Chart entered : 13 May 1972
Chart peak : 7
Here's one of pop's great coincidences. When the band recorded this affectionate tribute to Jerry Lee Lewis they couldn't have predicted that he'd be in the charts with them. As noted in the Tremeloes post very few groups fall out of the story in this period and this one mutated rather than disappeared.
This story is complicated. After their fourth hit "Fire Brigade " in Februrary 1968 Chris "Ace" Kefford was fired due to an escalating drug problem which was either cause or consequence of his stage fright. The band continued as a quartet with Trevor Burton switching to bass and scored their only chart topper with "Blackberry Way" at the beginning of 1969. The keyboard player on that, Richard Tandy was invited to join and assumed bass duties when Trevor hurt his shoulder. He left the band when Trevor recovered. However Trevor himself quit soon afterwards after an on-stage tiff with Bev Bevan in Sweden. He was replaced by a well known Birmingham musician Rick Price and the band set off for a disastrous tour of the US which was cut short due to lack of interest .
As a result Don Arden lost interest in them and sold their management contract to Peter Walsh who was more noted for middle of the road cabaret acts. He started booking them into cabaret venues which was welcomed by Carl Wayne but not Roy Wood. The latter started making plans for a separate orchestral rock venture. Carl suggested he went off and did that but continued to write songs for The Move while they brought back Chris and Trevor. This idea fell on stony ground with all his band mates so he used a fight between Roy and an audience member to quit the group himself in January 1970.
Roy approached Jeff Lynne from The Idle Race to replace him. Jeff had previously turned down the chance to replace Chris preferring to work for his own band's success ( I'll cover this more fully in the ELO post ) but now accepted due to his enthusiasm for Roy's new project. The band ditched Walsh and persuaded Arden to take them on again.
Rick left at the end of 1970 feeling that he was not having enough input into the band's music. With Rick gone the remaining trio were ready to rename themselves Electric Light Orchestra but Harvest insisted as part of their new deal that they should record a last Move album to recoup the advance. The band therefore worked on two LPs at the same time. Richard returned , along with horn player Bill Hunt to help them out , but the fourth bloke on the sleeve is actually the departed Rick.
Although they'd now fulfilled the condition in the contract there were three Move-ish tracks left over and so they released a maxi-single with "California Man" as the lead track. The lyrics don't reference Jerry - he's not from California for a start and hardly represents the Sunshine State's liberal values - the tribute is in the style and Jeff's remarkable impersonation of Jerry's voice in the chorus. The track is a prime example of Roy's talent for pastiche and is fondly remembered by fiftysomethings as the great British rock and roll single with its honking saxes , Jeff's JLL piano break and Bev's beefy tubthumping. The lyrics are nostalgic fluff as if Roy was trying to get on the American Graffiti soundtrack. It's good fun but it's not the sort of thing I want to hear too often. In the US they preferred the b-side "Do Ya" making it their only Stateside hit peaking at 93.
We'll be picking up the stories of Jeff, Roy, Bev and Richard very shortly so we'll look at the others here. Chris started work on a solo album after leaving the band with Tony Visconti producing but the project was abandoned following another breakdown and the eight tracks they put down were not released until 2003 on the compilation "Ace The Face". Chris was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
Instead he put the Ace Kefford Stand together with brothers David and Denny Ball and drummer Cozy Powell. They got a deal with Atlantic and released a cover of The Yardbirds' "For Your Love" in March 1969. They give it the Vanilla Fudge treatment, slowing it down and largely re-shaping the melody with a fair sprinkling of blues guitar wailing . Cozy fills up any gaps with his heavy hitting. Ace is the lead singer and sounds a bit like Roger Chapman of Family. Ironically it ends up sounding a bit like Cream but fatally they'd made it too long for radio play at 5:41 minutes and it failed.
The band split up and the Balls went off to form Big Bertha but due to contractual obligations had to do another single with Ace which came out under the name "Big Bertha featuring Ace Kefford" . "This World's An Apple" is a spiky R & B number sounding a bit like The Yardbirds i.e. several years out of date.
