Move Break-Up Planned...?

Record Mirror, December 1968

Interview with Carl by Derek Boltwood

There have been rumours. There are always rumours. This time, so the gossip goes, the Move are to split up. No denials. It's true. In about twelve or eighteen months the Move will probably be no more - and this direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Carl Wayne.

"I've heard these rumours myself" said Carl, "but as far as the near future is concerned, they're definitely untrue. If things work out as planned though, we'll probably break up in about a year and all go our separate ways."

"Well, it's not so much planned," explained Carl, "as that's what I feel is going to happen. We're going over to the States in January for a short promotional tour - and if things work out we'll probably spend a while there. Then there are a lot of other countries outside of Britain that we want to visit.

"After that," laughed Carl, "we'll return to this country with two fingers extended and thump a few of the people who have been particularly aggressive or nasty to us in recent months. Not the audiences - they've been great, as ever - but some of the people in the business who've been really obstructive. John Peel, for one, has a lot coming to him - he's always refused to play our records and once while compeering a stage show actually broke one of our discs and said: "That's what I think of the Move." I don't know why - we'd never spoken to the bloke when he started this hate campaign of his.

"A lot of people in the business seem to have put the block on us - some radio and television producers won't look at us even though we've had four hits in a row. I suppose our image of being an aggressive and difficult group has backfired on us - and it started off purely as an image. The controversy that's always surrounded us has never been really us - we're now doing our best to lose that image and just be ourselves. We're no nastier than anyone else - people just seem to think we are. And I admit that up till now we've done nothing to break that illusion.

"What does annoy me, though, as I said earlier, is when people in the business, who should know better - some of whom probably don't even know us - are not only obstructive, but also help to stir up more controversy over nothing.

"So now we're just going to be ourselves and hope people realise that we're not really monsters - though we're going to play up the old aggressive image to the full in the States. We're going over there in January, and one of the American papers - I think it was the New York Times - must have got hold of an old press handout, and ran a story saying "English Pop Villains To Tour States in January." So we're going to be as villainous and difficult as possible, because that's what they'll expect from us.

"It doesn't really matter if the image thing backfires on us in the end, as it has done here, because as I say, we seriously intend to split up in a year or so. In Britain we want to be accepted now for what we are - but in America we'll be as violent as possible. We'll be doing our old act on stage - chopping up television sets with axes - but it'll be even more violent than before. We're going to have dummies sitting round watching TV - and inside their heads will be those squeezy plastic bottles of ketchup so when we hit them with the axes the "blood" will squirt out everywhere.

"I think Britain is going to lose more and more groups to America next year - I'm not hiding the fact that if we can work there for most of 1969 we will. Everything's so much better there from what I hear - the facilities, the money. It's all on a different level - groups are respected as musicians, as being serious, not just layabouts. So you can't blame the groups for spending more and more time in America, unfortunate as it is.

"I think there are going to be less groups around next year anyway. This time last year it was virtually impossible to predict what would happen in 1968 - anyway, it's been very scrappy. There have been a lot of groups on the scene - and some very nice things have happened. But there doesn't seem to be one particular direction. The only thing that's been constant, and always will remain constant, is the pop chart. Whatever happens next year there'll still be the hard core of top twenty songs, which never seem to change - and still control the pop industry."