Looking like a mad scientist, attired in outlandish costumes, wearing bizarre greasepaint and sporting unruly long hair best described as an explosion in a mattress factory, Roy Wood is definitely not your average rock 'n' roll star. David Bowie's alter ego as Ziggy Stardust looked tame by comparison. Cited by Crawdaddy editor Paul Williams as one of the five true geniuses in rock 'n' roll, Wood is a multi-faceted wunderkind, acclaimed in his homeland of Britain and a cult artist in America.

Through his seminal work with the Move, ELO, Wizzard and as a solo artist, Wood was a singular rock visionary, effortlessly painting panoramic aural landscapes and vistas with dazzling skill and boundless imagination. Wood is a true rock chameleon, shedding his skin at will and perfectly adapting to myriad musical genres including pop, psychedelia, country 'n' western, blues, rockabilly, classical and jazz. Roy Wood could do it all.

The saga of Ulysses Adrian Wood began in Birmingham, England on November 8, 1947. Bitten by the rock 'n' roll bug at an early age, Wood initially played the drums and then harmonica. The guitar soon beckoned and Wood was on his way, joining his first band six months after learning the basic fretboard rudiments. A member of such early Brum-beat outfits as Gerry Levene and the Avengers and Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders, Wood hit paydirt with the Move, who debuted at the Belfry Hotel in February 1966.

Along with Wood, the Move included vocalist Carl Wayne, drummer Bev Bevan, bassist Ace Kefford and guitarist Trevor Burton. A weekly residency at London's famed Marquee club followed and cemented the group's status as one of England's top underground bands, attracting such luminaries as Pete Townsend, Mick Jagger and Keith Moon to gigs. Signed to notorious manager Tony Secunda, the Move inked a deal with Deram Records, issuing their debut single, "Night Of Fear" b/w "Disturbance," on December 9, 1966.

Sporting a snippet of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, "Night Of Fear" reached #2 on the U.K. singles chart. The Move was slowly beginning to make their mark.

A string of smash singles followed, with the psychedelic classic "I Can Hear The Grass Grow," the Eddie Cochran-inspired "Fire Brigade" and "Wild Tiger Woman" particular highlights. Meanwhile, Move stage shows were becoming quite flamboyant and often dangerous affairs. Spurred on by Secunda, the Move, like their contemporaries the Who, made stage destruction an art. Lead vocalist Carl Wayne was an expert with an ax on-stage, viciously hacking away at Hitler effigies, smashing TV sets and demolishing an entire 1956 Chevy. While this sensational stage show didn't sit well with Wood (or concert promoters who routinely banned the Move from many gigs), it did manage to draw considerable attention to the group.

The Move's August 1967 single, "Flowers In The Rain," was shrouded in controversy due to a risque postcard issued to promote the single. It depicted then-prime minister Harold Wilson sitting naked in bed with his personal secretary, with whom he was rumored to be having an affair. The caption on the postcard read: "Disgusting, despised and despicable though Harold may be, beautiful is the only word to describe 'Flowers In The Rain' by the Move."

Not surprisingly, "Flowers In The Rain" proved to be a thorn in the side for all concerned when a highly-agitated Harold Wilson sued the band. All royalties accrued, estimated at between $23,000 to $29,000, were channeled to two charities, the British Spastics Society and the Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Wood told Rolling Stone: "The sick thing is that we had to promote the single all the same." To this day, Wood receives no royalties from the track.

While the Move was one of Britain's top rock attractions, the band was also beginning to make inroads in America. Sadly, the Move's lone U.S. tour, which took place in October 1969, proved disastrous, due to a number of factors including poor organization and an apathetic record company.

Inner turmoil, meanwhile, ravaged the band. While the group's second album, Shazam, drew raves, acclaimed by Rolling Stone as "powerful and intricately structured and flowing, a brutally energetic rock and roll album," all was not well in the Move camp. Lead vocalist Carl Wayne left the band, mainly as a result of his refusal to sing Wood's majestic opus "Blackberry Way" and his desire to pursue a solo career as a balladeer.

Soon after Wayne's departure, Wood recruited chum Jeff Lynne, formerly of the Idle Race. With Lynne on board, the Move recorded two exceptional long-players, Looking On and Message From The Country, and issued three more singles, including "Tonight" and "Chinatown."

Before calling it quits, the Move released their last single, "California Man," in June, 1972; it was later recorded by Cheap Trick on their 1979 Heaven Tonight album and continues to be a mainstay in that band's live shows today. Cheap Trick later recorded another Wood tune, "Rock And Roll Tonight," for their Busted album.

While the Move was on their last legs, the Electric Light Orchestra was born. Wood and Lynne claimed at the time that the Move was merely taking a sabbatical and could surprise us and reform any day. That never happened.

The nucleus of ELO was Wood, Lynne and Move mate Bev Bevan, who remained with the band until their demise in 1987. The seeds for the ELO sound were sown several years prior when the Move flirted with orchestral rock on the original version of "Cherry Blossom Clinic." In fact, "10538 Overture" was originally slated to be recorded by The Move, but was later resuscitated by ELO and stands as a highlight from the group's debut 1971 record, No Answer.

According to Wood, the intention behind ELO's sound was to take off from where the Beatles' "I Am The Walrus" left off. Despite its revolutionary melding of rock 'n' roll and classical music, Wood's tenure as a member of ELO was short-lived. Midway into the recording of ELO's second album, ELO II, Wood left. "It was decided that I should leave because I had a name and was more likely to succeed at anything else," Wood told Melody Maker in August 1973. "When I quit, I was so disappointed that I didn't want to form another group, and then Wizzard came up."

A wild and woolly eight-piece band, Wizzard made their live debut in August 1972 in front of 40,000 people at Wembley Stadium, sharing the bill with many of Wood's heroes, including Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

A highly commercial enterprise, Wizzard racked up hit after hit, including two number one records that out-Spectored Phil Spector, "Angel Fingers" and "See My Baby Jive," along with the perennial British holiday standard, "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day."

Eclectic and ambitious, Wizzard's albums ranged from the '50s-style pastiche rock of Introducing Eddy & The Falcons to the experimental progressive rock stylings of Wizzard's Brew. As a live act, Wizzard shows were pure unadulterated rock 'n' roll spectaculars, a traveling Barnum and Baily circus of lavish proportions with a wildly attired Wood as its ring leader. Wood's garish costumes and Kabuki-styled makeup, described as looking like an "accident in a paintshop," had a profound influence on KISS, who borrowed elements of his visual image and met with much greater success.

In between Wizzard albums, Wood issued Boulders, a delightful collection of pure pop ear candy, featuring Wood as a one-man band (pre-MIDI days), singing, writing and playing all the instruments. He also produced the album, and did the front cover artwork as well.

The elegiac ballad "Dear Elaine," one of Wood's earliest compositions, reaped massive critical plaudits and considerable commercial success. Mustard, another similarly-styled solo effort - with a colorful front cover drawing by Wood - explored the same pop territory to great effect.

Meanwhile, "Forever," another engaging Wood solo single broke into the U.K. Top 10 in January 1974. Marrying the tunefulness of vintage Neil Sedaka with a soaring melody evocative of Brian Wilson and a dead-on Carl Wilson vocal impersonation, "Forever" stands as one of Roy Wood's greatest triumphs. Wood later returned the compliment to the boys of summer when he played sax on "It's O.K.," a track from the Beach Boys 1976 15 Big Ones album.

