The Move - Colour Me Pop, London, Britain, 12-28-1968

Here's a short live concert performance by the Move, from 1968.

In the late 1960s, there were almost no opportunities for musical groups to perform more than a song or two on TV at any one time. An important exception to that was the BBC TV show "Colour Me Pop," which ran from 1968 to 1969. Each episode lasted half an hour and generally just featured one musical act. You can see a list of the more than 50 episodes here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_Me_Pop

It would be a great audio and visual treasure trove of music, except for the fact that the vast majority of the recordings were erased and thus lost to history. One of the very few episodes to survive feature the Move. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, in color, no less. Just search for "The Move" and "Colour Me Pop."

A curious aspect of the show is that there appears to have been no talking whatsoever. There was no host introducing the band, nor any comments between songs by band members. Instead, there was just a little bit of theme music at the start and end (which I've cut out), and then the band running through their songs without pause. I guess they wanted to maximize the number of songs they could play within the show's half-an-hour time frame. There also was no crowd, so no crowd noise at all.

I've added a couple of songs at the end: "Brontosaurus" and "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm." The "Colour Me Pop" songs total to only 32 minutes. So the extra songs help flesh the album out to a more typical 40 minute length. But also, I've used up pretty much all the good recordings of TV appearances on the four albums I made of their BBC appearances. But here are two songs that are different versions than those on the BBC albums. I've come across other versions of other songs, but the sound quality is generally poor. Whereas these two sound great. They both come from the German TV show "Beat Club" in 1970.

Just as musical associate MZ worked on improving the sound for the other Move concert I just posted, he did that for this one too. So this should sound slightly better than the YouTube version or other bootleg versions, because the sonic balance has been improved.

01 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)
02 Beautiful Daughter (Move)
03 The Christian Life (Move)
04 Flowers in the Rain (Move)
05 The Last Thing on My Mind (Move)
06 Wild Tiger Woman (Move)
07 Goin' Back (Move)
08 Fire Brigade (Move)
09 Something (Move)
10 Blackberry Way (Move)
11 Brontosaurus (Move)
12 When Alice Comes Back to the Farm (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AupcpWAx

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/mynScdlosftChqC/file

For the cover art, I took screenshots from the actual "Colour Me Pop" video footage. The video begins with some sort of behind-the-scenes notations written in chalk about the show. I assume that wasn't shown. But I thought it looked cool, so I used parts of it. (I also wrote in the date and location myself in a similar style.) However, I left room for a screenshot of the band in the middle. It's a bit blurry and low-res, but photos of the band on stage in concert are rare, and this comes from the actual concert in question.

The Move - Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 12-15-1967

I consider the Move to be a pretty important and very talented 1960s group. Considering their importance, there's a surprising lack of live music available by them. The good news is that there are two nice official albums ("Something Else from the Move" and "Live at the Fillmore 1969"). But the bad news is there's very little else, even when it comes to bootlegs. But there are two good, though short, bootlegs, so I've decided to post both of them here. This is the first one.

Before I get to the main part of this album, I have a couple of bonus items at the start of the album, since that's what makes sense chronologically.

The first song, "Watch Your Step," is really interesting. Unfortunately, the recording starts mid-song and it fades out before the song ends. It actually comes from an undated 1966 concert in the Netherlands, and was shown on TV there. On the audio of this, the band sounds pretty wild, but the video of it needs to be seen to be believed - look it up on YouTube. In the few minutes of this song that we have, the Move smashes a TV on stage and sets part of the stage on fire! And this was hardly a one-off event. The Move of 1966 and 1967 was an extremely wild band in concert, miles away from what they would become as they morphed into ELO years later. In fact, they were so wild that they found it tough to do concerts at all, due to so many clubs and concert halls banning them.

The next three songs come from a German TV show in 1967 called "Beat Beat Beat." I'm including them because aside from the rest of this album and the stuff I'll put on another live album, this is just about the only other live recording that sounds good. There's one song played here that's also played later on this album: "I Can Hear the Grass Grow." Sorry 'bout that.

