Quotes
Well, obviously I wanted it to sound as original as possible. I suppose the influences that we had were probably from the actual power point of view we wanted to be like the Who. Vocally we wanted to be like the Beach Boys, whatever was good at the time.
We should have gone over years before that. I always wanted to and I think most of the band did.
We happened to be in the studio next door and I think Noel Redding came around and said, 'Do you fancy having a sing on this?' We just went and did it and it was great.
Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.
Tony Secunda was always full of surprises. We'd played a gig in London and we went back to the hotel and Carl Wayne came up to me and said we've just been told that we're in the studio tomorrow and we've got to record a single, have you got one? I said, 'Well not on me. Not at the moment.'
To me, 'Blackberry Way' stands up as a song that could be sung in any era, really. We do it with the new doing all sort of fanfare things in it and it works really well. It goes down great with audiences.
The record company was never behind us. Because Wizzard was very successful in England at the time, the management also managed ELO and they thought, 'We'll put ELO over in the States and work on them over there and keep Wizzard over here to hit the charts over here.' I think that's why Wizzard suffered in a way.
The first people I ever saw were probably Little Richard and Gene Vincent.
The best thing I ever heard was in the '60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow' after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant.
That's more of the direction we wanted to go in for a long time. I think that short spell of that cabaretism spoiled all that, really. It ruined the direction of the band.
Really, the management then asked me to take over producing the band. But then myself and Carl had our differences and everybody wanted a piece of the cake. So we just put it down to a band production because Carl was involved in the production; he wanted a say in what songs were on the album as well. He chose a lot of the cover versions.
One day I was actually over there and the telephone rang at the hotel and it was him! 'Hi, Roy, it's Brian.' I nearly fainted 'cause he's one of my all-time heroes. He invited me up to this house. We arrived and I went with the bass player from the band, Rick Price. We were supposed to meet one of the ladies from Warner Brothers.
Of course, the wind sort of swept up and the music was flying around in mid air and they were trying to play off it. You had to be there. It was quite funny.
It makes you wonder. I was always a big fan of Eddie Cochran, because basically he was the first person to play all his own instruments on his records. Apart from guitar he played drums and bass and everything. It makes me wonder what he would be doing now if he were still alive. He'd probably be a really top producer.
It intimated that Harold Wilson was having an affair with his secretary, which everyone knew was the truth. Obviously, you can't put that sort of thing into print. You probably could get away with it now but not in those days, it was really libelous. We've never received a penny from it. I lost more than everybody else because I wrote it.
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.