Midway into the '70s, the hits stopped coming for Wood. In 1977, he formed the short-lived Wizzo band, which issued a U.K.-only LP, Super Active Wizzo, before fading into oblivion. After the release of 1979's On The Road Again (featuring guest appearances by Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham and former Move lead vocalist Carl Wayne), Wood disappeared from the music scene for quite a while, only returning for several one-off solo singles and as a member of the Helicopters. Laying low, Wood dabbled in production, working with the likes of Annie Haslam of Renaissance on her Annie In Wonderland album, the Darts and the Paranoids among others.

Wood reemerged from his self-imposed "retirement" in 1985 with the highly underrated Starting Up album, which contained some of Wood's strongest material for many years. Collaborations also followed with the likes of Jeff Lynne, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Phil Lynott, Rick Wakeman and ex-Move vocalist Wayne.

Growing bored with the daily grind of studio work, Wood has recently returned to the music scene with a renewed vigor, confidence and creativity. Last year saw Wood embark on a successful British tour for which he was backed by a stellar new 11-piece troupe called the Roy Wood Big Band, featuring seven women. And the best news for "Woody" fans is that Wood has written a wealth of songs with a new studio album in the works.

A multi-instrumentalist who was just as comfortable playing cello, oboe and sax as he was playing the guitar, Roy Wood is one of rock's MVP's, a talented producer, versatile vocalist and, most importantly, ground-breaking songwriter. His hit song battling average is worthy of the Hall Of Fame, tallying over 30 smash singles in the U.K.

Even more impressive is Wood's remarkable feat of landing a cache of Top 10 hits (and three number ones) in four different incarnations: the Move, ELO, Wizzard and as a solo artist. A pop architect of the highest order, Roy Wood towers above the rock pantheon.

Goldmine: Tell me about your musical background. You started on harmonica.

Roy Wood: The first thing I ever played was drums, when I was six years old. And then I suppose the first musical instrument I played was harmonica at 10 years old. My dad was a member of a local club and I used to get up and play there. There was a little trio with drums and piano and bass. I used to get up and play with them. I didn't start playing guitar until later on. I was probably about 14. I didn't get into playing the other instruments that I've been noted for playing until much later on. I was in the Move then and I used to actually collect old instruments. It's difficult to collect them without actually having a go and playing them so I just got into it by accident just through collecting them.

Goldmine: I seemed to come easy for you; you could get a tune out of any instrument.

Roy Wood: I've always been that way. I'm not very good at reading music but I'm pretty quick at picking things up.

Goldmine: Were there any instruments you were unable to play properly?

Roy Wood: Yeah, one thing I had a go on that I wasn't very happy with was violin because I was used to playing a cello. It's a different action (laughs). It's like marching and chewing gum at the same time. It's weird.

Goldmine: At what point did you join your first band, the Falcons?

Roy Wood: Within the first six months of having a guitar I was in a band becausethere were a lot of guys that lived in the local area that had guitars. In those days if someone in your area had a guitar you found out about it. you went to get together with him and learn together 'cause there was always one guy who knew more chords than you did. Some of the first things I learned to play were instrumental tunes from bands like the Shadows and the Ventures, groups like that. When I eventually joined the Falcons we were playing American rock, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

Goldmine: At what point did you begin to write songs?

Roy Wood: The first thing i started to write was instrumental tunes. When I was in the Falcons we played a few of those. I didn't really get around to writing songs until the Beatles became enormous and everyone was influenced by the Beatles then. I was one of those people. I got into writing lyrics for songs when I was at art college. I wrote a book which was fairy stories for adults with a bit of a weird twist at the end of the stories. Obviously in those days I had no contacts. I didn't really know what to do with it. Consequently I used a lot of those ideas for lyrics when we got the Move going. Stuff like "Flowers In The Rain," "I Can Hear The Grass Grow." A few of the early things.

Goldmine: Eddie Cochran had to be a big influence on you because his "Something Else" riff has shown up in a lot of your work, starting with "Fire Brigade" to "Red Cars Are After Me" from the Starting Up album.

Roy Wood: (Laughs) It makes you wonder. I was always a big fan of Eddie Cochran, because basically he was the first person to play all his own instruments on his records. Apart from guitar he played drums and bass and everything. It makes me wonder what he would be doing now if he were still alive. He'd probably be a really top producer.

Goldmine: Did you ever get to see any of the rock legends like Cochran or Buddy Holly when they toured in England?

Roy Wood: No, I was just a little bit too young to be in on that. The first people I ever saw were probably Little Richard and Gene Vincent.

Goldmine: How long were you a member of Gerry Levene and the Avengers?

Roy Wood: I was only in the band for about four months. I was in the band just before I joined Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders. In fact, it was a bit of a stopgap for me. I'd just joined because I wasn't in a band and I needed to play. I just joined them for a few months and then went on to the Nightriders.

Goldmine: What type of band was Gerry Levene and the Avengers?

Roy Wood: Just a rock 'n' roll band. We did mostly Chuck Berry material, all that sort of stuff.

Goldmine: Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders was the first band you did any recording with.

Roy Wood: That's right. Mike Sheridan was signed to EMI Records and we were one of the few local bands who had a recording contract which was good.

Goldmine: I heard the band's stage act was pretty wild. You used to wear a wig and impersonate Dusty Springfield.

Roy Wood: Don't remind me (laughs). So you found out about that one. You've been reading my mail again (laughs). That was basically because I could do her voice. I could actually sing like her in those days. They got the wig out of the cupboard and that was the end of it. It was done in an extremely masculine manner (laughs).

Goldmine: You did a single with the band called "Take My Hand," which featured an original song of yours as the B-side, "Make Them Understand."

Roy Wood: I didn't think that was a very good song to be honest but Mike Sheridan quite liked it. In fact, he sang it out of tune on the record. It was one of those where we had to make the record in the engineer's lunchtime so we didn't get a chance to redo it.

Goldmine: Before the Move got together didn't you play with the members fairly regularly?

Roy Wood: Actually, there was a nightclub in Birmingham called the Cedar Club, and all the local bands used to play there. If we had a night off we used to go there anyway just to see the band and maybe steal a few ideas from them. We happened to be talking at the bar one night, saying that we were fed up being a human jukebox and playing all the chart material.

I mentioned that I had some songs written and a couple of the guys were interested in hearing them. It just went from there, really. When we actually got a bee in our bonnet about doing it we used to get up and jam there at the Cedar Club. I think most of the people could tell from that that we were going to do something. And that's how the Move came together.

Goldmine: Who came up with the name of the group?

Roy Wood: I did. I named it that because more or less each person from the band used to play in other bands and when we left respective bands other members from those bands all sort of changed round. It was a big sort of move thing. I got it from that, I suppose.

Goldmine: Alex's Pie Stand was also a club where you congregated with other Birmingham bands.

Roy Wood: It was brilliant. It was right in the center of Birmingham. It was like a hut on the side of the road. If bands had been playing away from home, in those days there weren't late night restaurants open and all that, so the only place you could get anything to eat was Alex's Pie Stand. We all used to meet there and relay what the gig was like and all that. It was a good atmosphere. There was quite a lot of camaraderie then between the bands.

Goldmine: Do you remember the first Move gig?

Roy Wood: Yeah, it was at the Belfry Hotel in Sutton Coldfield. When we were first started we were doing a lot of Motown stuff, but actually playing it more in a rock way. Everybody in the band sang and we did a lot of harmonies.

I was always well into harmonies anyway because I was influenced by the Beach Boys. We used to do a lot of that sort of stuff. I was trying to persuade the band to do more original material and they were getting into it gradually. When we first started we did just a few of mine, maybe six or so. "Night Of Fear" would have been one. Even though we hadn't recorded it yet, "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" would have been one as well.

Goldmine: The Move had quite an eclectic taste in cover songs, from "Stop! Get A Hold Of Myself!" to "California Girls." How did you come to cover those songs?

