Roy Wood

Roy Wood has earned recognition as one of Birmingham, England’s most significant yet unconventional rock figures, chiefly through his foundational leadership in both the Move and the Electric Light Orchestra.

Born in 1946, he began playing guitar during his early teens. The first band in which he participated that managed to issue a single was Gerry Levene & the Avengers; the group dissolved by mid-1964, after which Wood joined Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders. While with that outfit he was expelled from Moseley College of Art in 1964. Later that year he assembled the Move, whose original members included Bev Bevan on drums, Carl Wayne on lead vocals, Ace Kefford on bass, and Trevor Burton on guitar. The band secured a residency at London’s Marquee Club and began attracting a loyal audience there.

Wood supplied most of the Move’s songs and, over time, assumed many of the vocal parts as well. Their single “Night of Fear” reached number two on the U.K. charts in early 1967. Over the next three years the lineup evolved into a quartet; guitarist Jeff Lynne joined, and the group moved through psychedelic, progressive, and heavy-metal phases on albums such as Shazam, Message from the Country, and Looking On. Those releases succeeded in England yet remained virtually unknown in America. The band’s sound drew on classic rock & roll, including Duane Eddy and doo-wop influences, while also featuring Beatles-style harmonies and lyrical complexity.

By 1971 Wood’s broader ambitions could no longer be contained within a single group, so he proposed forming an offshoot of the Move called the Electric Light Orchestra. The self-titled debut appeared on the Harvest label in England, where it received strong critical praise and respectable sales, generating more serious interest than the Move had lately enjoyed. Although ELO and the Move were originally intended to operate in tandem, ELO soon supplanted the Move, which then disbanded. Wood left shortly afterward, leaving ELO to Lynne and Bevan, and formed Wizzard on his own.

Wizzard’s first single, “Ballpark Incident,” fused the Move’s hard-rock energy with a density recalling Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound productions and climbed to number six on the British charts. In April 1973 the band reached number one with “See My Baby Jive,” a success repeated by the follow-up, “Angel Fingers.” The debut album, Wizzard’s Brew, fared far less well, however, owing to its highly experimental character. The group’s fortunes as a singles act declined thereafter, partly because Wood continued issuing recordings under his own name alongside Wizzard releases. His Spector-styled “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” reached number four in England in 1973, and “Forever” made number eight the same year. Both Wizzard albums See My Baby Jive and Eddie & the Falcons proved critical and commercial disappointments; the latter’s poor reception led to the band’s dissolution. Meanwhile Wood’s solo albums Boulders (1973) and Mustard (1975) remained too idiosyncratic for broad acceptance.

The Roy Wood Story (Harvest), issued in 1976, collected his EMI recordings and performed solidly as a best-of set. His later releases On the Road (1979) and Starting Up (1987) failed to match the commercial impact of his early-1970s work, and since then Wood has ranked among the more elusive active musicians of his generation, although he continued recording into the 1990s.