10cc and I

 

In the 1970s, my relationship with pop music was simple: I watched Top of the Pops most weeks (unless it clashed with something like Space:1999), and on Sunday teatimes, we listened to the Top Forty rundown. If a record got into the charts that I liked, I could be sure to catch it on one of these two programmes. I seldom felt the need to own copies of anything, and between 1970 and 74, I had only a handful of singles bought for me, one of which was Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West’. I had no interest at all in albums, and didn’t begin to explore the format until early 1974, when I got my first contemporary pop LP – Band on the Run. (Curiously, I chose to own it on cassette, having been warned by a school friend that the vinyl LP was prone to jump). I certainly had the intention to own more: albums, particularly those by progressive rock bands, were regarded as more serious than singles, and some of the sixth form classrooms at the grammar school I attended had their walls plastered with posters of artists I’d never heard of.

My 1975 diary includes a memo page where I made a list of LPs I was planning on getting during that year. Only one of them is crossed off the list: With the Beatles. The others were all rock and prog, but I was kidding myself if I thought I’d ever really get into bands like ELP or Cream. Chart pop music was my thing, and it was a rarity for any of the so called ‘serious’ rock artists to make forays into the ‘hit parade’.

There was one band, however, who seemed to have a foot in both camps, and whose music managed to be both serious and commercial. Their albums were well regarded by critics, and their singles regularly got into the charts. During the 1970s, they were pretty well the only contemporary group whose LPs I sought out. That band was 10cc.

I’d been a fan of 10cc since their first single ‘Donna’, back in the autumn of 1972, and had kept up with their chart career ever since. When ‘Rubber Bullets’ got to number one, I even had the sheet music bought for me – but not the record itself. I didn’t, in fact, own any of 10cc’s music on vinyl until the late summer of 1974 when the single ‘Silly Love’ was released. At Christmas, it was joined by their first two LPs.

By this time, I already knew that there was no such thing as a ‘typical’ 10cc single. ‘Donna’, a doo-wop pastiche, was quite unlike ‘Rubber Bullets’ which itself was utterly unlike ‘The Dean and I’. This stylistic diversity had grown out of the band’s earlier recording activities, crafting so-called ‘bubblegum’ pop singles as part of a contract won by Graham Gouldman. The band members had all been active on the pop scene since the mid 60s, with Gouldman penning chart successes for The Yardbirds, The Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, while Eric Stewart had been promoted to lead singer of the Mindbenders following the departure of Wayne Fontana. Before 10cc, Godley, Creme and Stewart had scored a surprise international hit with 'Neanderthal Man', a song that evolved from a studio drum test and was released under the dubious name of Hotlegs. The band went on to release a solitary album, some of whose tracks had previously been recorded by Godley and Creme under the even more dubious name of Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, a Simon & Garfunkel-styled duo that never amounted to anything. It was the sheer amount and diversity of musical endeavour that had gone before them that set 10cc apart from their contemporaries.

Unlike most bands, who might run to a single songwriter or possibly a duo, 10cc was made up of four equally talented writers, who, moreover, could work in any of the possible permutations: thus, on their albums, one would find credits to Godley/ Creme, Creme/Stewart, Stewart/Gouldman, and occasional collaborations between all four members. Few other bands could work like this. Whilst Godley and Creme drew on their art school backgrounds to create challenging, occasionally experimental material, Stewart and Gouldman operated within a more commercially accessible pop sensibility. Bringing the two sides together resulted in singles like ‘Rubber Bullets’ (Creme/Gouldman/Godley) and ‘Silly Love’ (Creme/Stewart). On top of their experimentalism, Godley and Creme leaned towards broadway show tunes, as can be heard in tracks like ‘The Dean and I’, and, from their solo career, ‘Wedding Bells’. Few bands have ever brought together such diversity of talent and influences.

It was this tension between art school weirdness and solid pop song craft that made 10cc one of the most interesting bands of the 1970s. I liked melodic pop well enough, even more so when it veered off into unexpected territory, and whilst 10cc’s lyrics were a shade too sophisticated for me to understand aged around 11 or 12, I could certainly appreciate their music.