Roy Wood: We used to get a lot of our ideas from a guy in Birmingham who's a singer called Danny King. In fact one of the guys that was in the Move, Trevor Burton, was in his band. Danny King was notorious for having the best record collection in Birmingham. Occasionally we used to go around to his house and say, "What unusual records have you got?" And he used to play us all this stuff.

I think we got a lot of ideas from him. When we were doing songs like "Sounds Of Silence," this is when myself and Carl Wayne were having a few problems. He didn't want to sing my songs (laughs). So I let him choose songs that he'd like to sing and he came up with some of those. I didn't always agree with that because to me it sounded too cabaret.

Goldmine: When you formed the Move did you have a good idea of the musical direction for the band?

Roy Wood: Well, obviously I wanted it to sound as original as possible. I suppose the influences that we had were probably from the actual power point of view we wanted to be like the Who. Vocally we wanted to be like the Beach Boys, whatever was good at the time.

Goldmine: How did the Move's weekly residency at the Marquee shape your sound?

Roy Wood: At the time all the action was in London and we felt it was a big time thing to do and we tried our best when we did the Marquee and it did make us a better band. It hellped to get us a recording deal.

Goldmine: How did Tony Secunda come to manage the band?

Roy Wood: Tony Secunda got involved because the first gig we did was the Belfry in Birmingham and the guy that used to promote that he did quite a lot of gigs around. He knew Tony Secunda very well because Tony used to manage the Moody Blues before us. He rang him up one day to say "come along and watch the band and see what you think." He wanted to manage us straight away. He obviously had all the contacts.

Goldmine: How long after getting involved with Secunda did you get signed to Deram Records?

Roy Wood: I think we were probably playing live for about 12 months before we got a recording deal.

Goldmine: It must have been an amazingly exciting time for you.

Roy Wood: That's a difficult one. Even though we didn't actually record it as the Move I had already written a song called "Dear Elaine," which I subsequently put on the Boulders album. I thought at the time that was probably the best song I'd written.

Goldmine: Didn't that song also win an award?

Roy Wood: Yeah, I was quite pleased about that.

Goldmine: "Night Of Fear" was the Move's first single and was quite innovative with the Tchaikovsky riff.

Roy Wood: I've always been influenced by all music. My parents were classical music fans. They always had classical music on when I went 'round to the house. It was probably just in the back of my mind somewhere. I knew it was a Tchaikovsky riff and I thought, well, everybody knows it. Maybe if the record starts off with that we might be sort of halfway there (laughs). The song's all right, it was never my favorite song. If I could have chosen it I would have picked another song to be the single. I wanted to use "Disturbance" as the single because I thought that was probably more representative of the band.

Goldmine: Did "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" present any problems with people thinking it was about drugs?

Roy Wood: In those days the media were looking for things like that anyway. I think whatever we had recorded I think they would have tried to find a loophole somewhere. I think they had that sort of feeling about that and "Flowers In The Rain," really. But really, I got the ideas for the lyrics from those things that I had written at school.

Goldmine: Did you know that Jellyfish covers "I Can Hear The Grass Grow in concert?

Roy Wood: No, I didn't know that. The best thing I ever heard was in the '60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play "I Can Hear The Grass Grow" after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant (laughs).

Goldmine: That song really showcased the vocal ability of each band member.

Roy Wood: That's the thing we'd been doing onstage ever since we started. When we did a lot of that Motown stuff there were four of us on the front line. When we started the evening we'd start from one end of the band and just go along. The lead singer would change all the time. That's the first time that I actually managed to put it into a record.

Goldmine: "Flowers In The Rain" was very controversial due to the Harold Wilson postcard. Whose idea was it?

Roy Wood: That was Tony Secunda (laughs). That's why we ended up breaking away from him. In fact, a friend of his had a postcard printed with Harold Wilson, who was the prime minister, on it. It was a libelous thing. He showed it around to a few people. In fact, Carl Wayne was the only person that saw it and he showed it to a lawyer who said, "Stay away from it."

But when Secunda heard that he had the band's name printed at the bottom of this postcard. One of his friends posted one to No. 10 Downing Street (laughs) in the days you could get down there. The game was up, really. We had the big black limousine waiting for us after a gig. It was quite scary at the time. I was only 17.

Goldmine: What actually was on the cover of the postcard?

Roy Wood: It was a card that was sent out to press people and things. I can't say too much about it. It intimated that Harold Wilson was having an affair with his secretary, which everyone knew was the truth (laughs). Obviously, you can't put that sort of thing into print. You probably could get away with it now but not in those days, it was really libelous. We've never received a penny from it. I lost more than everybody else because I wrote it.

Goldmine: What are your recollections of recording the first Move album with producer Denny Cordell?

Roy Wood: Denny was a friend of Tony Secunda's and he was also involved with the publishing side of it. To be perfectly honest, I used to get on well with Denny but I never thought he was a very good producer. He realied very heavily on the engineer. I think we recorded the songs fairly quickly.

Goldmine: Tell me about recording "Fire Brigade," a classic to this day.

Roy Wood: Tony Secunda was always full of surprises. We'd played a gig in London and we went back to the hotel and Carl Wayne came up to me and said we've just been told that we're in the studio tomorrow and we've got to record a single, have you got one? (laughs). I said, "Well not on me. Not at the moment."

He produced a bottle of scotch out of his pocket and gave me the key to one of the hotel rooms because in those days we used to double up. We used to share because we couldn't really afford single rooms in those days. It was the first time I ever had my own room in a hotel. He produced this key and a bottle of scotch and said, "Get on with it." (laughs)

The other guys went out for a drink before the pubs closed. It must have been about 11 o'clock at night and I just wrote all the way through the night. Then at about 8:30 in the morning the band came in and I played it to them and they just sang along with it and said, "Great, let's go and do it." (laughs) They had to sort of hold me up to do the session.

Goldmine: Does it stand up for you today?

Roy Wood: Yeah. In actual fact I went through a stage where I didn't really want to play my old material because I'd been doing it for years and it gets on your nerves. Since having the new band I've rearranged some of the new stuff with the horns in mind and "Fire Brigade" is one of them and it works really well. Part of it is reggae.

Goldmine: Who came up with the Move's stage destruction bit, where you smashed TV sets with an ax and hacked up effigies of Hitler?

Roy Wood: Well, it was an amalgamation of Tony Secunda and a guy named Bobby Davidson, who's a photographer. He used to do a lot of photos of Zappa and other people like that. he sort of threw a few ideas in. I didn't like it, particularly. One good thing about it was it did attract audiences. We did a couple of real wild jobs at the Roundhouse in London. We drove a couple of Cadillacs in there and smashed them up (laughs) halfway through the act.

Goldmine: Did Carl ever get a little close with the ax?

Roy Wood: Oh yeah, I had the side of my shoe chopped off once by accident. It was a close one (laughs). One thing I was really upset about was it used to look like we were smashing our gear up. I always loved my guitar and I wouldn't do anything to hurt it.

At the end of the night I used to pack it away like a baby. On the back of the guitar I had this sort of foam pad made to stick on the back of my guitar so at the end of the night I could slide my guitar across the stage on its back and it wouldn't hurt it. But we did this thing at the Marquee and everybody got a bit carried away and I threw the guitar across the stage and (laughs) Bev picked his bass drum and cymbal up and threw them at the guitar and smashed it to little bits. I was almost in tears holding the neck of the guitar with strings and stuff hanging off it.

Goldmine: "Walk On The Water" was another great vocal vehicle for the band.

Roy Wood: Yeah. In fact, I think I wrote that as a follow-up to "I Can Hear The Grass Grow." I think it would have been a good one but they decided not to use it and put it on the B-side of "Fire Brigade." I thought it would have made a good single but obviously they didn't.

