) Strawberry Fields and its rapidly fading pop-psych offspring genre in late ’68?

Check also the Beatley flip of Curly – This Time Tomorrow – which is And I Love Her gently warped into bossa-psych, and deffo not a piss take in any way.

Now this is more like it! For some reason I have never encountered The Move before that I can recall, in any shape or form, but this is the sound of the sixties that I can really get behind. Seems like a much more Kinks-y vibe, and I’m so glad that strand of British pop is still bubbling under in the charts, holding its own against Beatles and Stones alike.

Now all but forgotten, the Move’s second single, “I Can Hear The Grass Grow”, is a an early flowering of Roy Wood’s odd genius: a joyously bonkers cod-psychelic classic. Driven by a thunderous Who-esque backing (the early line-up had a superb rhythm section courtesy of Ace Kefford and Bev Bevan), it packs an astonishing amount of hooks and ideas into its three minutes. I once read it described as their “beer-boys-on-acid epic”, which sums it up very nicely indeed.

There’s some really great Move records – pop but still quite heavy. I think my favourite is probably Fire Brigade, with a pretty decent Duane Eddy-esque guitar line and the backing vocals mimicing a siren.

Not remotely forgotten; a huge hit here and a constant on oldies radio.

The record certainly boasts some of the fleetest and most agile drumming ever laid down by Top Tory Drummer Bev “Bev” Bevan.

I was as surprised as anyone when Bev turned up on Wake Up The Nation but presumably the Joy of Music matters more than political differences to Weller these days. Wasn’t always the case; I recall that Lulu wanted to work with the Style Council back in ’83 but PW said no, much to her chagrin, because of her Toryness. “So ye’d put politics above music, wid ye?” she quipped. “Yes,” retorted Weller.

Yes Mark, they’re great. Proper time capsules. The earlier volumes got me dangerously hooked on Pre Rock – plenty of Frankie Laine in my collection now.

The 1960 sets are a pretty strong argument for Nik Cohn’s claim that it was ‘rue morgue’ – pop’s worst year. Though 1975 gives it a good run for its money; Roy Wood was one of many victims of a new, dead, flat studio sound that pretty much killed Glam.

DESERT ISLAND DISCS WATCH:

Harry Enfield, comedian(1997).

Berry Way was a mate of Roy Wood, and he was going back to Jamaica. Or something.

Re 30: Didn’t know she was a true blue. That’s what made Gary Barlow work with her, then. :runs to Relight my Fire and gives it a 1 to shock him and her into paying tax:

Trevor Burton always looked kind-of evil on the vintage Move footage ( They had that “Birmingham rock scene” documentary on BBC4 over the weekend. John Peel narrates, so it’s from a while ago..)

Seems he was a “King” blues fan (BBKing, etc, that is) and Hated “Blackberry Way” specifically, and the “pop” direction in general. Cue an on-stage bust-up and a departure.

Fast-forward to himself on TOTP with the Steve Gibbons band doing “Tulane”, looking much happier.

Takes all sorts I suppose, but how is covering “Tulane” better than “Blackberry Way”?

Jesus H Christ, Roy does sound like Ozzy Osbourne on this, doesn’t he? It’s quite funny to imagine Sabbath doing anything remotely “hippy”..

42: You listened to much Sabbath? Sweet Leaf might be heavy but as an ode to weed, it’s fairly squarely in the stereotypical hippie vein. Similarly, War Pigs as anti-Vietnam/anti-war in general message. And then there’s stuff like Fluff off Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, which is a rather fey, acoustic piece, which probably sounds a bit like the sort of thing hippies might have sterotypically listened to.

If hippies were the people that turned up to the early incarnations of Glastonbury, where Lep Zep played, I would imagine there was a fair few hippies that were into “heavy” music. I think imagining Ozzy as a hippie is only difficult now because we’ve heard all the stories about bats, snorting lines of ants, etc. All that black magic/wiccan stuff from early in their career though, plus some of their output, seems to suggest otherwise.

I could be way off base though. Someone who wasn’t due to be born for 10-15 years and actually was a hippie or knew some might be better placed to discuss this.

On topic, and as I mentioned up thread, I quite like The Move. I wonder if Roy Wood sounds a bit like Ozzy due to them coming from similar areas of the country. Both born and raised in Birmingham. Just saying…

I think a better way to see it is that Sabbath’s arrival marked the emergence (or anyway clarification) of divisions (class as much as subcultural or attitudinal) within the countercultural bloc: the Sabs hit *big* in the US hinterland (as did Zep), but were *hugely* resisted by the Woodstock Aristocracy, stupid younger-brother music, not what the revolution was about etc etc. The Sab choice of topics and treatment was pretty much entirely original to them (tale of Tony Iommi walking past a long cinema queue for a Hammer Horror film and a lightbulb going on — but this trivialises it quite a bit, since they were all so obviously MADE for the subject-matters as performer-musicians). Always beware the punk hindsight lens, which collapses the enormous turmoil and complexity of the late 60s and 70s into mere adolescent black-and-white (not a bad move for the belated runt sibling to create space for him/herself, but a bore and a misperception 40 years later).

Black Sabbath themselves always slag off hippies in interviews though, saying explicitly that they deliberately set out to do something anathemical to flower-power. Maybe that’s something they’ve adopted since punk and alt-rock made them a cool, outsider-y band acknowledged outside of metal/hard rock circles*, rather than something they genuinely felt at the time, I don’t know.

*I’ve never heard anyone express dislike of Black Sabbath, whereas there are plenty who despise Led Zep, et al.

The producers of the Iron Man films deferentially shoehorned in instrumental snippets of the Sabbath song to the first film before abandoning it entirely in the second and third films for AC/DC, far more fitting to the cartoonish swagger of likeable dickhead Tony Stark although the ‘nobody wants him’ bit from Iron Man (the song) would have been good for the scene in the third film where Tony’s dragging his broken Iron Man suit through the snow.

Yes, I do realise I’ve just admitted to having seen all three Iron Man films. No, I’m not proud…