Like his contemporary Syd Barrett, Chris then vanished from the music scene to wrestle with his demons though he would jam with local musicians when the mood took him. He re-emerged briefly in 1976 forming a new group Rockstar who again lasted for one single "Mummy" which I haven't heard. He disappeared again and spent time in mental institutions following suicide attempts which is very sad. For the past decade he has been reportedly back on a more even keel although Bev commented that he wasn't fit enough to join the revived Move in 2007 and links to his website currently produce a blank page.
Trevor , as we know from the Wings post , went into Balls with Denny Laine. When they split up he worked with obscure ( outside Birmingham ) singer -songwriter Raymond Froggatt and occasionally a band called The Pink Fairies. In 1975 he reunited with Steve Gibbons by joining his eponymous band just as they secured a deal with Polydor. This was just the time when any new R & B music was re-branded "pub rock " but the Steve Gibbons Band were no Dr Feelgood. I only knew them for their sole Top 20 hit, 1977's plucky cover of Chuck Berry's "Tulane" and that's all you really need. They were probably a good band to see live but on record they sound pedestrian. Gibbons wrote most of their A -sides but memorable tunes are in short supply. Second single "Johnny Cool" was a minor hit in the US, third album "Down In The Bunker" was a big hit in Sweden and 1978's "Eddie Vortex" a sprightly Dave Edmunds style rocker should have done better than number 56 after featuring on Top Of The Pops . Trevor wrote just one A-side "Loving me, Loving You" in 1982. They were popular in Germany and were one of the few Western acts to play in East Germany, in 1982.
Trevor featured on five albums with the group but in 1983 decided to leave and form The Trevor Burton Band. It wasn't a propitious time; even ELO were a spent force and interest in The Move diaspora was minimal. They did get to record an LP "Double Zero" in 1985 on a tiny local label but that was it for recordings. The band had a twice weekly residency at a pub and Trevor earned his corn doing session work and occasional tours as a backing musician with Robert Plant and Dexy's Midnight Runners. From 2004 he played occasionally with Bev Bevan's Move and in 2007 officially joined and it became "The Move featuring Trevor Burton and Bev Bevan" much to Roy Wood's disgust. Trevor has performed at my local in both guises in the last couple of years.
Carl had a curious career after leaving the band; he was never short of work but could never quite get himself back in the limelight. As the recognised lead singer of a successful band he didn't have any difficulty getting a record deal with RCA . Don Arden saw him aa a potential rival to Tom Jones and put him together with Don Black and Dennis King who wrote "Maybe God's Got Something Up His Sleeve" for him which he later described as the most abysmal record of all time" . Apparently he does a Brum-accented minologue at the beginning and can't hold the long notes. Reviewing it on Radio One in November 1970 Anne Nightingale commented "I think Carl's recorded this for a joke". With such ringing endorsements it's not surprising the single flopped.
Carl took his time in releasing a follow-up and "Imagine" was released in February 1972. It is the John Lennon song and it starts out as a pointless but harmless copy and then Mike Moran sinks it with an horrendous string arrangement that's painful to the ears. His solo LP "Carl Wayne" ( featuring uncredited but clearly audible backing vocals from Dusty Springfield ) was released to little interest and the single taken from it ,Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Take My Hand For A While" similarly bombed. That was the end of his time on RCA.
In 1973 he recorded a few tracks with ELO as Jeff Lynne, always a reticent front man, pondered the possibility of using him as lead singer but they were not released until decades later . Carl then moved into TV with a short stint on Crossroads where he met his future wife in co-star Susan Hanson. He recorded his best known solo single for Pye, "You're A Star" written by Tony Macaulay for the theme to new talent show New Faces . It's the most perplexing non-hit of the decade, a great catchy tune for a ratings-winning show that regularly produced chart acts, ( one of whom had sufficient staying power to feature here before too long ) and yet couldn't breach the Top 50. I'm presuming it "bubbled under" for a long while but couldn't "break out" because Radio One didn't want to advertise an ITV show and wouldn't play it.
Carl moved on to Polydor and in April 1974 released "San Diego" , another Macaulay song. It's a jaunty MOR pop song that would probably have been a big hit at the turn of the decade alongside Tony Burrows's various guises but sounds out of its time for 1974. He got to sing it the night before his wedding on The Golden Shot. It's on youtube at the time of writing and well worth watching both for the sadistically lingering sweep of a distinctly unimpressed audience during Carl's slot and , earlier, a cruel set-up of a female contestant for a cheap gag that would have had Charlie Williams run out of town today.