Goldmine: In retrospect was it a mistake to release "Wild Tiger Woman" as a single?

Roy Wood: Yeah. It was a mixture of a lot of stuff. "Wild Tiger Woman," we retorded it and went to mix the track, I think Denny Cordell wasn't there and we did it with the engineer and I think it was the last thing we did on Regal Zonophone. I don't think the publicity machine was actually active when that came out. I think it was sort of ignored.

Goldmine: You do some great lead guitar playing on the song.

Roy Wood: Unfortunately, most of the songs that I write I don't write them with guitar in mind. I just write it as a song and that was probably one of the ones that left an opening for it. The song's all right, I wouldn't choose to sing it now.

Goldmine: You described the Move at one point as being kind of Jekyll and Hyde. What did you mean by that?

Roy Wood: It got really strange at one point because Carl always had an ambition to be a solo artist. When we left Tony Secunda, I think Secunda signed us up to this guy Peter Walsh, who used to manage bands like Blue Mink and Marmalade and the Tremeloes, those sort of bands that did the cabaret circuit. He actually mistakenly put us on the cabaret circuit and it didn't suit us at all.

As we sent along I think Carl actually started to enjoy it but I didn't. I was getting more and more distant from the band because of it. I mean, it wasn't all cabarets we played. It was probably one a week. I didn't like it at all and neither did Rick Price. He was with us then. It's not what the Move was about. When we did the American tour, myself and Carl had a lot of big disagreements about the way the band should be going. When we came back off the tour that's when Carl decided to leave.

Goldmine: Why did Ace Kefford leave the group?

Roy Wood: Ace left because he couldn't handle it. Ever since the day we formed none of us really got on very well with him. He was a very strange person. He was very aggressive and Ace and Trevor used to have a lot of fights all the time. The reason Trevor (Burton) left was him and Bev weren't seeing eye to eye and Trevor then was sharing an apartment with Noel Redding from the Jimi Hendrix Experience and they were thinking about getting a band together. I think he left for that reason. Trevor, for a short time, did a thing with Denny Laine.

Goldmine: Tell me about the Move's lone U.S. tour.

Roy Wood: It was put together very cheaply on a shoe string. We went over and landed in New York. We hired one of those U-Haul trailer things and a ranch wagon and put our gear in the back and just drove all the way across to San Francisco stopping off and playing on the way; it was one of those (laughs). It was a good way to see America because I'd never been there before. It felt like we weren't being looked after too well.

We played at the Whiskey in Los Angeles. I remember when we were onstage seeing this buy guy carrying Jim Morrison out on his shoulder. He was sort of flaked out. That was one for the books for me. A gig that I enjoyed playing was at the Fillmore West. We were on the same bill with Joe Cocker and Little Richard. It was a great show. We weren't in America very long. We didn't do more than a dozen gigs.

Goldmine: Why didn't you tour in the U.S. more often?

Roy Wood: It was basically due to management. We should have gone over years before that. I always wanted to and I think most of the band did.

Goldmine: I heard some Texas cowboys were picking on the band.

Roy Wood: We had to make a hasty exit from this truck stop place that we stopped off for something to eat in Texas. These cowboys came up and in those days they didn't like long hair on people. They came up and tried to pick a fight and I think our roadie took the bait. It ended up this one guy took his belt off and hit the roadie with it and we all made a hasty exit because they were big guys (laughs).

Goldmine: You produced, wrote and sang background on a one-off single in the '60s for a group called the Acid Gallery. The single was "Here We Go Dance Round The May Pole."

Roy Wood. I did the vocal backing.

Goldmine: It sounds like you singing lead.

Roy Wood: Yeah, I know (laughs). It's probably because they were listening to the demo and they copied it. I wrote it and produced it. We did it in the late '60s. They changed their name just after that single and they released a single called "Yellow River." Christie. It was them. I also did a few production bits back then with Andy Fairweather Low just in the studio messing around. It was nothing that saw the light of day.

Goldmine: What are your recollections of touring with the Jimi Hendrix Experience?

Roy Wood: I got pretty close to Jimi, actually. He was a very nice guy. I mean, apart from his drug problems and all that stuff he was a gentleman. He was a real polite sort of guy. He started having a lot of problems toward the end of the tour. He was going a bit deaf sticking his head in the speaker cabinets and all that sort of stuff. He was going a bit deaf so I volunteered to tune his guitars for him because I had to tune four of my own anyway, so it was very easy. I used to do his for him as well.

Goldmine: Did you ever jam with Hendrix?

Roy Wood: Yeah. I played bass with him once in a place in Switzerland. It was Hendrix on guitar. I was playing bass, Chris Wood was playing flute, Steve Winwood on organ and I can't remember who was on drums. It might have been Jim Capaldi.

Goldmine: How did the Move come to sing backgrounds on "You Got Me Floating" from Hendrix's Axis: Bold As Love album?

Roy Wood: That was myself and Trevor doing that. We happened to be in the studio next door and I think Noel Redding came around and said, "Do you fancy having a sing on this?" We just went and did it and it was great.

Goldmine: "Blackberry Way" is one of your best Move songs.

Roy Wood: I think Carl left just after that. He got to a point where he was a bit annoyed about not getting songwriting credits and money and stuff. He wanted some of the publishing money and all that so there's a guy named Dave Morgan who later went on to join ELO years after. He wrote songs and Carl used to get him to write songs and put them on the B-sides so he could get some money out of it. I played Carl "Blackberry Way" and he refused to sing it. I did "Fire Brigade" anyway. The management didn't mind who sang on it, to be totally honest.

Goldmine: Didn't you do a demo of the song at Jeff Lynne's house?

Roy Wood: Yeah. The reason I did that is 'cause Jeff was the only person that I knew that had a mellotron in his front room and it was the only way in those days we could get string sounds and it was great. It was quite late at night. Jeff and I had been 'round the pub. I played him this idea I've got for a song and he says, "Oh, why don't we put it down?"

He's got a sound-on-sound tape machine made by B&O, Bang and Olufsen. We were working on it for a while and then decided to put this vocal on. And of course, Jeff's parents were sleeping in the room above the room that we were using. In order not to keep them awake I did the lead vocals kneeling on the floor with the microphone and Jeff and a couple of other guys had a pillow 'round my face so that they couldn't hear it upstairs. It was quite funny. And I was sort of laughing all the way through it.

Goldmine: Were you shocked when it hit number one?

Roy Wood: Yeah (laughs), you always are, if you get to number one. In those days, I mean, it was a shock, it was brilliant.

Goldmine: Does the song still stand up for you?

Roy Wood: Yeah, I like it now. To me, "Blackberry Way" stands up as a song that could be sung in any era, really. We do it with the new doing all sort of fanfare things in it and it works really well. It goes down great with audiences.

Goldmine: "Curly" was another great single with an infectious melody. Did you like the track?

Roy Wood: No, not really. I thought it was really corny. There were other songs that I would have preferred that they release as a single. Probably the way it was produced as well I wasn't very keen on. I think at that time the one that I did want to release was a song that I wrote that we put on the Shazam album called "Beautiful Daughter." I thought that was a much better song. The song just sort of happened. I think I based it around the chord sequences on that. I based the whole song around the chords. I did a lot of open string work on that and it worked quite well.

Goldmine: Who did the artwork for the Shazam album cover?

Roy Wood: It was a guy called Mike Sheridan, who was in the band that I played with called Mike Sheridan and the Nightriders. He was a bit of an artist too and he asked if he could do the cover and it worked out really well.

Goldmine: Shazam is kind of a schizophrenic album, with one side originals and one side covers.

