Roy Wood
In those days you couldn't get Barcus Berry violins and you couldn't get electric stuff like that. We amplified the cellos using those sort of microphones that the army uses, those throat mikes. It's a microphone that fits around your throat and you use it in the field.
In those days the media were looking for things like that anyway. I think whatever we had recorded I think they would have tried to find a loophole somewhere. I think they had that sort of feeling about that and 'Flowers In The Rain,' really. But really, I got the ideas for the lyrics from those things that I had written at school.
In actual fact I went through a stage where I didn't really want to play my old material because I'd been doing it for years and it gets on your nerves. Since having the new band I've rearranged some of the new stuff with the horns in mind and 'Fire Brigade' is one of them and it works really well. Part of it is reggae.
I've always been that way. I'm not very good at reading music but I'm pretty quick at picking things up.
I've always been a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde. I always feel that you should keep singles as commercial as possible so that the people can walk down the road and whistle a song. But on the other hand on albums I think you can afford to show people what you can do.
I think we were probably playing live for about 12 months before we got a recording deal.
I think the first gig we ever did was 'Barbarellas' in Birmingham. It was a big nightclub and actually most of the people in the audience were from other bands and just wanted to see what we were up to, what was going on. They were all saying afterwards what a weird atmosphere it was. It was quite an electric atmosphere, really.
I think Looking On and Message From The Country were the end of an era. The only reason that Jeff actually joined the Move was so we could be under the same roof and get ELO together and I don't think Jeff would have wanted to do any more albums with the Move.
I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren't together personally as a band. We weren't pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you're having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.
I put a load of horn parts in the old stuff and it works really well. Things like 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow,' that riff sounds great with a horn section. I do 'Forever.' The last time we played was Christmas so we do the Christmas record, 'See My Baby Jive,' 'Angel Fingers.' 'Ballpark Incident' sounds good with a big horn section.
I played bass with him once in a place in Switzerland. It was Hendrix on guitar. I was playing bass, Chris Wood was playing flute, Steve Winwood on organ and I can't remember who was on drums. It might have been Jim Capaldi.
I named it that because more or less each person from the band used to play in other bands and when we left respective bands other members from those bands all sort of changed round. It was a big sort of move thing. I got it from that, I suppose.
I just felt it was time for Jeff and myself to rock 'n' roll. His favorite artist at that time was Jerry Lee Lewis and mine was Little Richard, so I thought, I'm gonna write a rock 'n' roll song, which is what I did, and we treated it that way. It was like one singer meets another singer and it worked out all right.
Even though we didn't actually record it as the Move I had already written a song called 'Dear Elaine,' which I subsequently put on the Boulders album. I thought at the time that was probably the best song I'd written.
Even EMI wasn't sure, to be honest. They only agreed to let us release an album under the name of ELO if we did another Move album. At that time we were working on Message From The Country, more or less at the same time. Obviously, you could hear influences on both and that's obviously why.
Denny was a friend of Tony Secunda's and he was also involved with the publishing side of it. To be perfectly honest, I used to get on well with Denny but I never thought he was a very good producer. He realied very heavily on the engineer. I think we recorded the songs fairly quickly.
At the time all the action was in London and we felt it was a big time thing to do and we tried our best when we did the Marquee and it did make us a better band. It hellped to get us a recording deal.
A guy called Mike Sheridan, who was in the band that I played with called Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders. He was a bit of an artist too and he asked if he could do the cover and it worked out really well.