Wayne Bickerton brought "Sugar Baby Love" to Carl who told him "I'm not recording that pile of crap !" then watched it soar to number one for The Rubettes. Penitently he recorded Bickerton and Waddington's "Way Back In The Fifties" which sounds exactly like The Rubettes with a stronger singer. It was a big hit in Swede in the summer of 1975. Polydor gave him a last shot with "C'mon Round My Place" which sounds like Kenny ripping off 59th Bridge Street Song though again Carl's vocal lifts it up a notch. Without a hit single Polydor refused to release his second solo album which remains in the vaults.
In 1977 he tried for Eurovision glory with "A Little Give, A Little Take" but finished next to bottom in the British heats. It was his next flop. Carl was then part of the regular cast of the musical variety show Hi ! Summer on ITV which must have passed me by entirely. The title song was released under Carl's name but was written and produced by the recently deceased Lynsey De Paul and sounds like it's been scraped off the studio floor. I believe the show which also featured Leslie Crowther and Lena Zavaroni was equally bad.
Carl sat out punk as far as recordings go , concentrating on advertising and voiceover work. He re-emerged in December 1982 with a version of Cliff Richard's "Miss You Nights" done a capella with the Choral Union. Carl wobbles his jaw in all the right places but I think Cliff's is still the better version. Carl continued to dabble in acting through the eighties appearing on The Benny Hill Show in an A-Team sketch and the Simon Callow sitcom Chance In A Million. In 1987 he appeared in all episodes of the short lived Emu's Wide World and performed "Flowers In The Rain " on Wogan to mark 20 years of Radio One. "The following year he did another theme tune for the TV series Barney , " Love Your Dog ( A Dog Is For Life )". Probably fortunately I haven't heard that one.
In 1990 Carl got his big stage break with a six year run as "The Narrator" in "Blood Brothers" in the West End. He shared in the general acclaim for the production and his performance is generally regarded as definitive. After that Carl appeared on quite a few CDs of songs from the musicals. He also became a regular presenter on BBC West Midlands Radio.
At the end of the nineties Allan Clarke decided to retire as lead singer of The Hollies and Carl was invited to replace him. "Flowers In The Rain " and "Blackberry Way" were added to their set as a result. He toured the world with them but only got to record one song "How Do I Survive" as the new song on a retrospective CD in 2003. It's a resolutely old-fashioned AOR song that sounds as if it's come straight from the seventies but Carl's sixty-year old voice is in great nick.
Carl was still performing with The Hollies up to a month before his death despite a diagnosis of cancer of the oesophagus. He checked into hospital at the end of August where his condition suddenly deteriorated and he died on 31 August 2004.
On leaving The Move Rick joined up with Roy's old mucker Mike Sheridan as a songwriting partnership. They released an album "This Is To Certify" in 1970 which is a fine collection of light pop gems if a little under-produced ( by Rick himself ). They were on a small label Gemini who didn't seem sure whether Sheridan wanted to be credited as a recording artist or not, one of the two singles being credited to "Sheridan and Rick Price" and one to Rick alone. "Sometimes I Wonder" is untypical of the LP with its electric sitar and heavy bass taking it into psychedelic rock territory while "Davey Has No Dad" stays just the right side of mawkish with some more great bass work. There was one more single not on the LP , the over-optimistic "Top Ten Record" whose ultra-cynicism - "a little bitty riff that 'll bore you stiff until you're out of your mind" went unrewarded. The last minute with Rick just muttering to himself over the riff brought to mind Kevin Rowland on Don't Stand Me Down.
The partnership dissolved and Rick briefly joined a group called Light Fantastic who were backing Carl Wayne on tour. He then formed a band called Mongrel but before they got to record anything he and two other members answered the call from Roy Wood to join Wizzard and stayed with him in Wizzo Band until that ended in 1978 ( all this to be covered soon enough ).
By that time or soon after he met and married Dianne Lee ( of Peters and.. fame ) and became a sound engineer for musicals and live shows including a stint working for Jim Davidson. From 1999 onwards he has gone out on the road as an MOR duo with Lee and occasionally tours as a latter day member of The Rockin' Berries.
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