Roy Wood: Really, the management then asked me to take over producing the band. But then myself and Carl had our differences and everybody wanted a piece of the cake. So we just put it down to a band production because Carl was involved in the production; he wanted a say in what songs were on the album as well. He chose a lot of the cover versions.

Goldmine: Does the album hold up for you?

Roy Wood: I wouldn't play it now. There was just something missing. I can't really put my finger on what it was. I think it was probably down to the fact that we weren't together personally as a band. We weren't pulling in the same direction. I always feel if you're having a good time in the studio it actually comes across on the tape and that was a bit of a miserable album for us.

Goldmine: To me, the Shazam album was a change from being a pop group to being more of an underground band.

Roy Wood: Yeah, I think so. That's more of the direction we wanted to go in for a long time. I think that short spell of that cabaretism spoiled all that, really. It ruined the direction of the band.

Goldmine: What was it like for Carl to be the lead singer and then being relegated to singing stuff like "ooh" on "Fire Brigade"?

Roy Wood: To look at it from his point of view I think that was probably a bit frustrating as well. I think that's probably why he left in the end.

Goldmine: You are a very underrated guitar player. From your work on "Wild Tiger Woman" to, most recently, your playing on 1985's Starting Up album, your guitar playing is tremendous. How do you rate yourself as a player?

Roy Wood: That's weird, really. I know in my own heart that I could be a really good guitarist but due to the fact that I never practice, which is my own fault, I'm not as good as I can be. I'm an average guitarist but I think I've got it there to be good. If I sit there and practice licks I can do them. There's no problem with it but unfortunately when you get onstage and you've also got the responsibility of fronting a big band and being the lead singer and all that, the main thing you want to do is get the show on the road and get it good. The actual guitar playing goes down the tubes a bit.

Goldmine: Do you play more with the new band?

Roy Wood: I will do as time goes on. What we've done up till now is purely get a show together, mainly of the old hits, and we've interspersed a lot of new stuff in between that. I still haven't used the new band to their full potential because there's a lot of talent in the band. the two girls, the twins, they sing really well and I'd like to get them to the front of the stage to strut their stuff and do a song on their own. Then I could step back and play guitar. It's an 11-piece band with seven girls.

Goldmine: You were reduced to a trio for the "Brontosaurus" session with Jeff Lynne helping out. Was that more in the direction that you wanted the band to follow?

Roy Wood: Yeah, definitely. I can't remember much about the actual recording session except it was the first song Jeff Lynne played on with us. I remember that. We did a BBC television thing which was the predecessor to a program called The Old Grey Whistle Test.

We had to go on and do "Brontosaurus" and we had a rehearsal and we were all in the dressing room and I had this long sort of coat which was made of black and white triangles of material. I was a bit nervous. It was the first time I'd ever been the lead singer on TV properly.

I was thinking that it was time for a new image. The guys went to the bar and I put this jacket on and it looked like there was something missing that should have went with the jacket. So I got my comb and I combed my hair out so it looked really wild. I went down to the makeup department and borrowed some black and white makeup and I made my face up to match the coat with triangles around the eyes and I put a star in the middle of my forehead and this was the creation of the Wizzard image really but I did it then.

When we did the program I started rolling around the floor and biting the neck off my guitar and all that as you do. (laughs) To begin with I didn't feel comfortable doing it but I had a few large vodkas before I went on so I was all right. We had a great reaction from that. Up until the breakup of the Move that was the image that we portrayed.

Goldmine: Didn't your makeup inspire KISS?

Roy Wood: It was a great thing, really. When we eventually toured with Wizzard in America we did a few gigs supporting KISS and I did this radio interview; me and Gene Simmons did the interview together. I think it was in Detroit or something like that and he actually admitted on the air that they had been influenced by my makeup to get the band on the road, which I thought was nice of him to say in public.

Goldmine: Did it take a lot of pressure off you as a songwriter and musician when you brought Jeff Lynne into the Move?

Roy Wood: It did, really, yeah. How ELO got started was myself and Jeff had been talking about ELO for a long time before that and we were recording the album message From The Country and Jeff had come up with a skeleton idea for "10538 (Overture)." He'd just got the beginning to it. We got to grips with that. We actually put a backing track down to that. It was me, Jeff, Bev Bevan and Rick Price. We put it down as a Move backing track but then Rick and Bev went home and Jeff and myself were in the studio working out ideas.

I'd been to a music shop about a week before and bought a cello. That was when I started collecting instruments. It was like a Chinese copy of a cello (laughs). It was sort of yellowy in color but it sounded really good. It didn't sound like a sweet, mellow cello, especially the way I was playing it. I was doing all these Jimi Hendrix riffs on it. It sounded really quite wild. I was just sort of messing about as they were playing the tape back in the control room. Jeff said, "Oh, yeah, put some of those on." So I ended up putting loads of them on and it sounded like an orchestra. That's how the whole thing started.

Goldmine: When you were doing the Looking On album, did you and Jeff want to finish the Move so you could get started with ELO?

Roy Wood: More or less, yeah. I think Looking On and Message From The Country were the end of an era. The only reason that Jeff actually joined the Move was so we could be under the same roof and get ELO together and I don't think Jeff would have wanted to do any more albums with the Move.

Goldmine: "It Wasn't My Idea To Dance" has definite elements of ELO on it.

Roy Wood: Yeah, I think I played oboe on that one, if I remember correctly.

Goldmine: Do you have a large collection of instruments today?

Roy Wood: Yeah, I've got quite a few. Most are in storage and I don't get a chance to play them. The first time we went out onstage with the new band I was playing bad pipes on stage. That works really well.

Goldmine: "Feel So Good" is a real interesting song from the Looking On album. It's very funky. Who are the female singers on it?

Roy Wood: Oh, yeah, that was Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold. That was another instance where the other guy had gone home. In fact, myself and Jeff started that track off. We were just messing around 'cause all the gear was still set up and Jeff played drums on that and I played bass. We put the drums and bass on that first and just added things as we went along and it worked really well. It's a different way of working.

Goldmine: Was the album cover your idea?

Roy Wood: With the bald heads?

Goldmine: Yeah.

Roy Wood: No, it was a photograph that the record company had for years that was actually going to be used for the Move years before that. We didn't really have much of a say in it. They just put it on there. It was all right.

Goldmine: How much live work did the Move do with Jeff Lynne?

Roy Wood: Not that much. It was coming to its end then. When Jeff first joined we went to Ireland and did a tour there. When we got back we were mainly doing festivals and all that sort of stuff. We did Reading and other summer festivals.

Goldmine: Do you have a favorite Roy wood/Jeff Lynne collaboration from your Move days?

Roy Wood: Oh, dear. Basically, we collaborated on quite a few things but because of our publishing situation it usually went down on the sleeve as a Roy Wood or Jeff Lynne song. I don't remember any tracks that were written together. There was one of Jeff's called "The Minister" that I liked a lot, which we worked on together. "Ella James" was one of mine that we worked on together.

Goldmine: Do you like the Message From The Country album?

Roy Wood: Yeah. Well I like it a lot more than Shazam, put it that way. It was probably the best one that we ever did.

Goldmine: You mentioned the Beatles a while back as a big early influence on your writing. Did you ever have any involvement with them?

Roy Wood: In those days I probably met them once or twice but only just to shake hands and say hello. I couldn't say that I knew them very well.

Goldmine: Along with Jeff Lynne, the Move recorded a few final singles including "Tonight" which I read a while ago was your favorite Move song.

Roy Wood: Not all the time. My favorite Move track of all time is "Blackberry Way." But I did like it, and "Chinatown" was good as well.

Goldmine: The last Move single was "California Man," which has echoes of all your '50s heroes.

