The Idle Race

In the history of 1960s British rock, Birmingham was a source of talent virtually in the same league with Liverpool. Although the city never produced a group as big as the Beatles, it was a seething cauldron of musical activity and home to literally hundreds of groups whose activities and memberships were in a constant state of ferment, yielding acts such as the Move, the Moody Blues, and the Electric Light Orchestra, whose influences extended well into the 1970s and beyond. Perhaps the most important of the Birmingham groups that didn't make it to the front rank was the Idle Race. The group occupies a strange focal point in the history of the city's music and, between 1960s and 1970s rock, as a link between Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders, the Move, the Electric Light Orchestra, and the Steve Gibbons Band. The Idle Race itself evolved out of one of the most promising of local early-'60s Birmingham bands, Mike Sheridan & the Nightriders, who recorded for EMI and later for Polydor and whose membership included a young Roy Wood. After the latter's exit to join the Move in 1965 and Sheridan's decision to stop performing regularly with the group, the other members -- Dave Pritchard, Greg Masters, and Roger Spencer -- tried renaming themselves the Nightriders for a time, initially with guitarist Johnny Mann (formerly of Carl Wayne & the Vikings, whose frontman also passed into the Move). Mann quit after just a few weeks and was succeeded by Jeff Lynne. The reformed Nightriders had Lynne on lead guitar and backing vocals, Roger Spencer on drums, Greg Masters on bass, and Dave Pritchard on rhythm guitar and lead vocals. By the end of 1966, however, they'd begun evolving a new, more ornate sound, vaguely similar to some of the experimental tracks that the Beatles were putting...