All the remaining songs, from the fourth one onwards, are from the Konserthuset in Stockholm, Sweden. I've posted several other concerts at this same venue from the late 1960s, for instance Traffic, Wilson Pickett, and the Hollies. It seems concerts were routinely recorded then to be played on the radio in Sweden, and many of those recordings have survived.

One nice aspect of the concert is there's at least a little bit of talking between each song. It also features a cover of "Why" by the Byrds that the band never played on record or at the BBC. (I used to have this and "Watch Your Step" on the band's 1967 BBC album, but I removed those since they belong here instead.)

Note that this is a fairly short album, at only 30 minutes long. Only 19 of those minutes are from the Stockholm concert. But it still makes for a nice listen, especially considering the lack of other live recordings by the band.

One final note. The sound quality is less than perfect. But I had my musical friend MZ work on balancing the sound, so this should sound a little bit better than any other version floating around as a bootleg. He said he didn't change the "Beat Beat Beat" songs, since nothing could be done to effectively improve them.

01 Watch Your Step (Move)
02 Walk upon the Water (Move)
03 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)
04 Night of Fear (Move)
05 Somethin' Else (Move)
06 talk (Move)
07 Flowers in the Rain (Move)
08 talk (Move)
09 Why (Move)
10 talk (Move)
11 Hey Grandma (Move)
12 talk (Move)
13 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (Move)
14 talk (Move)
15 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4hZ7RsPM

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/QBfZ5HE77Yzz0BN/file

The cover art photo features the band playing on the "Top of the Pops" TV show in Britain in 1967.

The Move - BBC Sessions, Volume 4, 1970-1972

Here's the last of the albums I plan to post from the Move. It's the end of a series of four albums covering their performances at the BBC.

Unfortunately, their BBC albums end on kind of a down note in that the Move petered out as a band, releasing a few singles before turning into the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), and in a similar way, the Move made fewer and fewer appearances, either at the BBC or in concert in general, as the band wound down. They also got a LOT less diverse with their song list. The previous BBC albums all had lots of interesting cover versions, but this only has one, their version of the Beatles song "She's a Woman."

But on the flip side, Jeff Lynne joined the band in late 1969, and his arrival greatly strengthened the band's songwriting. So, song for song, this is a strong album. But unfortunately, some great songs late in the band's career don't appear to have been done at the BBC or live at all, or at least were never recorded. For instance, "California Man," "Chinatown," "Tonight," and "Do Ya." In the case, of "Do Ya," I had a nice alternate studio version of that song that I didn't have a good spot for, so I stuck that on here. (The band did a few high profile TV performances of some of these songs, but the ones I found we're lip-synched.)

The vast majority of the songs here originally appeared on the Move's last two albums, "Looking On" and "Message from the Country." But they didn't even play very many of those for the BBC. Luckily, they did three different songs for German TV show "Beat Club" in studio conditions (not in front of an audience), so I was able to include those too.

This album is 41 minutes long.

01 Brontosaurus (Move)
02 Falling Forever (Move)
03 Lightning Never Strikes Twice (Move)
04 Looking On (Move)
05 When Alice Comes Back to the Farm (Move)
06 She's a Woman (Move)
07 Ella James (Move)
08 Down on the Bay (Move)
09 The Words of Aaron (Move)
10 Do Ya [Alternate Version] (Move)
11 California Man (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/xPtQc7Q7 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/UtA2WLuOPfFEvEd/file

This the last of four BBC Move albums I've posted here, and I'm proud to say that I kept artistic unity across all four, using a different primary color for each. The photo here comes from the Move performing on a TV show called "Whitaker's World of Music" in 1971 (where, unfortunately, they lip-synced).

The Move - BBC Sessions, Volume 3, 1969

This is the third album I've posted of the Move's BBC performances. I really like how there happens to be one album's worth of music per calendar year.