Roy Wood: I just felt it was time for Jeff and myself to rock 'n' roll. His favorite artist at that time was Jerry Lee Lewis and mine was Little Richard, so I thought, I'm gonna write a rock 'n' roll song, which is what I did, and we treated it that way. It was like one singer meets another singer and it worked out all right.

Goldmine: Did you like Cheap Trick's version of "California Man"?

Roy Wood: I did like it. I like Cheap Trick, they're a good band. They're good friends of mine. I played in Phoenix with them, as well in an open air gig, and it was great. I really enjoyed it. it was in '79, probably. I was just on holiday and I happened to see that they were around and I met up with them. it was great, it was a good gig. Myself and Rick Nielsen did a bit of guitar battle and we did a bit of "Brontosaurus" and we did "California Man." I joined in on a couple of their songs and it worked great.

Goldmine: They also covered "Rock And Roll Tonight."

Roy Wood: It was interesting. I think it could have been slightly better, actually, but it was still all right.

Goldmine: The creation of ELO harkens back in sound several years with "Cherry Blossom Clinic." Do you regret that you kept the Move going longer?

Roy Wood: I think I did, really. I had the idea for ELO. The first album that we did with the original "Cherry Blossom Clinic" and a few other songs that had strings, I thought wouldn't it be great to get a band together and instead of advertising for a guitarist, advertise for a french horn player or a cellist 'cause there must be young people around that play those instruments that like rock 'n' roll. I thought of it back then but it just took so long to bring it to fruition. I felt even then that the only way I could do it was with someone else's help. That person happened to be Jeff, who I rated very highly.

Goldmine: I understand that for the first ELO album there were times that you were in the studio overdubbing 20 different cello parts.

Roy Wood: Oh, yeah, I did loads of that (laughs).

Goldmine: What ELO was doing at the start was very innovative and revolutionary. Did some people second guess the band's direction?

Roy Wood: Even EMI wasn't sure, to be honest. They only agreed to let us release an album under the name of ELO if we did another Move album. At that time we were working on Message From The Country, more or less at the same time. Obviously, you could hear influences on both and that's obviously why.

Goldmine: I understand at the early ELO gigs you had problems amplifying the cellos.

Roy Wood: Oh, yeah. In those days you couldn't get Barcus Berry violins and you couldn't get electric stuff like that. We amplified the cellos using those sort of microphones that the army uses, those throat mikes. It's a microphone that fits around your throat and you use it in the field.

We got a couple of those and jammed them down the bridge of the cello and amplified them that way. They were like contact mikes but obviously if you turned them up too loud they used to whistle and feedback and all that. It got really difficult because Bev as a drummer was used to playing loud with the Move. So the rhythm section ended up being quite loud and a lot of times you couldn't hear the strings enough.

Goldmine: How did audiences react to such a new sound?

Roy Wood: They didn't know what to make of it to start with. I think the first gig we ever did was "Barbarellas" in Birmingham. It was a big nightclub and actually most of the people in the audience were from other bands and just wanted to see what we were up to, what was going on. They were all saying afterwards what a weird atmosphere it was. It was quite an electric atmosphere, really.

Goldmine: At what point did you realize it was best for you to leave ELO and form Wizzard?

Roy Wood: It's difficult to explain. We had a few problems within ELO, which I personally think were caused by the management. There was a lot of political stuff going on which caused myself and Jeff to have big differences of opinion about a lot of stuff. I swore that after playing in the early Move and going through all that stuff where we weren't speaking and not getting on very well, I didn't want to play in a band with that atmosphere anymore. I basically left ELO while we were still friends and before it went any further.

Goldmine: Did you like ELO's music after you left the group?

Roy Wood: Yeah, I did. It was different to what I would have done. I followed the band up until Jeff left, actually. I still followed what they were doing and bought their albums.

Goldmine: Tell me about forming Wizzard.

Roy Wood: I like a band with a lot of people, which is why I have that now. Wizzard, I think there was one day when I was playing on the second ELO album and I was playing bass on a song and something happened and we all had a bit of a difference of opinion so I walked out of the session. I knew that some friends of mine were playing at a studio down the road, Air Studios, which was Rick Price. He was in a band called Mongrel that was doing a session down there.

I went down to visit them and said, "Would you be interested in getting a band together?" And they said yeah. So it all sort of went on from there. When people found out that I was getting a new band together they offered me (laughs) ... Our first gig ever was at Wembley Stadium. I accepted. Also on the bill was Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley. I mean, everyone who's anyone. It was a totally brilliant show to be on. I don't know why we were on it, to be perfectly honest.

Of course, the rest of the guys in the band, the biggest gig that they had ever done was just local halls and that. Then to go to Wembley Stadium, it was real brown trousers time. It went over really well. The place was full of Hell's Angels and rockers and at least we didn't get any cans or bottles thrown at us. We went down really well. The two saxophone players in Wizzard had only joined a few days before so they were playing off the dots, reading the music.

So it didn't look too obvious they put the music down on the stage and were playing off that. Of course, the wind sort of swept up and the music was flying around in mid air and they were trying to play off it. You had to be there. It was quite funny.

Goldmine: Wizzard was a different band at times. You could be very commercial and then be very avant-garde and experimental. Was that your aim behind Wizzard, that the band could explore any musical style?

Roy Wood: Yeah, I think so. I think I've always been a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde in that respect. I always feel that you should keep singles as commercial as possible so that the people can walk down the road and whistle a song. But on the other hand on albums I think you can afford to show people what you can do.

Goldmine: Your singles with Wizzard took the Phil Spector Wall Of Sound another step. Was that your intention?

Roy Wood: I wanted Wizzard, when we first started, to be a rock 'n' roll band because I didn't want to form another band like ELO because we would have always been in opposition to each other and people would have always been comparing the two. So that's why I consciously went for something different. When we first started the band we had two drummers, two saxophone players, two cellists and a rhythm section and I thought, what the hell can I do with this sound? I thought instantly of saxes and strings and whatever and I thought rock 'n' roll Spector, it's got to be Spector. What's what I based the first few songs on and then it branched out into other things after that.

Goldmine: A lot of people described Wizzard as being like a traveling rock 'n' roll circus.

Roy Wood: It was a bit, yeah. We had the roadies dressed as gorillas, that was pretty good (laughs).

Goldmine: What are some of your favorite Wizzard hits?

Roy Wood: Well, I think my favorite one of all was the Christmas song ("I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday") because I felt like I had succeeded in bringing a Disney image to sound, to a rock 'n' roll record, which is what I was after, and it worked really well. If you listen to that record now you can hear that we really were having fun doing it. Great fun, that record.

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to get EMI to re-release it. It's played to death on the radio every year but it's not in the shops. They re-released it twice and it got in the Top 20 both times.

Goldmine: Wizzard's Brew was perhaps your most experimental album.

Roy Wood: It was probably a bit too experimental. I think the record company wanted us to get in the studio too soon. We should have had more experience on stage.

Goldmine: How do you rate the Mustard album?

Roy Wood: It was all right. In fact, I haven't heard it for years. I do know that I enjoyed doing that record.

Goldmine: At what point did you record your solo album Boulders?

Roy Wood: Actually, it was recorded in '69 and it was ready for release in 1970. The other members, mainly Jeff and Bev, didn't want it to be released because the Move were bringing out an album as well. They didn't want the two to clash so it had to wait and was put on the shelf.

Goldmine: I love "Song Of Praise." It that you doing the kids' voices with a varispeed?

Roy Wood: Yeah (laughs). Mister cheat of the year.

Goldmine: Do you like Boulders?

Roy Wood: By the time it was released, I was bored with it, to be honest. It felt really old to me...I wanted to do some new stuff then.

