The Move Bev Bevan interview, originally published by Prog via Louder Sound, remains one of the most candid accounts of why a band that had everything going for them never quite broke through the way they should have. Speaking in 2018, Bevan, former member of both ELO and Black Sabbath, and, by his own description, the second-loudest drummer in Birmingham, laid out three specific things that derailed The Move at the peak of their powers: a missed American tour, a catastrophic lawsuit, and the moment Roy Wood walked out the door.
The Move Bev Bevan interview: America, the libel case and what Tony Secunda got wrong
Bevan is generous about The Move’s management, up to a point. Tony Secunda gets credit for transforming the band’s image, out went the mod gear they’d arrived in London wearing, in came gangster suits, sharp photography courtesy of Bobby Davidson, and the stage stunt of smashing televisions, which Bevan traces to Secunda’s idea of ‘destroying the one-eyed monster in the living room.’ Don Arden, meanwhile, Bevan clarifies, was ‘more of an agent’ than a true manager during that period, whatever the received history suggests.
But Secunda’s mistakes were costly. The first was failing to get The Move to America in 1967-68. ‘I think we would have done well,’ Bevan says plainly. ‘We only did one tour there in 1969.’ By then, the moment had shifted. The second was the promotional postcard issued alongside ‘Flowers In The Rain’, a cartoon depicting Prime Minister Harold Wilson in bed with his secretary Marcia Williams. It got the band front-page coverage and cost them the royalties. Wilson won the libel case and the songwriting royalties, including Roy Wood’s, were awarded to him. Bevan notes that Wood was still fighting to reclaim them at the time of the interview.
The 1967 Hendrix package tour and a word about Syd Barrett
One of the richest passages in The Move Bev Bevan interview concerns the legendary 1967 package tour alongside Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Amen Corner, The Nice and Eire Apparent. Two shows a night, theatres across the country, and a lineup that reads now like someone’s fantasy bracket.
Pink Floyd opened, playing two songs (‘See Emily Play’ and ‘Arnold Layne’) and Bevan’s recollections of them are pointed. ‘Pink Floyd were difficult; they kept themselves to themselves.’ He makes an exception for Nick Mason (‘drummers always speak to each other’) and offers a frank assessment of Syd Barrett: ‘He seemed out of it most of the time. I don’t think he was speaking to the others much.’ Everyone else, Bevan says, was genuinely warm. Amen Corner asked Roy Wood to write them a song, Wood obliged with ‘Hello Susie’, and it became a hit. Jimi Hendrix, Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, Bevan recalls, were ‘great guys.’
The Move closed the first half, playing around half an hour. Hendrix closed the second half. ‘There was no way you would want to follow Hendrix onstage,’ Bevan says. It’s the kind of statement that needs no elaboration.
Roy Wood, ELO and the split that shaped both bands
Before Wood became the songwriter Bevan describes with clear admiration, he wasn’t a songwriter at all. The Move were pulling sell-out crowds at the Marquee every Thursday night on a set of covers, queues around the block, record companies circling. Secunda’s condition for signing: write original material. Wood was, in Bevan’s words, ‘the closest thing we’d got to one,’ so Secunda handed him a reel-to-reel tape recorder and told him to get on with it.
What came back were songs good enough that everyone in the band wanted to sing them. Three different lead vocalists appear on ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ for exactly that reason, with different members taking the verse, chorus and middle eight. Bevan adds that he contributed bass vocals across a number of the band’s records.
The coexistence of The Move and Electric Light Orchestra was always uneasy. ‘California Man’ in 1972 was a massive hit, and EMI, who had them on Harvest, were not enthusiastic about letting the band pivot to a new orchestral project. The first ELO album was funded from a Move advance. Then Wood went quiet for a couple of weeks. Don Arden, by that point managing the operation, broke the news: Wood had left and taken some of the band with him to form Wizzard. Jeff Lynne’s response was immediate. ‘We’ll carry on as ELO.’ They brought in proper cellists, which Bevan credits as the turning point, and the rest followed from there.
