Fanable Collector: A personal insight into the psychology of a record-collecting completist (Part 2)

In a previous blog I briefly outlined the mindset of being an excessive record collecting completist using myself as a case study. That particular article contained some of the extreme and excessive lengths I have gone through on a general level when it comes to collecting music by particular artists. What I thought I would do in this blog is write a brief but more detailed account of my most recent music completist (and some would argue obsessive) activity concerning the British rock band The Move who were active in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I had liked The Move since my early teenage years after buying a 10-track cassette (The Greatest Hits Vol. 1) in my local Woolworths shop in my home town of Loughborough. The cassette was on the budget Pickwick record label and I bought it because it only cost 99p. (In fact, I bought dozens of budget albums at Woolworths in the early 1980s including many Pickwick compilation cassettes and many vinyl records on the MFP [Music for Pleasure] record label mainly because they were priced £1.99 or less and the same price as 12” singles at the time). I had only ever heard a few songs by The Move on BBC Radio 1 (my preferred music station in my teenage years) including ‘Flowers In The Rain’, ‘Fire Brigade’, and ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’. Because the cassette featured all three of these songs I bought it on impulse and was not disappointed.

Over the years, the albums that I had on cassette and vinyl were slowly replaced by CDs but The Move’s greatest hits LP was one of the few that slipped through the cracks and which I never got on CD – until about a six weeks ago. As ever, the buying of the CD was an impulse purchase following a ‘You might like…’ recommendation from Amazon. I had just bought a couple of ‘glam rock’ CDs and (as Amazon always do) I got a personal recommendation that I might like The Move’s greatest hits CD because I had bought greatest hits CDs by T-Rex and Slade.

The album that I was recommended was Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of The Move, a 21-track LP featuring all their singles and released earlier this year (“magnetic waves of sound” is one of the lyrics from ‘I Can Hear The Grass Grow’ in case you were wondering). I bought it not only because it contained all the 10 tracks that were on my Pickwick label cassette that I bought in the early 1980s, but also because it had an accompanying DVD of many rare performances of The Move on TV from the late 1960s. I ordered the 2-disc set and as soon as it arrived I uploaded it onto my i-Pod and played it repeatedly for the next few days. In fact, I played it three or four times a day for the following week. I absolutely loved it – despite the mixture of different song styles from four different line-ups of the band during the 1967-1972 era.

I haven’t got time to go into the history of the band but most fans of the band tend to differentiate between the line-up featuring Carl Wayne as lead singer (with all the original songs being written by Roy Wood) and the later incarnation after Carl Wayne had left and was replaced by Jeff Lynne (who shared songwriting and lead vocal duties with Roy Wood). Roy Wood and drummer Bev Bevan were the only two in all the different line-ups over the years.

Within a few days of playing the CD, my thirst for The Move was unquenchable. After just four days listening to the ‘best of’ album on repeat, I ordered all four of The Move’s back catalogue studio LPs – Move (1968), Shazam (1970), Looking On (1970), and Message From The Country (1971). Not only were all four albums still available but all had recently been re-released in ‘deluxe’ and remastered editions with many extra discs’ worth of unreleased material including dozens of tracks from BBC radio sessions over the years. The four albums soon arrived and I had eight new discs of music to gorge myself on. They arrived just before I went on my family holiday to the Canary Islands so I had lots of time (without work) to listen to the music on the plane, by the pool, while I was reading, and in when going to bed (I always listen to a couple of LPs in bed every night before I go to sleep).

While I was on holiday I was reading lots of online articles about The Move while listening to their albums. It was at this point that I decided that I had to have every track they’ve ever recorded in my collection (irrespective of whether I like the songs or not). This is one of the worst things about being an avid collector and song completist. I simply have to have every note – good or bad – that has been recorded by the band (including live albums). I soon found out that The Move had only released two live albums (Something Else From The Move and Live At The Fillmore 1969) so I ordered those while I was on holiday (and they were waiting for me on my doormat when I arrived back home). Thankfully, both of these feature lots of songs that are not on any of their four albums and they also happened to be a great band when playing live (but I didn’t know that until after I’d ordered). There was also an LP of session tracks they recorded for the BBC (the unimaginatively titled BBC Sessions) but thankfully all of those tracks (and more) were included as extras on the deluxe editions of their studio LPs (which I already had). Good job too because it sells for hundreds of pounds on sites like Amazon and eBay.

Finally, there were two anthology box sets. The first one (Movements, issued in 1998) was a 3-disc set, but again, all the rare tracks on that set featured in the extras of the more recently remastered deluxe edition versions of their studio LPs (so I decided I didn’t need to get that). However, a more recent 4-disc box set (The Move Anthology 1966-1972, issued in 2008) had lots of tracks and alternate versions of songs that weren’t available anywhere else and exclusive to this particular CD boxset. I went online and found various online websites selling it secondhand for exorbitant prices (around £125; I’d managed to get all the other seven albums for around £80 in total). I would have gladly paid the price for such an overpriced item (and that is another downside of being a completist – we will pay over the odds to complete our collections – even if there is just one or two tracks that I don’t own), but thankfully I found a secondhand set on Discogs for just over £30. Bargain! I quickly ordered it (“only one copy left”) and had it in my possession within 36 hours of ordering. In the space of about three weeks I had completed my collection of everything The Move had legally and commercially produced.

