Britain’s lost pop genius: the glam rocker who hated being in the spotlight

On YouTube, there are a plethora of clips of Roy Wood at the height of his fame, the years between January 1967 and December 1974 when he piloted 15 singles into the Top 10, three of them No 1s. In all of the videos, he is pretty spectacular: wearing what looks like a warped version of a medieval knight’s outfit (accessorised, for some reason with a load of chains wrapped round his neck) to perform the Move’s 1968 hit Fire Brigade on Top of the Pops; fronting Wizzard’s peerless run of glam-era hits in deranged face paint, clashing tartan and explosive, multicoloured hair. But he also appears oddly uncomfortable, even when See My Baby Jive or Angel Fingers are at No 1, their glorious, chaotic updating of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound – in which Wood’s sparkling pop hooks had to fight for space with the sound of four drummers, eight guitarists and umpteen saxophonists – outselling everything else. He keeps nervously glancing off to the side of the stage. He never looks directly into the camera, as if he thinks that ignoring it will make it go away. Roy Wood looks both like a fantastic pop star – one of those unreconstructed oddballs who wouldn’t get past reception at a major label nowadays – and someone genuinely ill at ease with the idea of being a pop star.

Perhaps that’s one reason why Wood, who turns 70 on 8 November, keeps a low profile. By all accounts, he has always been painfully shy, a temperament aggravated by the kind of miserable experience of the music industry common to artists who had the misfortune to be managed by the appalling Don Arden. (“Unfortunately, I seem to have mislaid the number for Interflora,” he mordantly remarked when his former manager died.) Wood hasn’t released an album of new music in 29 years and rarely gives interviews – Simon Reynolds’ attempts to contact him for his definitive, new history of glam, Shock and Awe, came to naught – although he pops up occasionally on TV when the time comes for Wizzard’s deathless 1973 smash I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day to make its annual appearance in the charts.

In fact, there is a sense that Wizzard’s biggest hit might have overshadowed Wood’s musical legacy. His influence has occasionally seeped into subsequent pop in some peculiar ways – not least the fact that Glen Matlock claimed the opening guitar riff of God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols was based on the Duane Eddy-inspired twang of Fire Brigade – but you never hear Wood’s name dropped as an inspiration by a hip new band. The heritage rock mags never run grand retrospective features, tracing his career from the Move, through the formation of ELO to Wizzard and his extraordinary, maverick solo albums, Boulders and Mustard, in the 1970s. He is seldom placed on a par with all the other revered idiosyncratic pop craftsmen, which is exactly where he belongs. If Todd Rundgren had come from Birmingham, if Frank Zappa could have stopped himself sneering for five minutes, they might have made records like Roy Wood. Maybe if you’re best remembered for a seasonal novelty hit, it’s hard for people to see past it. There are worse fates for a musician than to write a song so indelible that it becomes part of the fabric of national life, but Wood’s latterday image as a hirsute bringer of seasonal jollity does seem to undersell his talent quite dramatically.

Or perhaps the problem is the nature of Wood’s talent, which is incredibly hard to pin down. My favourite line about him is in Bob Stanley’s fantastic book Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop. “Roy Wood loved pop,” he wrote. “He was a superfan. He wanted to be all of pop, all at the same time.” It meant that, from the start, the music Wood made was marked by a kind of itchy restlessness, shifting and changing at a rate that was almost impossible to process. The Move started out as purveyors of tough psychedelia that, almost uniquely among their pop contemporaries, dwelt on the dark, overwhelming side of the acid experience. Wood didn’t indulge, but seemed to pick up on what was happening to their resident space cadet, bass player Ace Kefford, whose LSD experimentation played havoc with his already precarious mental state. Night of Fear, Disturbance and 1967’s peerless I Can Hear the Grass Grow prickled with anxiety, dread and nervous energy; their live show was so aggressive and violent it apparently terrified the tripping denizens of London’s UFO Club.

But they were equally wont to make records that sounded as if they were after a cushy billeting on the cabaret circuit: the parent-friendly pop of Curly and Blackberry Way, the latter a perfect example of Wood’s ability to pull a timeless melody, the kind of tune that sounds instantly familiar, out of the ether. They released homages to doo-wop, rock’n’roll and most confusingly, Wave the Flag and Stop the Train, which seemed to be a loving pastiche of the pre-psychedelic beat group sound that had only just gone out of fashion. Then they started knocking out clangorous proto-heavy metal, interspersed with mock music-hall numbers and faux country and western. It’s not all great, but huge swaths of it are. They got labelled as bandwagon-jumping dilettantes, a state of affairs not helped by their manager Tony Secunda’s penchant for headline-grabbing publicity stunts.

As it turned out, the Move’s back catalogue was just the sound of Roy Wood being Roy Wood: it was as if he just couldn’t stop the ideas gushing out, even when it was apparent that everyone else was struggling to keep up with or make sense of them. In 1972, he piloted the band’s final single, the aggressive, fuzzed-out California Man and came up with the idea of overdubbing cello after cello on to bandmate Jeff Lynne’s song 10538 Overture, until it sounded like “a monster heavy-metal orchestra”, thus birthing the idea of ELO.

He also played bass for Bo Diddley, attempted to write Britain’s Eurovision song contest entry for the MOR combo the New Seekers and formed Wizzard, who managed, thanks to Wood’s extravagant appearance, to glom on to the glam-rock movement, without really sounding anything like any other glam-rock band. Indeed, Wizzard occasionally sounded absolutely nothing like Wizzard, or at least not like the version whose songs got in the singles charts. Their debut album, Wizzard Brew, bore almost no resemblance to their singles: the 13-minute-long Meet Me at the Jailhouse opens with a heavy riff, stops dead, goes into an extended passage of unaccompanied free-sax improvisation, then turns into a kind of stomping, wilfully ungainly boogie track, replete with much nosily atonal soloing. One review described it as “sonic terrorism”. A year later, his solo album, Boulders, offered baroque pop, art rock, pastoral folk and luscious west coast harmonies.

All of pop, all at the same time – no wonder people find Wood hard to place. And sometimes, it’s hard not to think Wood’s enthusiasm might have got the better of him: his record company balked at his idea for Wizzard’s second album, a double set containing one album of 50s rock’n’roll and one of experimental jazz rock; the world probably didn’t need a collaborative single featuring Wood, Phil Lynott and Chas Hodges from Chas and Dave called We Are the Boys. More often, however, it resulted in astonishing music, from You Sure Got It Now, which gamely attempted to meld “the Andrews Sisters and John Mayall”, to Forever, a solo hit that imagined what it would be like if Neil Sedaka had joined the Beach Boys with beautiful results. Then there was the honking blare of Wizzard’s Ball Park Incident and Angel Fingers, the latter a No 1 single about the transient nature of pop fandom, a song that, metaphorically speaking, keeps glancing nervously off to the side of the stage: “Will Dion still be so important to you on your wedding day?”

He effectively ended his commercial career by forming Wizzo Band in 1977 – of all his ideas, starting a tricky jazz-rock group at the height of punk wasn’t the most timely – although he still occasionally made fantastic records. If Red Cars Are After Me (1987) suffered a bit from the production techniques of the time, it also proved Wood’s pop smarts were entirely intact. It’s a shame that he hasn’t made more music in recent decades. You can’t blame the guy for being pragmatic and recording I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day with the Wombles, but it’s hard not to think the end result might be less edifying than an album where he lets his idiosyncracies and eclecticism run riot. Still, as he reaches his 70th birthday, Wood’s is an oeuvre that’s ripe for rediscovery and reassessment: the sound of Britain’s great lost pop genius lurks just behind the familiar tinselly facade.