Quotes
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.
When I was a boy, we all learned the story of George Washington and the cherry tree and accepted it as gospel truth. The present, more enlightened younger generation, however, is well aware that this incident never happened, but that it was the invention of Washington's most famous biographer, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems.
All the good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
Yes, but if you take that crap and put a star in it, then you've got something.
Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery.
What do you know? Haven't you heard of suspension of disbelief?
Well, I started thinking about what you were saying about how your movies need to make a profit. Now, what is the one thing, if you put it in a movie, it'll be successful?
We shot ten minutes of the movie, and now we're looking for completion funds.