July 2011 Archives

DESPITE all the attention The Move were getting early in 1967, we were still penniless.

We'd play gigs in London and then motor back to Birmingham in the early hours of the morning because we couldn't afford to stay over.

Our van was owned between us and wherever the van went, we went.

It used to be embarrassing at times. I was banned from driving for quite a while after an accident.

My girlfriend Val, now my wife, used to work at the Cedar Club in Birmingham and whenever we had the odd night off, I'd have to get the night bus into Birmingham to meet her.

I was very conscious of the fact that here I was, a pop star, having to use the bus!

I used to pull my collar up and pray that no-one would recognise me as the guy in the gangster suit with the Rolls Royce they'd seen in the press.

It was like living another life. The fans saw you on 'Top Of The Pops' and assumed you were millionaires.

If you did it these days, you'd probably be canonised as a man of the people, making a virtue out of the situation. I bet that Bono still uses the buses from time to time. It's okay to do that sort of thing when you can afford NOT to do it.

So when Woody wrote I Can Hear The Grass Grow it really had to be a hit. We were petrified that we might become one-hit wonders after Night Of Fear, which we'd released in December 1966, had got to No 2.

I used to save as much as I could because I was terrified that even if we had two hits, then we might become two-hit wonders and so on.

The whole band was very conscious of the need to save some cash. Money was the last thing that hip bands were supposed to be interested in, but we had a reputation for being careful.

Photographer Bobby Davison gave Roy the title for I Can Hear The Grass Grow. It was a line out of the Tennessee Williams play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Everybody assumed it was all about drugs and smoking grass. It wasn't. Woody wouldn't even smoke a Woodbine, let alone anything like that!

THERE came a time in 1967 that The Move decided to make it in the movies.

This was long before the advent of MTV, of course. That was still 14 years or so in the future.

Music videos hadn't even been invented yet - and VHS tape recorders wouldn't be launched until the 1970s.

But we decided that we wanted to make a film to promote what would be our next single, I Can Hear The Grass Grow.

We always liked to be the band who were willing to try something new, and making a movie seemed like a great idea.

To be honest, there wasn't much of a script. We were all sitting in the middle of a wood and we had a butler serving us tea and biscuits!

I seem to recall that it was filmed on Wimbledon Common.

Suddenly all these girls appeared from the trees, saw us and started tearing us to bits. Or, at least, that's what the script called for.

There was a tramp rambling round in there as well. We'd actually found him in the woods, slipped him a ten bob note, and asked him to appear in the film.

That was his bit of history in the making. He's probably a stockbroker now - or maybe he's sitting in the House of Lords.

When it came to movies, everyone wanted to get in on the act. The Beatles and The Monkees had already announced plans to make new films and suddenly it was the bandwagon to jump on to.

Cliff Richard, it was reported, was toying with the idea of making a serious drama about the Vietnam War and the Dave Clark Five were being lined up for roles in a thriller, neither of which materialised.

Brian Jones of the Stones wrote the soundtrack for a movie too, inspired no doubt, by the fact that his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was to have the starring role.

The movies were still big business in '67. There was The Graduate with its Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack; the shockingly violent Bonnie & Clyde; Paul Newman eating boiled eggs in Cool Hand Luke.

And, of course, there was Sidney Poitier breaking the race barrier in the utterly brilliant In The Heat Of The Night.

READING back through my old scrapbooks now, I look at the ambitions The Move had back in the 1960s.

It was all very narrow-minded really. It was all very material.

Roy Wood's ambition, believe it or not, was to "own a skyscraper block of flats."

I wanted to own my own Boeing 707.

Ace Kefford's ambition was definitely from the heart - he just wanted to be a millionaire.

It wasn't enough to be the world's best bass player, he had to make a million, too.

Trevor Burton said that his big ambition in life was to retire at birth and live in Rio.

He's still playing with my band, bless him.

Carl Wayne said he just wanted to he happy. That was very unlike him - not outrageous enough.

We'd all taken on different personalities within the group, in much the same way that The Beatles had done.

Carl was the outspoken and outrageous one; Woody was the bizarre but strangely shy one.

Trevor and Ace were the youngest and they were most in tune with the drug culture.

I was the steady one at the back, the one who held the band together and played practical jokes on everyone.

There were obvious parallels with The Beatles, who we, like most other groups, held in awe.

Meanwhile, the clergy branded us "immoral and disgusting" and the psychiatrists said we were portraying a very unhealthy and degenerate culture.

A Bishop had a go at us for devil worship - God knows where he got that one from - and there were big headlines about how we'd been banned from playing at the cathedral in our hometown.

It was utter tosh. Why on earth would we want to be at Birmingham Cathedral with The Three Monarchs and Ernie Wise, anyway?

But there was no such thing as bad publicity. We'd do anything for publicity.

One article that wasn't a hype was a piece by Paul McCartney. He reviewed us and told the world: "The Move are cool."

Can you imagine how we felt about that?

We were still in awe of The Beatles, and here was one of them giving us the official stamp of approval. We were well chuffed.