As with the two previous albums, I think the really interesting thing here is the number and variety of cover songs. Five of the 13 BBC performances here are Move originals: "Something," "Beautiful Daughter," "Curly," "Hello Susie," and "Fields of People."

Here's a breakdown of who did the originals for the rest:

The Birthday - Idle Race
Goin' Out of My Head - Little Anthony and the Imperials
Evil Woman - Crow
The Sound of Silence - Simon and Garfunkel
Abraham, Martin and John - Dion
Open My Eyes - Nazz
Walk Right Back - Everly Brothers

Once again, it's notable that not only did they seem more interested in playing covers than their own songs, they sometimes played fairly recent hits by their competitors. For instance, "Evil Woman" was a hit by Crow when the Move played it at the BBC. I applaud their approach of playing whatever good songs they liked, even if that didn't help them sell their latest records.

I've added two bonus tracks of sorts at the end that actually aren't BBC performances at all, but I didn't have a better place to stick them. On the 1968 BBC collection, I included three songs recorded by Ace Kefford, who was bassist for the Move until he had to leave in mid-1968 due to mental issues. Those three songs were recorded in 1968 for a solo album that never got released at the time. Here are two more that he recorded in 1969 and also didn't get released until decades later. I think they would have made solid Move songs.

Two songs, a cover of "Good Times" by the Easybeats and a cover of "Rock and Roll Woman" by the Buffalo Springfield, come from a bootleg. Originally, I didn't think they were even worry of inclusion as bonus tracks. However, I did some editing, such as patching in a chorus from one part of the song to help with a chorus in a rougher sounding part of the song. Then I got my musical associate MZ to work on them. He managed to make them a little bit clearer. So at least now they're listenable, but still rough.

This album is 41 minutes long, not including the bonus tracks.

01 The Birthday (Move)
02 Beautiful Daughter (Move)
03 Goin' Out of My Head (Move)
04 Evil Woman (Move)
05 Curly (Move)
06 The Sound of Silence (Move)
07 Abraham, Martin and John (Move)
08 Open My Eyes (Move)
09 Hello Susie (Move)
10 Fields of People (Move)
11 Walk Right Back (Move)
12 Gravy Booby Jamm (Ace Kefford Stand)
13 This World's an Apple (Ace Kefford & Big Bertha)

Good Times [Edit] (Move)
Rock and Roll Woman [Edit] (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/f1Fgex3k

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/dGp0J2Igxh6logJ/file

For the cover art, I'm glad to say that I found an actual photo of the Move performing for the BBC in 1969. This comes from an appearance on the BBC TV show "Colour Me Pop."

The Move - BBC Sessions, Volume 2, 1968

Here's more of the Move's many BBC sessions. Luckily, with the last album, I had just the right amount of music to make one album from all their 1967 BBC performances, and that's the case again with their 1968 ones.

Also like last time, what really surprises me here is the Move's willingness to perform then-recent hits by other bands. Many of their contemporary bands, such as Pink Floyd, wouldn't have been caught dead playing any cover versions at all, much less a bunch. But it seems the Move just enjoyed playing great songs and didn't get too hung up on where they came from. Four of the songs here are Move originals: "Fire Brigade," "Useless Information," "Wild Tiger Woman," and "Blackberry Way."

Here's where the others come from:
Weekend - Eddie Cochran
It'll Be Me -Jerry Lee Lewis
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher - Jackie Wilson
Piece of My Heart - Emma Franklin / Janis Joplin
Kentucky Woman - Neil Diamond
Long Black Veil - Lefty Frizzell / Band
Goin' Back - Byrds (and others)
California Girls - Beach Boys
The Christian Life - Louvin Brothers / Byrds
Something - Dave Morgan

The last three songs are kind of bonus tracks, in that they're not actually BBC performances. Ace Kefford was the Move's bass player from the beginning of the band's existence. However, it turned out he had bipolar disorder, which grew worse due to the use of drugs like LSD and the pressure of being a rock star. He left the band in mid-1968 after having a nervous breakdown. Then he tried to make a solo album, but he had further mental troubles, leaving the album unfinished. (What was completed was released in 2003.) I've included my three favorite songs from it, which I think are all written by him.

