Move's Carl Wayne: Singer Who Couldn't Say 'I'm Sorry'

Disc and Music Echo, February 1st 1969

Interview with Carl by Penny Valentine

When he was eight years old, Carl Wayne would pack all his worldly possessions in a little paper bag and leave home. Ten minutes later, with monotonous regularity, he was back. But this early independent streak has stayed with him all his life.

Carl Wayne is an odd mixture. Strong, egotistical, charming, talkative and very worldly on the surface; underneath soft, easily destructible, a constant worrier. And yet, despite his putting down of the Move's violent image, you feel there is something burning in his personality that could snap and become uncontrollable at any moment.

"I find people have a foregone conclusion of me - that I'm very tough and hard - based on the Move's image. I find I go on the offensive to prove that I'm a person before I'm anything else. It really worries me. I mean, who wants to walk into a club and see a lot of glaring suspicious faces. I want to see people smile and be friendly."

"You know, people are always telling me I look like someone. It's ranged from Dave Dee to Alan Blakley to Ringo Starr! I like my face. Someone once said it looked like it had been lived in twice - it's better than being "pretty" good-looking. At least my face is interesting."

He likes talking about himself. At his own admission 99 per cent of his conversations resolve around the Move or Carl Wayne. Eventually he wants to go into films.

"I don't think you're a real 'star' until you're someone like Yul Brynner. I know I could act - it's in me. I mean I couldn't look in a bird's eyes and say 'I love you' very seriously and with great intensity. But I'd love to have a go at a Michael Caine or Albert Finney type of role." And, oddly, you can see a lot of the Finney North Country roughness about Wayne.

Carl Wayne says he isn't the great raver he was. His life is uncharacteristically quiet for a member of a group like the Move. He says it's a fallacy that the Move are always going out to clubs. Now that his own five year romance with the group's fan club secretary has split asunder and left him with an air of sad world-weariness, he finds his life is involved with the group 24 hours a day.

Now they have no manager Carl is the spokesman. He carries a lot of responsibility on his shrugging shoulders. "I'm the eldest and I had all that education crap so I tend to have the others leaning on me. I worry constantly. I'll phone agents and people six or seven times a day and nag them silly, although I know they'll give me the same answers all the time."

Almost to prove that under that sturdy front lies a normal human being Carl bites his finger nails down to the quick, and plays chess to calm himself. He has few friends. "I must know more people than anyone else in the world. I can nod to them in the street, but I never remember their names. But I don't trust enough people to be close friends with them.

"Trust is a great thing - in a personal relationship or just picking friends - and yet it's the hardest thing to maintain. It's a shame but that's the way life is."

His friends consist of the Move, who are like brothers to him, and a songwriter called Dave Morgan "who's really an extension of myself - I've never known two people so alike."

Carl Wayne is probably one of those fortunate people who has actually looked inside himself. He loves living, and yet he will talk about life all night and get more confused than he was before he began.

"Life," he says sadly and heavily, "is a very strange thing. I often wonder if those ordinary people who are married with kids and have a routine job aren't much happier living off the top of their heads. Never trying to work out who they are and why they tick."

He is obstinate and proud. When he was younger the word "sorry" just didn't appear in his vocabulary and it took him a long time to ever be able to blurt it out and mean it. He has an inbred North Country stubbornness, and often regrets it afterwards. The only thing that worries him as a person and the Move as a group is that people won't accept Carl Wayne for what he is.

What he is a long way from what you might think. And certainly a long way from what you expect.