In 2018 Bev Bevan – former ELO and Black Sabbath member, and self-proclaimed second-loudest drummer in Birmingham – looked back on his life and times with Prog. That included his analysis of The Move, who seemed to have everything in their favour in the mid to late 60s. He identified three things that worked against them: a missed tour opportunity, a lawsuit and a line-up change.
The Move’s records are so exciting because one can feel that things were changing quickly and lots of ideas were coming through. How did it feel to you at the time?
The Move were always a great band to play in as you always had total freedom to play exactly what you wanted. No one said, “Hey, keep it simple.” I could do whatever I liked. The album I like most is Shazam [1969]. It’s an eclectic mix alright, and by the time you get to Message From The Country [1970], you’ve even got some country and western in there.
You had some pretty heavyweight management in Tony Secunda and Don Arden. What did they add to the group?
Don Arden never really managed The Move. He was involved but he was more of an agent. Tony Secunda was a good manager, but he made mistakes; the biggest was not sending us to America in 1967–1968. I think we would have done well. We only did one tour there in 1969.
The other one was issuing that libellous postcard [a cartoon of PM Harold Wilson in bed with his secretary Marcia Williams] with Flowers In The Rain, which gave us front page coverage but lost us the royalties, including Roy’s songwriting royalties [Wilson was awarded them in the libel case], which he’s still fighting to this day to get back. So Tony did make mistakes, but he was a great ideas man.
We’d turned up in London looking like The Who, really, with mod gear, and he turned that round completely, and put us in gangster suits and really cool-looking clothes, and hired a great photographer called Bobby Davidson. He gave us an image. And smashing TVs onstage was another idea of Tony’s – destroying the one-eyed monster in the living room.
The Move played on the famous 1967 package tour with Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Amen Corner, The Nice and Eire Apparent. Do you have any particular memories of that?
It was two shows a night in theatres. The opening act were Pink Floyd and they got to play two songs – their two hits, See Emily Play and Arnold Layne. Pink Floyd were difficult; they kept themselves to themselves. Nick Mason was fine, but drummers always speak to each other. I remember Syd Barrett being a bit weird. He seemed out of it most of the time. I don’t think he was speaking to the others much.
But everyone else was really friendly. Amen Corner asked Roy Wood to write them a song, which he did – Hello Susie – and it became a big hit. Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell were great guys and we got on very well. The Move closed the first half – we played about half an hour – and Hendrix closed the second half. There was no way you would want to follow Hendrix onstage.
What was it like seeing Roy Wood become one of the best UK songwriters of the 60s?
We were playing the Marquee to sell-out crowds every Thursday night and it was a great show; they were queuing around the block to see it, but it was all covers. We had record companies wanting to sign us, but Tony said, “If we get a record deal, you guys have got to write some original songs.”
None of us were songwriters, including Roy, but he was the closest thing we’d got to one, so Tony said, “Here’s a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a mic – get writing.” And he would come up with these extraordinary songs.
EMI were saying, ‘We’ve got this hit band and you want to do this thing called Electric Light Orchestra?’ They weren’t very keen
He couldn’t churn them out, but he could write a good song in a couple of weeks. When he came up with a new song, everyone wanted to sing it, including Roy. Trevor and Ace would also say they’d like to sing it and Carl said, “I’m the lead singer – I should sing it.”
So that’s why when you listen to I Can Hear The Grass Grow, you can hear three different lead singers. Someone would sing the verse, someone would sing the chorus, someone else would sing the middle eight. I did bass vocals on a lot of the records as well.
Electric Light Orchestra formed while The Move were still going. Was it always the plan to run the two groups simultaneously?
The Move were signed to EMI Harvest when we did what turned out to be the last ever single, California Man [1972], which was a massive hit. So EMI were saying, “We’ve got this hit band and you want to do this thing called Electric Light Orchestra?” They weren’t very keen on the idea. The recording costs were involved in the first ELO album were made from an advance we got for The Move. So they did coexist for a little while.
Is it true that ELO were thought of as a conceptual group in which you would expand on the arrangement ideas of Beatles songs like I Am The Walrus?
Jeff, myself and Roy were huge Beatles fans and we loved Strawberry Fields and I Am The Walrus. We were attempting to do something like that, but on stage. The first album, The Electric Light Orchestra, took forever to record; Roy played all the cello parts and it was just overdubbing and overdubbing!
We did one British tour with ELO and then went to Italy, and it was a bit of a mess as we were trying to amplify violins and cellos and we didn’t really know how to do it. Then we came back; and for a couple of weeks neither Jeff nor myself had heard from Roy.
Don Arden, who was managing us by then, said, “He’s left and taken some of the guys with him. He’s formed this band called Wizzard. Do you want to carry on with this Electric Light Orchestra idea or go back to being The Move?” Jeff said, “We’ll carry on as ELO.” We got a couple of proper cellists in, so that made a hell of a difference.