01 Fire Brigade (Move)
02 Weekend (Move)
03 It'll Be Me (Move)
04 Useless Information (Move)
05 [Your Love Keeps Lifting Me] Higher and Higher (Move)
06 Piece of My Heart (Move)
07 Kentucky Woman (Move)
08 Wild Tiger Woman (Move)
09 Long Black Veil (Move)
10 Goin' Back (Move)
11 Blackberry Way (Move)
12 California Girls (Move)
13 The Christian Life (Move)
14 Something (Move)
15 Step Out in the Night (Ace Kefford)
16 Trouble in the Air (Ace Kefford)
17 Daughter of the Sun (Ace Kefford)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/4v3yQYjQ

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/JZhSu3hM3y1ZPxr/file

The cover art uses a publicity photo of the Move from 1968, while Kefford was still in the band. (He's the blond in the front row.)

The Move - BBC Sessions, Volume 1, 1967

The Move were a fairly important and popular band in Britain in the late 1960s (though they were largely unknown in the US), and the vast majority of the songs on their singles and studio albums were their own originals. So I find it interesting that they kind of had a separate career playing lots of covers in concert and at the BBC. Furthermore, they didn't just play obscure songs from different eras, like, say, the Byrds did. They played lots of songs that were big hits right at that time, by their main competitors.

This album is a good example of that. In it, they do a few of their own songs, mainly their hits ("Night of Fear," "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," and "Flowers in the Rain") and a few original non-hits ("Kilroy Was Here," "Walk upon the Water," and "Cherry Blossom Clinic"). But that's only six out of the 16 songs here. The rest are like a 1967 station playing soul and rock hits, except with all of them played by the Move. Here's who they cover:

You Better Believe It Baby - Joe Tex
Stop and Get a Hold of Myself - Gladys Knight and the Pips
Our Love (Is in the Pocket) - Darrell Banks (and J. J. Barnes)
Tired of Being Lonely- Sharpees
Cherry, Cherry - Neil DIamond
Morning Dew - Bonnie Dobson (and many others)
So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star - Byrds
Stephanie Knows Who - Love
Hey Grandma - Moby Grape
Eight Miles High - Byrds

Note that some of the songs here are fairly obscure danceable soul songs, the type of music that would later be known as "northern soul." The Move played a lot of this kind of music in 1966 and 1967, but moved away from it by 1968, as rock music got more serious, and became less about dancing.

All the songs here were played by the Move on the BBC in 1967. Nearly all of the recordings were released on an official album called "The BBC Sessions," so the sound quality is generally excellent. Two songs are officially unreleased, but they sound pretty good as well.

Thankfully, there are no instances of annoying BBC DJ talking over the starts or ends of songs. However, one song, "You Better Believe It Baby," clearly had the intro of about 10 seconds cut off until the very second the vocals began, probably to get rid of that DJ talking. So I went to the original version of the song by Joe Tex and found out that the intro is repeated exactly halfway through the song. So I copied and pasted that from later in the Move version of the song to make it whole again.

I have three more albums of the Move at the BBC to post.

01 Night of Fear (Move)
02 You Better Believe It Baby (Move)
03 Stop and Get a Hold of Myself (Move)
04 Our Love [Is in the Pocket] (Move)
05 Tired of Being Lonely (Move)
06 Cherry, Cherry (Move)
07 Kilroy Was Here (Move)
08 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)
09 Walk upon the Water (Move)
10 Morning Dew (Move)
11 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (Move)
12 Flowers in the Rain (Move)
13 Stephanie Knows Who (Move)
14 Hey Grandma (Move)
15 Cherry Blossom Clinic (Move)
16 Eight Miles High (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3quJKGMZ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/pDf3txMPU7qqoB0/file

For the cover art, I wish I could have found a photo of the Move playing at the BBC, or at least playing in concert in 1967. But I didn't find any really good ones in color. So I went with a publicity photo of that band from that year.

