April 11, 1997 GOLDMINE #436
10cc :
A Pure Injection Of Pop
Original
Article By Dave Thompson
Chapter Six
: So That’s How They Got The Name…
Space
Hymns apparently
did very well in
Early in
1972, Gouldman got together with producer Eric Woolfson (later a member of the
Alan Parsons Project, and later still, an aspiring solo artist, whose 1990
album would feature contributions from Eric Stewart), to record a new solo
single, Growing Older. It was followed by a group decision that while
session work was all well and good, it was not making any of them feel
particularly fulfilled. There and then, Gouldman remembers, they made a pact.
They wanted to create ‘something good and lasting.’
“It was
Neil Sedaka’s success that did it, I think,” Gouldman reflects. “We’d just been
accepting any job we were offered and were getting really frustrated. We knew
that we were more than that, but it needed something to prod us into facing
that. We were a bit choked to think that we’d done the whole of Neil’s first
album with him just for flat session fees, when we could have been recording
our own material.” The first recording that the four made together, in the
spring of 1972, was a Stewart-Gouldman composition, Waterfall. Stewart
took an acetate of it with him when he
went to the Apple studios to master that first Sedaka album, hoping that he
could persuade Apple to release it. Months later, he received a rejection slip
saying that the song wasn’t commercial enough to be put out as a single – by
which time, Godley and Creme had come up with another song which was. Donna
was initially intended as a possible B-side to Waterfall, a
falsetto-voiced rock ‘n roll spoof.
“But we
knew it had something”, Stewart remembered, and with Waterfall having been
written off, Donna was immediately promoted to the top of the band’s
pile of potential singles. The trouble was, according to Eric, “we only knew of
one person who was mad enough to release it, and that was Jonathan King.” The
arch entrepreneur of British pop, King had known Eric since the early Sixties,
when the Mindbenders were being followed around the country by a university
student who claimed he could make them bigger than the Beatles. The band
laughed him off, “and the next thing we knew, he’d had a hit with Everyone’s
Gone To The Moon. We never saw him again.”
Since then,
King had gone from strength to bizarre strength. If an annoying novelty record
came within even sniffing distance of the charts, King was usually behind it,
whether manipulating vari-speed voices for the Piglets’ skinhead anthem Johnny
Reggae, protesting nuclear proliferation (and everything else) behind
Hedgehoppers Anonymous, or conjuring up a version of Hooked On A Feeling
that was even sillier than Blue Swede’s. Most recently, he had launched his own
label,
Stewart
called King that same day, and by evening, King was on his way to Strawberry.
“He listened to Donna and fell about laughing, saying ‘It’s fabulous, it’s a
hit.’” Stewart remembers. “So we agreed to let him release it on his
Gouldman
countered, “Mythology has it that the name 10cc came from the average male
ejaculation being 9cc, and, of course, being big, butch Mancunian guys, we’re
gonna be, ya’ know, 1cc more than that.” It took Eric Stewart to end the
speculation. “No, the name actually did come from Jonathan King. He said he’d
had a dream the night before he came up to
Initial
worries that the band would simply be dismissed as another of King’s little
jokes were dispelled when the band appeared on Top Of The Pops in
September, 1972. King had given them two alternatives: either appear wearing
their normal everyday denims, or “go the whole hog, be outrageous and appear in
polythene hot pants.” They opted for everyday wear and, as they walked into the
studio, the program’s host DJ Tony Blackburn (whose choice of Donna as a
Pick Of The Week had been instrumental in the record’s success) greeted them
with the words “Good God, you’re normal! What a great gimmick!” Donna
backed by the instrumental Hot Sun Rock (based around a track Gouldman
had had lying around for several years) reached #2 on the British chart;
immediately work began on a follow-up. In retrospect, the band admit that their
choice was a mistake. Johnny Don’t Do It was another Fifties-type song,
this time with the theme of a motorcycle accident; unfortunately the Shangri-Las’
Leader Of The Pack was reissued at the same time, and while that epic
tale of teenaged dismemberment would reach #3, Johnny Don’t Do It sank
without trace. You can have too much of a good thing.
10cc’s
third single, Rubber Bullets (backed with Waterfall), also ran
into problems, but of a very different kind. The British army had recently
started using rubber bullets in their bid to bring peace to embattled
Working
nights while the Maccas worked days, 10cc nevertheless made their presence felt
on McGear, with Godley and Creme in particular lending a hand; ever since the
Hotlegs days, they had been developing the Gismo, a device which enabled a
guitarist to achieve maximum sustain, whilst duplicating a variety of
orchestral sounds. McGear would mark the first public airing of this
ingenious device. The McCartneys returned the favour.
“We often
overlapped,” Gouldman remembers. “The studio was completely crammed with
equipment, and there was this tremendous buzz – ya’ know, Paul would come in
and we’d play him our stuff and vice versa. And I think that kind of inspired
us as well. There was just… a tremendous atmosphere.”
10cc’s own
second album was the next phase in what Stewart calls, the band’s “masterplan
to control the universe. The Sweet, Slade and Gary Glitter are all very
valuable pop, but it’s fragile because it’s so dependent on a vogue. We don’t
try to appeal to one audience, or aspire to instant stardom, we’re satisfied to
move ahead a little at a time as long as we’re always moving forward.”
Eric
Stewart In Air Gun Revelation!!! |
|
Graham
Gouldman In Wrong Studio Revelation!!! |
|
Graham
Gouldman In Songwriting Technique Exposé!!! |
|
The
Runcible Spoon… What Exactly Is It? |
|
Strawberry
Puts The ‘Hit’ In ‘Shit’!!! |
|
So
That’s How They Got The Name… |
|
A
Million Dollars Buys A |
|
Strawberry
Studios South… Now You’re Dorking!!! |
|
I Said
‘You’ve Got To Be Joking Man, It Was A Present From Me Mum’!!!! |
|
Headline
Writer In ‘Stuck For Words’ Shock!!! |
|
Sometimes
Having Wax In Your Ears Can Be A Good Thing |
|
And They
Still Don’t Give A… |