Roy Wood's Wizzo Band - Life Is Wonderful
It's Sunday night, and time for one of the music of our epoch's most weird and wonderful characters to get some flowers in the rain.
This guy -- who's made it to 80 today -- is such an underrated force in everything we know as modern popular music.
There's no overstating the quantum impact the work of his group The Move had on early psychedelia; you can't make kids today understand what was not permissible until the birthday boy came along.
Perhaps the first pop figure to begin to overtly marry Rock to other kinds of music, he's surely one of the formative figures of what came to be termed Progressive Rock. And of course he sang on Jimi Hendrix's second album and -- while The Move was still on the radio and making vital music -- formed another of history's most beloved groups.
He only lasted in The Electric Light Orchestra (ELO for short) for a couple of years before -- in a story that kind of says it all about the "music industry" -- the record company decided that having he and Jeff Lynne in one group was a waste of potential revenue.
They wanted him making his own records and them lots of cash, and two top drawer songsmiths in one group wasn't caressing their bottom line quite to their liking, so rumors got circulated and tensions escalated, and before 1972 was over our hero was out and ELO was to enter a phase of commercial and artistic dominance under the guidance of Jeff Lynne.
It was after ELO that the music of today's honoree really gets into Joshy's Preferred Kind Of Weirdness territory, where his group Wizzard began to add brass instruments and Jazz leanings to the stringed, cello-tized mayhem he had started with ELO.
This culminated a few years hence with his next group, which made one LP and played precisely one gig before splitting up.
A little like what you might get if you crossed The Move with Keith Tippett's 50-piece Jazz-Rock orchestra Centipede, the Wizzo Band was a foray into fusion that I always loved since I heard it in college about 40 years ago.
Speaking of the only Wizzo concert performance, I've wanted to post this tape since I began this page 13 years ago, but it was missing a song and you know I hate that. But I finally found the missing track, included in a partial BBC rebroadcast from 2017, so today is at last the day I get to celebrate the monumental musical force of nature that was, is, and shall ever be the great Roy Wood.
Roy Wood's Wizzo Band
Paris Theatre
London, UK
2.4.1977
01 BBC introduction by Alan Black
02 Life Is Wonderful
03 Waitin' At this Door
04 French Perfume
05 California Man
06 I Should Have Known
07 Another Wrong Night
08 band introductions
09 Are You Ready to Rock?
10 Sneakin'/BBC outro
Total time: 59:09
Roy Wood - guitar, bagpipes & vocals
Rick Price - guitar & pedal steel guitar
Graham Gallery - bass
David Donovan - drums
Nick Pentelow - tenor saxophone
Mike Burney - tenor saxophone
Billy Paul - alto saxophone
Brian Crotham - baritone saxophone
Bob Wilson - trombone
Ian Royal - trumpet
Andy Peate - trumpet
Kevin Perry - trumpet
Rod Lee - trumpet
off-air analog FM capture of indeterminate origin from the JEMS archives
Track 05, which was officially released in edited form as a single in 1982 and
thus omitted from the 2016 zootype reseed seed of this, was subbed in from a 2017 BBC FM partial rebroadcast
edited, retracked & remastered for unity by EN, November 2026
378 MB FLAC/direct link
378 MB FLAC/direct link
I've got a huge project for my next birthday missive, which -- if you can believe this -- actually concerns an artist under 40 whose music is current. As in, right now and everything! Ripped from yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's headlines, in fact.
But that now is then, and this then -- where we celebrate 60+ years of Roy Wood -- is now. So happy 8-0 to the man on The Move, born this day in 1946 and always ready to Rock!--J.