The Move - California Man - Non-Album Tracks (1971-1973)

This is the third and last of stray tracks albums from the Move. However, I have even more albums of the Move performing for the BBC, and I plan on posting those soon.

For some reason, I don't have any stray tracks from 1970. By the time the music here starts in 1971, the band had changed drastically since the last stray tracks album I posted. The band's main lead singer Carl Wayne had left the group, and future ELO star Jeff Lynne had joined. The band was jointly led by Lynne and Roy Wood, who had been with the band from the beginning and still wrote most of the songs.

This album is fairly short by usual album standards, at only 34 minutes. But what it lacks in length in makes up in quality. The Move's last studio album, "Message from the Country," came out in early 1971, but they released four non-album singles after that, and all four A-sides are great.

It's strange to me that the band didn't put out an album to go with those singles, because this collection shows they had enough songs for it. But that probably had something to do with the band's strange transformation into Electric Light Orchestra, better known as ELO. In fact, the two bands are really just one band, with a name change. I guess by 1972, Lynne and Wood felt the Move name carried certain musical baggage and expectations, and they wanted to make a new start. So all three remaining band members at the time (the two of them plus Bev Bevan) began calling themselves ELO. Two more musicians were brought in to help record their last singles, Richard Tandy and Bill Hunt, and they wound up joining ELO too. Funnily enough, at one point in 1972, these five people promoted a Move song with a TV performance, and then promoted an ELO song for the exact same show on the same day, just calling themselves a different band name for that song!

ELO was supposed to be a joint project between Lynne and Wood, just like the last days of the Move. But after just one album as ELO, Wood left to pursue a solo career. It's hard to say what exactly is the Move and what is ELO. I've included an early version of "10538 Overture" from 1971, back when they were known as the Move, but that song went on to be a minor hit for ELO.

By the way, if you know the hit songs from ELO but you're not that familiar with the Move, you may wonder about the inclusion of the song "Do Ya" here. That originally was the last single by the Move, in 1972. But it totally flopped despite being a great song, not making the charts at all in Britain and barely scraping the bottom of the charts in the US. Lynne wrote it, so he revived it in 1976 with ELO and had a hit with it in many countries.

This album is 34 minutes long.

01 Tonight (Move)
02 Don't Mess Me Up [Acappella Version] (Move)
03 Chinatown (Move)
04 Down on the Bay (Move)
05 10538 Overture [Early Version] (Move)
06 The Words of Aaron [Acoustic Version] (Move)
07 California Man (Move)
08 Do Ya (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/cL22Rjkj

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/wOIHhBAyulY4hhr/file

The album cover is based on the cover of the "California Man" single. However, that one had a rather bland black and white photo in the middle. I replaced it with a color photo showing the three last members of the Move in 1971.

The Move - Blackberry Way - Non-Album Tracks (1968-1969)

This is the second of my three stray tracks albums for the Move.

I mentioned in the last one how it was odd that the band didn't release a studio album in 1967, despite having plenty of songs to do so. They did put out an album in 1968, but then they didn't have one in 1969, despite again having enough songs to do. This essentially is that album.

The bulk of this album comes from the A- and B-sides to three singles. The first A-side, "Wild Tiger Woman," had no chart action at all despite being a good song. The second, "Blackberry Way," hit number one in Britain. The third, "Curly," made it to number 12 in Britain. None of these had any success at all in the US, since the Move was essentially unheard of there in the 1960s.

If I only had the seven songs from the three singles (one of them had two B-sides), that would only be a 24-minute long album. Luckily though, there are three more Move stray tracks from this time period that are not from the BBC, since I have a whole series of albums just dealing with their BBC performances. These three songs are from a live album of a 1969 concert, though it wasn't released until decades later. As I often do, I removed the audience noise from these songs so they'd fit with the studio tracks that make up the rest of the album. All three of those songs are covers, while all the other songs here are originals.

In my opinion, this album is just as good as the official one before it or after it. Note though that Jeff Lynne still hadn't joined the group at this time.

