I mentioned Richard Tandy’s passing a couple of weeks ago.

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.

Electric Light Orchestra: Mr Blue Sky

Richard Tandy: 26/3/1948 –  1/5/2024. So it goes.

Everybody’s favourite girl-next-door at least until she released Physical in 1981,) Olivia Newton John, has died.

Her earliest hits were in the country and western style but she was a relatively minor star until she got the part as Sandy in the film Grease, with which she will forever be associated. I confess I found that film to be not as good as the hype surrounding it. (It did have its moments – the wink from Stockard Channing at the lyric “did he have a car” was priceless – but its ending seemed to imply that the only way to win a boy’s heart is to dress more than a little ‘obviously.’)

Not that that can be held against Newton John.

This title song from a later film which was not such a success is reputed to be writer Jeff Lynne’s favourite of all the ones he wrote.

Olivia Newton John: Xanadu

Olivia Newton-John: 26/9/ 1948 – 8/8/ 2022. So it goes.

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.

The Idle Race: Here We Go ‘Round The Lemon Tree

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.

The Move: California Man

Speaking of Jeff Lynne, his first brush with fame came with The Move’s Birmingham contemporaries The Idle Race.

One of my schoolmates raved about The Skeleton And The Roundabout though it didn’t trouble the charts much; and nor did other Idle Race tracks.

If you listen closely you’ll hear that the singer actually pronounces the unusual (for a song’s title) word in the song’s title “skelington.”

The Idle Race – The Skeleton And The Roundabout

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.

The Move: I Can Hear The Grass Grow