Whilst Looking On is possibly my least favourite Move album, it was released at a pivotal time in the band's career and is therefore worthy of appraisal in my book, not least because it marks the joining together of two of my favourite rock musicians of all time, Roy Wood and Jeff Lynne, as songwriters, and marks the formation of one of pop's most underrated, and tragically, shortest, partnerships.
Under the management of the late Peter Walsh, a great man whom I was fortunate enough to get to know personally during his 1990s career as a health insurance salesman, the band's output at the turn of the Seventies was largely a game of two halves.
Impresario Peter was booking the band into cabaret venues, a world away from their early shows on the credible underground circuit where an earlier incarnation of the band gained notoriety for smashing up television sets onstage. Singer Carl Wayne had left to pursue a solo career in cabaret, leaving Roy Wood to helm the ship until the arrival of a young Jeff Lynne, who was drafted in following a successful stint in The Idle Race, having just produced their second album. Lynne's arrival came with one proviso: that the Move would evolve into a new band, Electric Light Orchestra, the earliest stirrings of which can be traced back to this album.
The Move's singles around this time varied in style from radio-friendly pop such as the lightweight 'Curly' and the irressistibly upbeat 'Tonight' to 'Brontosaurus', often credited as one of the earliest heavy metal singles. The Move's albums, however, were essays in experimentation which bore little similarity to the act seen in the hit parade. Here, new ideas could be tried out away from the cut and thrust world of the pop charts.
1970 saw The Move at their creative peak. With the songwriting burden lightened by Lynne's arrival, the band's main songwriter Roy Wood was busy completing a solo album 'Boulders', a wondrous confection on which he would write, sing and play every note himself and which would not see the light of day until 1973. With the band slimmed down to four members, and a plethora of songwriting talent waiting to be mined, it was time to re-evaluate things.
Looking On starts with the title track, a heavy metal dirge with Lynne's sweeping piano flourishes which lyrically looks forward from the band's television-smashing days ('TV looking down, I'm just looking on') and which dissolves into an extended jam around a descending chord sequence with every instrument in the studio thrown at it: sitars, Arabic pipes, wah wah guitar and a hulking great drum solo. And why not? Roy Wood could play practically any instrument he was given. It's a passable enough opener, but not the band's best song by a long chalk.
More coherent altogether is the Bev Bevan-written Turkish Tram Conductor Blues, which employs a basic rigid 12-bar structure and the same heavy metal sound with a parping coda on those Arabic pipes again. The enigmatic 'What' closes side one, and is Jeff Lynne's first composition and lead vocal on the album. It's rather long, very morose and wouldn't sound out of place on ELO's second album. Which isn't to say it's a bad song at all, in fact Roy Wood's production saves the day with a suitably doomy choir effect.
When Alice Comes Back To The Farm is something of a curio. Released as the first single after the chart topping Blackberry Way, it failed to create any impression whatsoever in the commercial world, which is something of a surprise, as the melody is certainly quite accessible, if not as catchy as its predecessor. It's followed by 'Open Up Said The World At The Door', a more uptempo Lynne composition with some great boogie-woogie piano and another blistering bin-bashing solo from Bevan, although the slow funereal coda always puts an end to my enjoyment of this track, sounding like some kind of terrifying film score and in fact quite out of place not only on this album but in Jeff Lynne's overall body of work, as it's my considered view that Jeff's best songs are the upbeat ones.
After the aforementioned 'Brontosaurus', a Lennon-esque rocker with a great bass sound best played at full volume, the album closes with 'Feel Too Good', a progressive number which, unlike the other extended tracks on this album, doesn't outstay its welcome and even throws in a couple of false endings in the form of a doo-wop masterclass (pure Wood) and a hilarious cockney pastiche with barrel piano and a lusty refrain about lettuce (pure Lynne) not to mention a choir of vocals in a repeated refrain of 'what can you do?' which sounds uncannily like Dusty Springfield.
So were the Move treading water with their third album?
Well, as a Move devotee, I think the Wood-Lynne partnership needed time to cement, because to me, Looking On lacks direction and discipline. It would only be a few months before the release of two delightful but much more mature non-album tracks in the form of 'Tonight' and 'Chinatown', followed in 1971 by the band's swansong album 'Message From The Country'. Had the Move bowed out here, they would have gone out on a real low; it's fortunate that they stuck around and made another proper album before they called it a day, because by the end of 1972 this beautiful partnership would be no more.
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