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Blackberry Way — The Move
When I first heard “Blackberry Way” by The Move, I imagined it had been recorded in an underground club on the Left Bank in Paris.
It felt to me like half a dozen blokes wearing black polo neck sweaters, smoking Gauloises, were performing it…perhaps with a couple of women smoking long, thin cigars and drinking Crème de Menthe, looking like extras from the film “Cabaret”, in the background.
In fairness, I didn’t have much else to go on. I’m guessing my first encounter with “Blackberry Way” was some time in the late 1970s when my dad was driving me to school — before then, in common with most Brits at that time — he didn’t have a radio in his car.
This was before YouTube, social media, pop music videos, MTV and all the visual merchandising we take for granted with pop music nowadays. None of those would be invented for a few decades yet. All I had to go on was the sound coming out the tinny dashboard speaker (singular) in my dad’s rattly old Hillman Hunter.
And that was a bleak, dark sound, albeit with hints of gothic avant-garde about it. The vocal was strange too…strained and plaintive for the most part, it seemed to me.
It wasn’t even that “Blackberry Way” was a current hit, or I might have seen the group on Top of the Pops…pretty much the only mainstream pop music TV show in those days…it was…