Back in 1972, I was ready to accept a single like ‘Donna’ at face value, not realising the band had is collective tongue firmly in cheek, and I was far too young to notice the sly double entendre in the opening line: ‘Oh Donna, you make me stand up'. Neither, for that matter, did the BBC. The single was helped on its way by a resurgence of interest in 50s music – Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock’ was in the charts at the same time – but when they tried another doo-wop single, ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’, they missed the charts. ‘Donna’ was like the proverbial joke that can only be told once, and henceforth, no two 10cc singles would sound quite the same – at least until the departure of Godley and Creme.

‘Rubber Bullets’ was hardly a typical 1970s pop record. Thematically, the band were looking back to the era of Elvis and ‘Jailhouse Rock’, but stylistically it was out there on its own, driven along by a curious bubbling rhythm that Kevin Godley had conjured from a primitive beat box. There was another ‘naughty’ lyric too, and this time Auntie Beeb spotted it – the couplet ‘we’ve all got balls and brains/ but some’s got balls and chains’ was excised for airplay. Quite astonishingly, ‘Rubber Bullets’ made it to number one in the charts – albeit for just one week. I’d discovered a new favourite band, even though I didn’t as yet own any of their records – just one piece of sheet music.

Sheet Music, of course, was where 10cc were going with their next album (and that title was yet another example of the band’s propensity for undergraduate humour… try saying it in a Spanish accent). It was with Sheet Music that I finally caved in and bought a 10cc record, the single ‘Silly Love’, released in August '74: but back in February, I thought the band had lost its collective marbles when I heard ‘The Worst Band in the World’ on Tony Blackburn’s morning show. To have chosen this, arguably the most unorthodox recording the band ever made, as the debut single of a new LP seemed wilfully perverse. ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’ was easier for pop fans to digest, and made number 10 in the UK singles chart in midsummer. ‘Silly Love’, a satire on pop songwriting, was just a shade too clever for its own good with its ‘clichés and toupées and threepées’, and stalled just outside the top twenty.

On the album lurked still more exotic and unusual items – ‘Hotel’, an eccentric calypso with vaguely racist leanings; ‘Clockwork Creep’, a song told from the perspective of a bomb in the hold of an airliner; and ‘Somewhere in Hollywood’, a paen to the golden age of the movies. None of these were songs that could be readily absorbed on first listening – you needed several plays, not to mention the lyric sheet and a degree in cultural studies to unpick all the references.

As the Beatles had done with the sleeve of Sergeant Pepper, so 10cc did in their lyrics. Lurking in their songs you’ll find Norman Mailer, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Lassie, Minnie Mouse, the Pope, Joe Palooka (a boxing champ from an American comic strip), Jack Kerouac (his novel, D’harma Bums is mentioned in ‘The Worst Band in the World’), Howard Hughes, Paul Getty, Rudolph Valentino and the Rothschild dynasty. These boys had certainly done some ‘reading around’. Of course, I didn’t get most of these references back then, but it was all grist to the mill. 

Sheet Music was, and still is, an extremely odd album, but I enjoyed its eccentricities even if I didn’t always know what the band were going on about (‘The Sacro-Iliac’ made a dance craze out of a pain in the back). In 1975, they followed it up with The Original Soundtrack, which included the future number one hit ‘I’m Not in Love’; a song whose genesis tells us a lot about the working methods within the band. When first presented by writers Stewart and Gouldman, in the manner of a jazzy bossa-nova, Kevin Godley refused to record it unless the band agreed to approach it in a new and original manner. His instinct proved to be correct, and the reimagined song, with its textural washes of multi-layered vocal parts, provided the band with their biggest hit.

In January 1976, 10cc released their fourth studio album, How Dare You, hard on the heels of the single ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. Stylistically, the single harked back to ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’ (in a Melody Maker interview, Gouldman referred to it as ‘the inevitable money song’) as well as recycling sections of the looped vocals from ‘I’m Not in Love’, all of which took the band to number five in the UK.

