He was a mainstay of The Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) being Jeff Lynne’s right hand man in the group.
I note that the lyrics scrolling along the bottom of this video misrepresent the last vocoded words (which apparently Tandy voiced.) They are not “Mr Blue Sky” but instead “Please turn me over.” Mr Blue Sky was the last track on side three of the album Out of the Blue.
This Roy Wood song was originally planned as a single but ended up as the B-side of Flowers in the Rain famously the first song to be played on Radio 1, fifty years ago this week
There’s a great rhyme in the lyric: plans/underpants. Not to mention cider/beside her.
The Move:- (Here we go round) The Lemon Tree
Jeff Lynne (of ELO fame)’s first group The Idle Race also recorded it as a single but it was only released in Europe and the US.
This is something of an oddity but yet is entirely consistent with Roy Wood’s oeuvre.
Very unMove-like and far too restrained for Wizzard – which he had formed at around the same time as this – it could still be an outtake from The Electric Light Orchestra, the band’s eponymous first album, which did contain quite a lot of acoustic plucked strings in its arrangements.
The roots of both ELO and Wizzard are evident in this, the last of the hits by Birmingham band The Move, which by this time had lost original members Carl Wayne, Ace Kefford and Trevor Burton and reeled in Jeff Lynne from The Idle Race. ELO’s first single 10538 Overture was released only a month or so after this.
It’s that time of year again. I was in a shopping mall yesterday and over the tannoy came the sound of I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day. It was the nineteenth of November!
Still, it got me to thinking about the band that recorded it, Wizzard, a project that Roy Wood had (ahem) moved on to from The Move following a brief stint with the earliest incarnation of ELO.
I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day never made it to no 1, among other things having the relative misfortune to be first released in the same year as Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody. I don’t suppose Roy Wood will complain. The residuals he gets every year for I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day must keep him in mince pies well enough.
This was the world’s introduction to Wizzard. Their first single.
This was the first single The Spencer Davis Group released after Steve Winwood left.
The heavy cello prefigures early Electric Light Orchestra (their eponymous first album featured the cello a lot, as well as brass) but does anyone else hear in the introduction pre-echoes of Oasis? (“Free to be whatever I – “)
The Move was of course Roy Wood’s (and Bev Bevan’s) first brush with fame. Not content with rattling out some of the mid 60s best pop songs Roy then went on to found ELO with Jeff Lynne but quickly tired of that and formed Wizzard.
This clip (I believe from French or German TV) certainly sounds live but isn’t well synched.