Goldmine: Can you understand why people cite it as one of your best records?

Roy Wood: No (laughs). Some of it's all right. Obviously, when you've completed something there's always something that you wish you changed. There was quite a lot on there that I would have wanted to change. I got it more right with Mustard, I think.

Goldmine: Was it difficult maintaining your objectivity for an album like Boulders, where you wrote all the songs, played all the instruments and produced?

Roy Wood: Yes, I suppose so. In retrospect it probably was difficult to be objective. Even though I was working on my own I had some good engineers. Alan Parsons did quite a lot of engineering on that and he's a really good guy to work with. You need to work with an engineer who's not afraid to say what he thinks. If it's a load of rubbish he should say that. You get more ideas that way.

Goldmine: Were you happy with your front cover self-portrait on Boulders?

Roy Wood: I didn't get a chance to finish it.

Goldmine: The hair's finished.

Roy Wood: (laughs) The rest of it is still in pencil. I didn't even get a chance to do it in ink (laughs). The photos inside were taken at Abbey Road Studios.

Goldmine: You were asked to write songs for Elvis Presley, right?

Roy Wood: Yeah, that's right. Elvis was with the same publishing company that I was with, called Carlin Music. I had a message come through a guy called Freddie Bienstock, who was the head of Carlin Music in London, and he had actually met up with Elvis and Elvis had heard some of my songs. I think I must have been in Wizzard at the time and he said, "Well, does he want to submit a couple of songs, is he interested?"

I spoke to this guy about it and said, "Before I do I would really like to see him live onstage now, so I don't write another 'Hound Dog,'" which is something he didn't want. The stuff that I loved of Elvis was his early stuff. At the time Wizzard was working a lot and recording a lot and it was set up that I was supposed to go see him in Lake Tahoe and he became ill after that and that was the end of it, really.

Goldmine: Did you ever write any songs for Elvis?

Roy Wood: I had a load of ideas with him in mind.

Goldmine: Wasn't the Eddy And The Falcons album supposed to be more lavish in terms of different musical styles explored on each side?

Roy Wood: We wanted to do a rock 'n' roll album and a jazz album and put them in a double cover. We recorded about four of the jass ones and it worked out really well. But then when the record company heard part of the album that we were doing with the rock 'n' roll stuff, they said this is the one we want. Jazz in those days was like, play jazz and starve. So that's why it came out as eddy And The Falcons, it came out as a rocker.

Goldmine: You only toured once in America with Wizzard. Why do you feel you never cracked the U.S. market with the Move and Wizzard?

Roy Wood: It was both the record company and management. The record company was never behind us. Because Wizzard was very successful in England at the time, the management also managed ELO and they thought, 'We'll put ELO over in the States and work on them over there and keep Wizzard over here to hit the charts over here.' I think that's why Wizzard suffered in a way.

Goldmine: You played sax on the Beach Boys' 15 Big Ones album. How did that come about?

Roy Wood: It was brilliant. It all started off, I released a record called "Forever." It was a solo record. On part of it I tried to sound like the Beach Boys and I gave Brian Wilson a credit on the label to say I was influenced by him. He was doing a record review page in a journal in Santa Monica. He actually reviewed the record and he gave it a great review. He thought it was great.

One day I was actually over there and the telephone rang at the hotel and it was him! (laughs) "Hi, Roy, it's Brian." I nearly fainted 'cause he's one of my all-time heroes. He invited me up to this house. We arrived and I went with the bass player from the band, Rick Price. We were supposed to meet one of the ladies from Warner Brothers.

When we arrived at the front gate, the two Wilson girls came to the gate and they were singing "Forever" in harmony. It was totally brilliant and they sort of escorted me up to the house singing this song. We waited for almost an hour and we were talking to the lady from the record company and Brian Wilson wasn't around.

It was an unsuccessful meeting. But then a couple of weeks later, I didn't realize it but he'd been working again with the Beach Boys. He hadn't worked with them for awhile. The 15 Big Ones album was a bit of a secret job that they were doing. He rant and invited me down to the studio. In fact we had a load of interviews that day and we were a bit late going.

I went down and a couple of other guys in the band went and when we arrived at the Brother Studios they were coming out. They were going home. Brian says, "Oh, play him this thing!" And they opened the car door and put this tape on of the backing track to "It's O.K." It was really great. He said, "Do you like it?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "C'mon." They all unlocked the studio again and started it all up again.

So it was great. I did this one bit where I was actually standing at the microphone next to Carl Wilson and Brian Wilson, singing with them. I just couldn't believe it. The people that I'd admired all these years. It was brilliant.

Goldmine: Tell me about the Wizzo band.

Roy Wood: After Wizzard I had quite a bad time with management and all that stuff and not being able to record and all this. I spent a lot of time hanging around studios engineering and doing that side of it. I think the Super Active Wizzo album came out. I'd been doing some tracks in secret that nobody knew about and I'd been getting some stuff on the shelf. I wanted to form a band that was a jazz-rock band. Instead of jazz players coming into the rock era, going the other way, rock musicians playing jazz.

The only time that we ever appeared together is when we did a TV show that I've never ever got a copy of, called Sight And Sound. It was BBC-TV and it was also put out on Radio One in stereo at the same time. For that I actually got a big band together with a 14-piece horn section on it. That worked really well. The record company was saying, "Come back when you've written another 'See My Baby Jive.'" They weren't bothered about it at all.

Goldmine: On the Road Again is a good album. I can't think of a better person to play drums on "Keep Your Hands On The Wheel" than John Bonham.

Roy Wood: John was a very good friend of mine. We used to live in the same area. In fact, I was working down at Rockfield Studios in Wales and John and Robert (Plant) came in. They were rehearsing down at Clearwell Castle with Zeppelin, which was only just down the road from the studio.

They were looking to record a new album and they came in to see what the studio was like because they'd never recorded there before. I think I was working on that track at the time and I think I played drums myself on the album. I got my kit set up and John was messing around on the kit and I said, "Do you fancy having a go on this one?" And he said all right and we just went for it, it was great.

Goldmine: You once said he was the most talented musician you've ever worked with.

Roy Wood: Yeah, my two favorite musicians at that time were John Bonham and Frank Zappa.

Goldmine: At that point nothing was heard from you, apart from 1979's On the Road Again album, for a long time. What happened?

Roy Wood: (laughs) I got disillusioned with it all and I sort of gave up, really. I used to do odd sessions with people and did some engineering and all that just for something to do. I more or less retired for a while, I suppose. I was still writing songs. I managed to build myself a recording studio as well during that time. I wired it up and did all the things myself. That took a bit of time.

Goldmine: You did do some work with the Helicopters and released the solo songs "Green Glass Windows" and "Rock City."

Roy Wood: That's right. I did a bit of work with Renaissance at the time. I produced an album for Annie Haslam called Annie In Wonderland. Around about that time I was talking to John Camp, who was the bass player in Renaissance and he said, "Why don't we get a part-time band together and do a few colleges and that?" That's what I did, really. The reason nothing really happened with Helicopters is because we didn't take it seriously. All the rest of the guys played in other bands anyway and we had to wait for people to be free to play and all that. It was just a way of getting on stage and doing something.

Goldmine: You returned in 1985 with the Starting Up album. It seemed you were pretty obsessed with cars at the time.

Roy Wood: (laughs) It just happened that I had a few songs on the shelf that were all sort of connected to cars and I put them all together. Some of the songs on the album were okay but I was a bit disappointed with the finished product. When I recorded it I recorded it in UB40's studio in Birmingham, I didn't use Dolbys because I felt that it sounded warmer with Dolbys to have a big of analog tape hiss on it. It sort of suited it, I suppose.