01 Wild Tiger Woman (Move)
02 Omnibus (Move)
03 Blackberry Way (Move)
04 Something (Move)
05 Curly (Move)
06 This Time Tomorrow (Move)
07 Second Class [She's Too Good For Me] (Move)
08 Goin' Back (Move)
09 Under the Ice (Move)
10 Open My Eyes (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/xh9VhUct

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/oGzDPog3XIyE1an/file

For the cover, I used the cover to the "Blackberry Way" single. However, I cleaned up some areas, removed the name of the B-side, and stretched the title to fill the space where the B-side name used to be.

The Move - I Can Hear the Grass Grow - Non-Album Tracks (1966-1967)

First off, a couple of people asked if I've stopped doing album covers. I haven't. It's just that I've been too busy to work on them lately. But I promise I'll get caught up on those by and by.

A while back, someone asked if I could post albums of the Move. So here we go. I've got a lot to post from them because they have a lot of great non-album tracks. Plus, they pretty much had a second career covering other people's songs for the BBC. So I have three albums of stray tracks to post, plus another four of BBC stuff. That's a lot, considering the band was only in existence for a few years and released five studio albums.

If you like the big British rock bands of the 1960s, like the Beatles, Kinks, Who, Rolling Stones, etc, and you haven't gotten into the Move, you're missing out. They're not as great as that top tier of bands I just mentioned, but they're definitely in the next tier. However, they aren't well known outside of Britain, probably because they only went on one short tour of the US and never had much commercial success there. In that respect, they're similar to the Small Faces, another great British band of the time that only had one hit in the US (which is one more than the Move did!).

Plus, if you like ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) at all, consider the Move to be the 1960s version of that band. Although there were some personnel changes, it's literally true that ELO was just the Move renamed, and of course Jeff Lynne was in both bands (though he hadn't joined yet for the music on this album).

The Move are rather unusual in my opinion in that it took them so long to come out with a debut album. They were formed in late 1965, and many of the songs on this album date from January 1966. They had their first hit in late 1966, "Night of Fear," which reached number two in Britain. That alone would have been enough for just about any band to quickly follow up with an album. They had two more top five hits in 1967, yet their first album, simply called "Move," didn't come out until March 1968. That was an eternity in those days.

It turned out they recorded enough music to have put out an album in 1967, one of that would have been just as good as the album they released in 1968, yet containing all different songs. That's the album here. It contains all their stray tracks from 1966 and 1967, including their hit singles "Night of Fear" and "I Can Hear the Grass Grow." (Their other big hit from 1967, "Flowers in the Rain," was included on their 1968 album.) A few of the songs are covers of soul hits, like "You're the One I Need," "Respectable." and "Too Many Fish in the Sea," but most are originals.

I've gone to the trouble of finding out when all of the songs were recorded, and I've ordered they mostly chronologically. One exception to that are the first two songs. The first song is an intro to the second one, and the second one, simply called "Move," is kind of a theme song for the band, so I figured it makes sense to kick off with that.

The last song is basically a bonus track. It's an acappella version of "Night of Fear." Normally, I don't like to include two versions of the same song on one album, but this one is too good to ignore.

01 Move Intro (Move)
02 Move (Move)
03 You're the One I Need (Move)
04 Winter Song (Move)
05 The Fugitive (Move)
06 Is It True (Move)
07 Too Many Fish in the Sea (Move)
08 Respectable (Move)
09 Don't Hang Up (Move)
10 I Can't Hear You No More (Move)
11 Night of Fear (Move)
12 Disturbance [Single Version] (Move)
13 Don't Throw Stones at Me (Move)
14 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)
15 Wave the Flag and Stop the Train (Move)
16 Vote for Me (Move)
17 Night of Fear [Acappella Mix] (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/E2fU1iEt 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/AT1uvGXzNGqMjSL/file

The cover was a breeze to make. It's the cover of one of the many covers of the "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" single. All I did was clean it up a little bit.