The album saw a return to the wayward eclecticism of Sheet Music, and its first side included some of the strangest waxings in the band’s career, songs that would surely prove unpalatable to all but the most dedicated fans. ‘I Wanna Rule the World’ included a manic Hitlerian speech (Creme?) and a kiddie-chorus warning the world to prepare itself for an army of ‘terrible tiny tots’ ‘sinking their milk teeth into your thighs’. Structurally, it abandoned all the conventions of songwriting: a typical pop song might comprise at most three sections, verse, chorus, middle eight. 'I Wanna Rule the World' has six: and other 10cc songs could have as many as eight...

Most of 10cc’s albums came with sleeve notes which included full instrumental breakdowns for each track, hence it was possible to deduce that some of the slippery sounds in ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ were a zither (recorded in reverse), but I was in the dark when the credits included the likes of ‘Dobro’ (which I later learned is a resonator guitar) and ‘gizmo’, which I took for an in-joke but was actually an invention of Godley and Creme.

Of all the sounds and textures that made it onto 10cc’s records, the ‘gizmo’ or ‘gizmotron’ was the strangest of the lot. The device, about the size of a cigarette packet, was screwed onto the bridge of an electric guitar and consisted of six small rollers (like those in a tape recorder), which rubbed the strings and created a continual hum, giving an organ or string-section effect. Godley and Creme attempted to market the device, and in their quest to promote it on record, ended up splitting the band. How Dare You would be the last work from the original line-up, and whilst 10cc continued with Stewart and Gouldman, producing albums including Deceptive Bends and Bloody Tourists, for me, the journey was over. The post Godley-Creme singles were fine pieces of work, but I never bought any more of their albums, and when I did get to hear them on various friends’ turntables, I could tell there was something missing. Godley and Creme had brought an edginess to the band which Stewart and Gouldman could never quite recapture, an unpredictability that, for a while, became their musical calling card.

Freed from the band, Godley and Creme embarked on the sprawling concept album Consequences, whose lavish triple LP box set format was commercial suicide, priced way beyond the means of the average pop music buyer. I certainly couldn't afford it. A friend of mine and reader of this blog managed to get a copy from the local music library that had been left in the sun and warped: ironic, really, considering the album's theme of malevolent meteorology... Consequences yielded one splendid single, 'Five O'Clock in the Morning' which again harked back to the duo's love of Broadway show tunes. In time, it was whittled down to a single album, omitting the spoken word sections and focusing on the more easily digested musical items.

With their subsequent releases, Godley and Creme strayed further and further away from the ‘weird but commercial’ realm of the original 10cc. Albums L and Freeze Frame still contained recognisable songs, but were far too smart for their own good. At times, the duo’s delight in experimentation could go a little too far for my liking: ‘I Pity Inanimate Objects’ warped the vocal melody through a harmoniser (a studio device used to bring singers and instruments into pitch), coaxing some bizarre melismas from it a couple of decades before Cher’s vocal on ‘Life After Love’ was given the same treatment. If nothing else, they were way ahead of their time… Fortunately, they calmed down somewhat, and 1981’s ‘Ismism’ saw a return to the filmic narratives and pop/pastiche mindset of mid-period 10cc, a formula which continued on ‘Birds of Prey’, but with less commercial success.

By this time, Godley and Creme had diversified into the lucrative arena of the pop video, and as commissions from the likes of The Police, Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood ate into their time, so the songs began to dwindle. The last big hit for the duo, 'Cry' owed much of its success to the innovative face-morphing video they created to promote it, and their final LP release was 1988’s Goodbye Blue Sky. Many of their albums were unavailable on CD for a long time, but various reissues have taken care of that. Fans should also check out the 2022 release Frabjous Days which brings together all the early recordings produced under the banner of Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon, and hints at the greatness that was to come.

10cc were, in many ways, an ideal band for me: musically adventurous, literate, and disinclined to take themselves too seriously. They ventured into musical territories where other bands simply weren't allowed – having their own studio gave them the freedom to experiment without running up huge record company bills, and their working methods anticipated the move towards private studios and home recording. They could out-perform and out-think pretty well all of their contemporaries. In fact, the only things they lacked were an image and a charismatic front man, none of which made any difference to me. 10cc were a band for listening to, not looking at. Even today, I'm not sure if their unique qualities are sufficiently appreciated, and aside from a BBC4 documentary and a 1970s paperback, there's been precious little time devoted to critical appraisals of their work. I don't even know if the band members themselves realise how important they were...