But then when the record company came to cut the album they put Dolbys on it and to me it made it sound all digitized and electronic and horrible. To me, it took the warmth out of it and I can't actually listen to it anymore. But some of the songs are okay. "Raining In The City" I quite like. "Red Cars" is all right and "Starting Up" was okay as well, I suppose.

Goldmine: Didn't you write with Jeff Lynne a little while ago?

Roy Wood: At the time I was staying at his house socially and we were just messing around, really. I played him this idea for a song that I'd had, which eventually ended up as a song called "Me And You." I played him the tune for the verse and all that. He said, "Well, I'll throw a few bits in." And we ended up writing it together and recording it. It turned out well.

He also had a guy staying with him named Richard Dodd, who actually recorded the Traveling Wilburys and he's a great engineer. It turned out well and we stayed up one night and wrote another song that we thought we could do as a single and stick it on the B-side. It was called "Get What You Want." "Me And You" is an out-and-out pop song and "Get What you Want" sounds like an old skiffle number (laughs).

Goldmine: Any chance of working further with Jeff?

Roy Wood: I really don't know. He's now moved to L.A. and I haven't actually seen him in a long time. It's possible. Jeff gets so busy nowadays. I don't know what's going to happen to the tracks. I couldn't get anybody interested in it.

Goldmine: What prompted you to get back out on the boards and perform live again?

Roy Wood: A couple of reasons. I was bored with doing nothing and just being stuck in the studio all the time. I was beginning to feel a bit claustrophobic. Someone asked me to do a charity concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, which is quite a big venue. I said yes and put the phone down and forgot all about the fact that I hadn't got a band (laughs). So I phoned a few friends, a couple of guys I knew that I had played with before in a band called the Poor Boys, the bass player and the drummer, who became the basic rhythm section.

I knew one of the girls who is in the brass section. She's a trumpet player. I sent to see her and asked her if she could help me get a brass section together. She said, "How about all girls?" And I said, "That sounds good."

I had my reservations about it because I didn't know how good they were gonna be. They came along to a rehearsal and they blew me away. They were unbelievable. They stripped all the paint off the walls, they were that good. They also play in a couple of jazz orchestras, the Midland Youth Jazz Orchestra and The Warsaw Jazz Orchestra. They play Chick Corea stuff and Pat Metheny. They're very, very good musicians. They're young, in their early twenties. We've got two trombonists now. The new girl is only 17. She's still taking her exams at college.

Up until now it's just gone out under my name and now it's gonna be called the Roy Wood Big Band. As I mentioned before, we still do some of the old hits, the Move and Wizzard material, because people who come to see me expect me to play that. Because I'd grown bored with it over the years I'd rearranged it all with the horns in mind. We've got a six-piece horn section, there's two saxes, two trombones, two trumpets. I put a load of horn parts in the old stuff and it works really well. Things like "I Can Hear The Grass Grow," that riff sounds great with a horn section. I do "Forever." The last time we played was Christmas so we do the Christmas record, "See My Baby Jive," "Angel Fingers." "Ballpark Incident" sounds good with a big horn section.

Goldmine: Who's in the new band?

Roy Wood: There's me, I play guitar and bagpipes and occasionally soprano sax. We've got drums, bass - he's a very good singer and he actually helps me out with the vocals. There's a tenor sax player, who is the only guy (laughs) and the rest of them are girls. There's seven girls. We've got the Naylor twins, who've got loads of talent. They both do vocal backing and the one twin does all the keyboards.

Then we've got the Hughes sisters, Sue and Penny Hughes, and Sue plays trombone and Penny plays baritone sax. There's another trombonist called Helen Miller, she's the young one, she's only 17. Two trumpet players, Karen Blackmore and Kay Henderson, who are just totally brilliant. All the brass girls do vocal backing well. It's quite a big sound when it all gets going.

Goldmine: Tell me about the new material.

Roy Wood: The new material I'd written just before we got the band together, really more with a solo project in mind. But since then I'd added horn parts to it. It sounds all right. It's still rock music and still commercial songs in a way but probably the rhythm section is a bit more on the heavy side, a bit more heavy rockish.

There's one called "Boadicea" which is an out-and-out rock 'n' roll song. It's about a guy who used to fight in Boadicea's army. He really fancied Boadicea and he was trying to put her on the straight and narrow and stop her from killing people and all that (laughs), so she'd be a better person. But at the end of the day all he was interested in was trying to get her in the back of the tent. It's one of those sort of songs.

There's another song called "Lion's Heart," which is more of a heavy rock sort of thing, with a bit of guitar in there. There's another one called "If This Love Is Magic," which is another pop song.

Goldmine: Are you planning on doing a new album with this band?

Roy Wood: I have been trying to get record companies interested in giving me a contract but I've had no luck yet, which is why I wanted to do more gigs, more live material. But hopefully we'll be in the studio soon doing something.

Goldmine: Do you have much unreleased material spanning your whole career in the can?

Roy Wood: Well, I always tried not to leave spare tracks hanging about, really, because record companies can be a bit vicious at times. If your contract is coming to an end they might end up throwing out a pile of rubbish. But there is still an unreleased album that we did with Wizzard, but that is still owned by Don Arden. I think he might be waiting for me to be tied to the railway lines and run over and then they'll probably release and it'll be a big hit.

Goldmine: One a sad note, most recently your cherished Red Stratocaster from the Move days was stolen.

Roy Wood: It's a 1958 Strat. We were playing with the new band just before Christmas in a place called Oldham, which is near Manchester. We left the tour bus to go and get something to eat and when we came back the tour bus had been broken into and all the instruments were stolen. We hadn't got them back as yet.

We hear that it was a drug-related thing. They just took it for drugs. But I felt more sorry for the girls in the band that lost all their brass instruments because they are just ordinary girls. They can't afford to buy new instruments. At least I was in the fortunate position that I could go out and buy a new guitar, even though it wouldn't be the same. So far they've retrieved empty keyboard cases, but that's it. (If anyone has any information about Wood's 1958 Red Stratocaster and/or the rest of the band's instruments, please write to Goldmine. All information will be kept strictly confidential.)

Goldmine: You mentioned earlier that Frank Zappa was one of your favorite musicians. Did you have any contact with him?

Roy Wood: No, I met him once. He came to Birmingham and played here with the Mothers Of Invention. I used to love them because it really appealed to me that a couple of guys used to play with Stan Kenton and all that, that jazz element appealed to me quite a lot. At least Zappa had the courage to stand up and do it, which I admired a lot. After the show I got to meet him. I was slightly disappointed because I thought he might be, from his image, a bit wild and a bit of a maniac. He was actually a shrewd business guy. He was standing there with his briefcase and his suit on. (laughs) I was a bit disappointed.

Goldmine: Have you had any contact with any of the members of the Move?

Roy Wood: I saw Bev last week. We played together last weekend. It was a party for the guy who plays bass in my band. It was a birthday party and we all got up and played together. Bev's got a part-time band together called Belch, which is Bev Bevan, Tony Iommi, Jasper Carrot and the bass player from my band. I played with them. We did a load of rock 'n' roll things and then I got up and played some of my own stuff as well.

I haven't seen Ace for years and I don't particularly want to. Trevor is still playing around the Midlands circuit. He's got a new band together and they're supposed to be very good, they've a blues band. I haven't seen him for ages. I speak to Rick Price on the phone occasionally. he doesn't live in Birmingham anymore. Carl I occasionally speak to on the phone. He lives in London now and he's in a musical in London called Blood Brothers. In fact, Nick Pentelow, who played sax in Wizzard, is in the orchestra for that.

� 1994 Goldmine Magazine

Transcribed by Lynn Hoskins