from the NYTimes–

March 28, 2002

ROCK REVIEW | ROY WOOD

Returning After 28 Years, Leading an Army of Brass

By JON PARELES

Bigger means better to Roy Wood, the English rocker whose four shows at the Village Underground were his first New York City performances since 1974. His music has always equated blare with rock ‘n’ roll bliss.

Electric guitars rang out when he led the Move in the late 1960’s; cellos took over when he founded the Electric Light Orchestra with Jeff Lynne in 1971; and saxophones and voices buttressed Wizzard, his next band. Roy Wood’s Army, the band he brought to the Village Underground, backed him with 12 musicians,
including an eight-member horn section. Most of the band members were women. Mr. Wood looked much as he did in the 1970’s, bearded with brightly dyed long hair.

Sunday’s set was a brass-pumped retrospective of Mr. Wood’s catalog from the Move to the present. Sung in his high, nervous tenor while female backup singers gestured in sync, the songs were the work of a songwriter proclaiming his love for an imagined 1950’s paradise, full of pretty girls jiving to jukebox rock, or a man in thrall to the fearful power of women’s charms. The Move’s “Fire Brigade” calls for firemen to cool him down; a newer song, “Kiss Me Goodnight, Boadicea,” begs the ancient warrior queen to “take a break from your pillage and destruction.”

The songs often harked back to grand Phil Spector marches or a swinging rockabilly two-beat, but they weren’t pure revivals; they threw in odd key changes or skipped beats, while Mr. Wood took guitar solos that swiveled their way toward brash dissonances.

Other songs took Beatles-style pop and added extra crimps. The Army also played the Move’s psychedelic artifacts “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” and “Flowers in the Rain,” which showed Mr. Wood’s ear for plant life.

With the horns hooting away, the Army came across like a mixture of a soul revue and a Las Vegas show band, conveying a skewed nostalgia. For “Are You Ready to Rock?” Mr. Wood piled on one more element: he marched onstage playing bagpipes.

Proud of his eccentricities old and new, he had clearly decided that nothing succeeds like excess.