"We're Not Trying to Incite Anybody" The Move hits back Top Pops, first edition, 1967 Interview by Marc Crossland

"Stay away from our shows - or accept us for what we are." This is Carl Wayne's angry reaction to the current controversy involving parents and adults after complaints when some of them accompanied the fans to The Move's "one-nighters".

Shocked, and, as some put it, "disgusted" by Wayne's actions on stage, a number of parents complained that his presentation of the group's material displayed "sexual overtone and an incitement to violence".

"Nobody's trying to incite anyone - and none of us would like to feel that we influence the fans to commit acts of violence," Wayne told us. "I certainly don't consider the way I put over a song as being sexually provocative, and I am not responsible for older people reading something into the act that really isn't there.

"If, as some of them say, we were exciting fans to the point of violence then surely the law would have been on to us. No performer wants that and nothing of the kind was ever intended. We're a new act with a new way of presenting our material. Sure it's different from, for instance, the Bachelors, just as Presley was never expected to present his numbers in the style of Sinatra," he said.

Wayne thought it a terrible indictment of young people for their elders to suggest they would be so easily influenced as to throw responsibility to the wind and suffer character transformation under the influence of a song.

"Of course some of the fans become uninhibited in expressing their appreciation when we perform - but then so were their mothers a few years ago in the days of Donald Peers and Johnny Ray."

To this reporter there lies the crux of the issue. It's so easy for the older generation to forget their own days of mass hysteria. I can remember the mothers of today nearly twenty years ago tearing the clothes of Messrs. Ray, Laine and Peers.

And if that isn't violence, then was is? But I don't remember anyone ever accusing those three of inciting violence.

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