While they had 10 Top 40 singles, including Blackberry Way going to No1, between 1967 and 1972, despite releasing four albums in the same period THE MOVE only ever had one Top 75 album, their self-titled debut which peaked at No 15.
Quite why they never caught the album-buying public’s interest is a mystery, but seems likely to have been the disconnect between the pop sound of the singes and the more aggressive heavy rock they favoured for the albums, the debut being the only one to include any big hits, though 1970s Looking On did feature Brontosaurus.
Their final album was Message From The Country, recorded due to a contractual obligation with EMI, with most of the band focused on the debut Electric Light Orchestra album. It’s now been issued in an extended edition by Cherry Red, or more strictly reissued and remastered from 2005 which piles on the final singles Tonight, Chinatown (and California Man and B-sides Down On The Bay and Do Ya (a great crunchy rocker with a The Beach Boys break that was the A side in America and subsequently a hit for ELO) alongside alternate versions of the latter, Don’t Mess Me Up, The Words of Aaron and My Marge.
Given nobody’s heart was really in it and musical styles were all over the place (see Presley pastiche Don’t Mess Me Up, a precursor to Eddie and the Falcons perhaps, and Johnny Cash parody Ben Crawley Steel Company, both sung by Bev Bevan) , numbers like the title track, the muscular boogie Ella James (ELO orchestra rock evident, the experimental psychedelic chamber folk No Time with Roy Wood on recorder and the surely Pepper-era Lennon-influenced Words Of Aaron are more than simply filler and deserve a full reassessment. The reissue also comes with new, detailed liner notes by Mike Barnes.
While I suspect it’s unlikely to prove representative of the forthcoming The Awful Truth album (“a modern mutant music hall interpretation of the day’s news, a haunting jolt into realism narrated with all the angst of an insistent, slightly dishevelled late-night newscaster”), THE NIGHTINGALES are at their most immediate and accessible with The New Emperor’s New Clothes, a crank it up loud, driving rock n roll blast of thundering drums, pounding piano and ringing guitars aptly tagged as Velvets meet Fairport Convention in a crowded boozer.
KATHERINE PRIDDY’s second winter-themed collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, again written for the project, the slow swaying ‘Daybreaker’ (Cooking Vinyl) dreamily embodies the thaw after the freeze, a reemergence into the sunlight carried by the gently rippling guitar pattern as her pure voice floats on the breeze as it builds to a swelling, keys and strings euphoria. (www.katherinepriddy.bandcamp.com/track/daybreaker)
A prelude to their third EP, Solitude, THE MISSED TREES, guitarist Joe Peacock and violinist Louisa Davies-Foley, release ‘I Am Water’. Their most immediately accessible and radio friendly track to date, it’s inspired by the story of Manfred Gnadinger, a German hermit who dropped out and went to live on a beach in the Galician fishing village of Camelle, where he was known as Man, creating sculptures (“in splendid isolation”) out of things that washed up and living in tune with nature until an oil spill from the sunken Prestige tanker covered his sculpture garden and he died, ostensibly of a broken heart.
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