Roy Wood’s astonishing It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance hypnotises with its uncompromising mood – at times almost discordant, while exuding a darkly menacing and disturbing aura. It is not only the finest song here, but to my mind perhaps the best track The Move ever recorded.
The final few albums from The Move – and especially the final two – encapsulated a very strange time in the band’s development and imminent dissolution. Initially very much a singles-oriented band, The Move had only released one album in their first four years up until 1970, that one being 1968’s self-titled debut. With members such as Trevor Burton and, most crucially, frontman Carl Wayne leaving, Roy Wood took over the creative reins even more strongly than he had previously, and when the band’s second album, Shazam! appeared in early 1970 it was a far more progressive and experimental beast, surely frightening away the teenage fans of (admittedly excellent) pop singles such as Fire Brigade or Blackberry Way. With the disenchanted Wayne departing after the recording of the album, Wood set his sights on the planned new Electric Light Orchestra project with Jeff Lynne, who he brought into The Move in February 1970. The public at large might not have realised it, but from that moment The Move were already destined for history, and only kept in business by contractual obligations which prevented ELO from being officially launched. Looking On, the third Move album, arrived just before Christmas of 1970, by which time the ELO project was already waiting to be formally announced, and the highly progressive and ambitious Looking On – which marvellously featured a hidden final track called The Duke Of Edinburgh’s Lettuce – was intended to be the final Move release. Mundane matters, including the need to finance the first ELO recordings, dictated otherwise, which is where this album comes in, released in the Summer of 1971 in farcically chaotic circumstances.
By this time The Electric Light Orchestra existed, and it was common knowledge. Their highly experimental debut album was already being worked on at the same time as this final Move record, with the trio of Wood, Lynne and faithful drummer Bev Bevan not only forming the entirety of the Move, but essentially the whole of ELO as well. The songs were recorded and it was decided which album would be the most suitable for them – sometimes this would be guided mainly by the arrangements. The only demarcation between the two ‘bands’ was that the highly eclectic and multi-instrumental Wood indulged his passion for overdubbing himself playing stringed instruments on the ELO recordings and horns on The Move stuff. Even then, there are songs here which could have easily had the name ‘Electric Light Orchestra’ credited to them. In fact, the very first completed ELO song, 10538 Overture was originally intended as a Move track, but it became apparent that it was more suited to the string arrangement, so it came to almost accidentally define the early ELO and become one of their cornerstones. The remarkable thing is that, despite this potential car crash of a studio scenario, Message From The Country went on to contain plenty of excellent material, with a number of fans – and Wood himself – still proclaiming it today as their best album. To me it isn’t, being a slight step below Looking On, but it is certainly better than it really had any right to be – with just a couple of clear exceptions.
Lynne and Wood shared the songwriting fairly evenly, with Bevan popping up with one contribution, and for the most part tended to provide lead vocals on their own songs. Three Lynne contributions provide the selections which ended up most similar to early ELO recordings – the opening title track bursts with ideas and, had it had a different arrangement, could easily have sat alongside 10538 Overture as one of the most progressive and dynamic tracks on the first ELO album – but it does its job here equally well, opening things in confident style. No Time, the third track here, is a delicate ballad which stands out amid the three rockers surrounding it like a fluorescent hi-visibility camouflage jacket. Finally, the penultimate The Words Of Aaron is Lynne’s most overtly ‘prog rock’ moment here, and his best. It’s a song which deserves to be better known, and perhaps to have had a fuller and more dramatic arrangement accentuating its qualities, but it’s a great song nevertheless. It isn’t the best track on the album however, with that honour falling to Wood’s astonishing It Wasn’t My Idea To Dance. This sublime piece hypnotises with its uncompromising mood – at times almost discordant, while exuding a darkly menacing and disturbing aura. It is not only the finest song here, but to my mind perhaps the best track The Move ever recorded. It’s a long, long way from Flowers In The Rain, that’s for sure!
Those are the highpoints, but there are other tracks just a slight level behind them, with Ella James being partly one of Wood’s irritatingly frequent ’50s rock and roll pastiches which he would later take into Wizzard, but leavened by some more contemporary rock sections giving it the required muscle to improve it. Until Your Moma’s Gone is another Wood rocker, but despite its feeble sounding title, it’s a powerful one. The Minister by Lynne by contrast sits in thrall to The Beatles, well executed if somehow coming across as a rather thinly disguised Paperback Writer. Now, at this point we get into the three tracks on the album which see the band openly having fun and producing what could be termed ‘novelty songs’. One of the three is very enjoyable, with Wood’s Country And Western parody Ben Crawley Steel Company being not only hilariously on the nail in its accuracy and lyrical humour, but also boasting a Johnny Cash-style vocal from Bevan which is so uncannily performed that I genuinely had to check the credits in case Cash had stepped in and contributed a guest vocal. This is a fine example of great parody, where the fun being had by the band is infectiously enjoyable. The final two songs, unfortunately, buck that trend. Bev Bevan contributes the Elvis pastiche of Don’t Mess Me Up, which uses such a blunt hammer that it makes Showaddywaddy appear brilliantly subtle re-interpreters by comparison, the humour so apparent in the Cash imitation draining away through Wood’s desperate attempts at the Elvis vocal. It’s perhaps not quite the low point, as the closing My Marge is a 1940s-era effort in the vein of When I’m Sixty Four, only without any of that song’s infectious charm, and with vocals seemingly delivered through a megaphone. It only lasts for two minutes – but that’s around a minute and fifty seconds too long. Still, with just those two duds arising from the ‘let’s mess about with ideas and have fun’ approach, the hit rate is still very strong considering the background to the recording – ‘contractual obligation’ is certainly a description which could be used with some accuracy, but for the most part it doesn’t feel like one.
Several bonus tracks are appended here, from non-album single tracks, which again are up and down. The fine Tonight deservedly made the charts, while the Chinatown single is unfairly forgotten – it’s arguably a better song than the far more successful California Man which is also included. Also from that latter single comes the original version of Do Ya, which was cleaned up and sanitised extensively by Lynne five years later for the ELO classic A New World Record album – and while that later, professionally slick version is indeed excellent for what it was intended to be – and will be preferred by many for sure – this original take is something which has to be heard. By contrast, here is no hint of strings backing the song, no silky production gloss – indeed, it’s hard to even use the word ‘production’ here, as this is essentially a high-energy, high-enthusiasm pre-punk blast through the song. Guitars snarl from the speakers, Lynne howls the lyrics as if his very sanity depends on it, and while the later ELO version still absolutely retains a rock feel to it, this by contrast is positively feral. It’s a version that every ELO fan should hear, at least once. Rounding things up are four alternate versions of songs found here (including, God help us, My Marge and Don’t Mess Me Up coming round for another go) – but despite another, even rawer Do Ya and a stripped back Words Of Aaron, none of these are really improvements.
The album cover, painted by Wood himself from ideas put forward by Lynne, may not be high art, but it is so endearingly ‘early ’70s’ in its feel and visual impact that it worked splendidly. The accompanying booklet covers the circumstances around the recording well, and includes the note that, while Wood considered this his favourite Move album, Bevan thought it was the weakest. And that is perhaps the best way to sum this strange but unique recording up: the wild, eclectic nature of the different styles covered may not make for the most cohesive listen, but that in a nutshell explains the differing reactions to it. One man’s thrillingly adventurous may be another man’s lack of focus – even within the band themselves. Which, really, is a quite appropriate epitaph for a band which were about to regenerate into a new, and entirely different, slice of history, while leaving behind a longer shadow than perhaps they realised at the time.
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