But a completist collectors never end there. We then start to track down illegal bootlegs (typically online but also at various record fairs around the country). We seek out rarer and rarer items and build up a kind of tolerance that can never be totally satisfied until in the possession of new recorded material. I only managed to locate five bootlegs by The Move and there were no tracks on them that didn’t feature in the albums already owned (so I wasn’t tempted to buy any of them – other completists have to own all recorded output irrespective of whether they already have the tracks in question). I then went onto YouTube and found some rare live performances which I converted into MP3s to make my own unofficial rare bootleg LP collection of The Move live. But that still didn’t satisfy my thirst for material by The Move. I wanted more.

Much of the reading I did online about The Move during my summer holiday featured quite a lot on the 1970-1972 period (when Jeff Lynne joined) where there were actually two bands in operation simultaneously – The Move and the embryonic Electric Light Orchestra (ELO). As a child (11-12 years old) I loved E.L.O. and had bought their Discovery album on cassette because I loved the track ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ (and still do to be honest). However, I never realized in my early teens that Jeff Lynne had been in the later line-ups of The Move. Given that the Electric Light Orchestra were actually The Move in all but name at the beginning of the 1970s, I also ended up buying a 2-CD collection called The Harvest Years (a new copy for just £6) featuring all of the tracks on the first two ELO albums (The Electric Light Orchestra and ELO 2) plus dozens of extra outtakes and b-sides. ELO’s mission statement was to produce ‘symphonic’ rock fusing elements of classical music and instrumentation (cellos, violins, etc.) into the rock genre. In fact, the only reason The Move still existed as a band was because they were contractually obligated by their record company to produce two more albums. In reality, Wood and Lynne’s only aim was to get ELO up and running and the first ELO album was recorded at the same time as the last album by The Move. ELO’s first hit single (‘10538 Overture’) was originally recorded as a Move b-side. The Move’s last top ten hit single (‘California Man’) crossed over with ELO’s first top ten hit single in the British charts and had identical core line-ups (Wood, Lynne and Bevan).

 

I then found out that Jeff Lynne and Roy Wood had been friends for years in Birmingham where they both lived and served their musical apprenticeships. In fact, The Move had recorded a demo version of ‘Blackberry Way’ (their only No.1 hit in the UK) in Lynne’s homemade studio while he was lead singer in his own band (The Idle Race). Roy Wood had also asked Lynne to join The Move in 1969 but Lynne felt he could still get somewhere with his own band. The Idle Race were also one of the first bands to perform a cover version of a song by The Move – ‘Here We Go Round The Lemon Tree’). This led me to buying a secondhand copy of the complete (2-CD) recorded works of everything by The Idle Race ever commercially released (Back To The Story) for just £5. Bargain!

But my thirst for Move-related music didn’t end there. I then found out that there were various tracks that Roy Wood had written during his tenure with The Move and Electric Light Orchestra (Mk.1) and that ended up on his subsequent LPs (most noticeably his Boulders album). I subsequently bought Boulders as part of a £10 Roy Wood 5-CD boxset also featuring LPs by his next band Wizzard as well as ELO’s first LP and The Move’s final LP (both of which I already had but £10 for three new albums seemed good value to me). I then bought a ‘greatest hits’ CD of Roy Wood and Wizzard (for a couple of quid).

As I write this, for the last two weeks, I’ve been slowly buying up the rest of ELO’s album back catalogue. For the best part of three decades, ELO were one of my guilty pleasures as I had quite a few of their late 1970s albums on my iPod (as well their Light Years greatest hits collection). I now have all the albums ELO recorded in the 1970s as well as the most recent (2015) platinum-selling Alone In The Universe. I managed to get all of these for less than £20 in total. Bargain! However, whether I will end up being an ELO completist remains to be seen. A lot of their post-1980 output is not something I can honestly say I like. But who knows? As I said above, one of the worst things about being a completist is buying music that we don’t like but collect just to complete our collections. With ELO, it’s definitely a case of ‘Watch this space’.

Dr. Mark Griffiths, Professor of Behavioural Addiction, International Gaming Research Unit, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Further reading

Brumbeat (2017). The Move. Located at: http://www.brumbeat.net/move.htm

Paytress, M. (2008). Liner notes in book included in the 4-CD The Move Anthology 1966-1972. Salvo/Fly Records.

Van der Kiste, J. (2014). Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra – Before and After. Stroud: Fonthill Media.

Van der Kiste, J. (2014). Roy Wood: The Move, Wizzard and Beyond. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Wikipedia (2017). Carl Wayne. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wayne

Wikipedia (2017). Electric Light Orchestra. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra

Wikipedia (2017). Jeff Lynne. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Lynne

Wikipedia (2017). Roy Wood. Located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Wood

Wikipedia (2017). The Move. Located at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Move