April 11, 1997 GOLDMINE #436
10cc :
A Pure Injection Of Pop
Original
Article By Dave Thompson
Chapter Eight
: Strawberry Studios South… Now You’re Dorking!!!
October,
1975, saw Justin Hayward and John Lodge take a break from the Moody Blues and
chart with Blue Guitar, a song which featured the members of 10cc as
both producers and accompanying
musicians. Then, the following month, 10cc re-emerged in their own right with Art For Art’s Sake,
their seventh British Top Ten entry (but a lowly #83 in
“[Phonogram]
wanted a single out in
It was not
the band’s greatest ever record; many fans actually preferred the B-side, a
non-album ballad called Get It While You Can, which itself would
reappear later as Anonymous Alcoholics on 1978’s Bloody Tourists
album. Unfortunately, however, it proved an all too accurate introduction to
the new album, How Dare You. The four writers in the band had always
naturally gravitated into two distinct schools of thought (Godley/Creme and
Gouldman/Stewart), with the most entertaining results usually occurring when
they swapped partners. Throughout How Dare You, however, the once
healthy friction between the pairs was becoming uncomfortable. The band were
evidently struggling for ideas, and while a handful of tracks (notably I
Wanna Rule The World and I’m Mandy Fly Me – another hit single) did
bear repeated listening, the collection as a whole showed 10cc to be suffering
from an acute dearth of inspiration.
Creme
himself admitted the title track itself was “three or four” years old, “it was
on experiment we tried, which somehow worked its way into that song.” There
again, Lazy Days sneaked into the soundtrack of the soft porn epic Emmanuelle
2, so obviously 10cc were doing something right!
Their live
credentials, too, came under sustained assault when it was revealed that not
only were they incapable of reproducing several of the greatest hits (The
Dean And I and I’m Not In Love) live, without resorting to a ton of
tapes, the new album, too, was utterly unsuited to the concert environment. Iceberg,
one of the better tracks on the set, was hastily dropped from the show, but
bootleg evidence suggests that even the songs that did remain were on very
dodgy ground. The band’s appearance on Don Kirshner’s Rock Show in early
1976, for instance, offers up very shaky renditions of Don’t Hang Up and
Head Room, alongside a studio heavy I’m Not In Love, and a simple
mindless thrash through Art For Art’s Sake.
Neither
were the band members impervious to this abuse; indeed, further damage was done
when Eric Stewart, enraged by a scathing review in the New Musical Express,
wrote an indignant letter to the editor, which of course was duly published in
all its apparent spoiled brat glory. As another magazine, Street Life remarked,
“it was predictable that [NME] would allow the reviewer equal space to
reply, and so make Stewart’s impassioned outburst look rather silly. The NME
always has the last word.” Band interviews from the time appeared as strained
as their music.
“I
remember a conversation with Lol in the
front office of the studio,” Gouldman recalls. “We’d just recorded I’m Mandy
Fly Me and we’d almost finished recording it. Eric and I were really
pleased with it; we thought it was just really good. But Lol was, sort of,
mewing about it, ya’ know, like ‘Is this the direction we should be going in?
Was it interesting enough? And, was it music? And was it this?’ And, I thought,
‘What are you talking about?’ For me, the seeds of doubt were planted then;
that this was leading to some inevitability; that the end was nigh.”
It was, in
October, under the banner headline, “We’re Not In Love,” the now defunct
British rock weekly National Rock Star reported that Godley and Creme
had left the band to work on a “revolutionary new instrument they have invented
and developed.” This, of course, was the Gismo, and while the duo’s initial intention
was to simply record a single which would showcase the Gismo’s many talents, by
Christmas the project had become a triple album telling the story of “man’s
last defence against an irate nature” – Consequences. The pair had
already begun work on this ambitious
project before announcing their departure. “I heard the first side of [it] as
they were doing it,” Eric Stewart remarked at the time. “Just before the split,
and that was the last thing I really wanted to know about what they were
doing.” Later, he would admit, “If you must know, I thought Consequences
was absolute rubbish. I think Graham and I held them in check when they were in
the band, and when they left… I don’t know, they just lost control.”
Gouldman
and Stewart, meanwhile, decided to carry on as 10cc (rumours that Moody Justin
Hayward was set to join them proved unfounded), and having moved their base of
operations down to the recently completed Strawberry South studio in Dorking,
leaving the Strawberry studio with drummer Paul Burgess. “We read everywhere
that the creative side [of the band] had gone,” Stewart complained to Melody
Maker, “and everyone brought us down. We were the commercial ones, we were
looked down on because we weren’t stuck in a garret in
Well, they
certainly proved they were still commercial. The Things We Do For Love,
the truncated line-up’s first single, appeared in time for Christmas 1976 – a
pleasant pop romp which reached #2 in Britain, #5 in America, and joyously
previewed the early 1977 release of their new album, Deceptive Bends, a
set which itself duplicated the single in proving totally innocuous to all but
the most cynical palate. Gouldman willingly concedes this point. “I’m very
proud of the early period, and I understand why the earlier period is the
definitive 10cc,” he admits today. “In a way there were always two main writing
teams, so there were already two separate teams, but of course it was the
combination of the four of us. Kevin and
I wrote a song called The Sacro-Iliac, which I think is a charming
little piece, Lol and I wrote Worst Band In The World. There was that
chemical thing, you can’t get it back. I listen to the records, and I
understand why it was so great and why it was different. When Kevin and Lol
left, it was a blow, an artistic blow and although we carried on and we had
hits, and some tracks show all the humour and imagination and style of the
early 10cc, we lost Kevin and Lol’s abstract, bizarre attitude, and there was
nothing we could do about it.”
While Deceptive
Bends was the commercially most successful of these releases, making the
Top Ten and spawning a second trans-Atlantic hit single, Good Morning Judge,
Consequences was by far the most adventurous, and was thereby truer to the
original intentions of 10cc, intentions which Godley and Creme would continue
fulfilling over much of the next decade. Several themes from Consequences,
meantime, have resurfaced in the most unexpected places – cigarette
commercials, TV incidental music and so on, but though sales for the actual
album were at least respectable, pushing it to a peak at #52, Mercury
eventually issued a single album drawing together the most popular moments from
the original six sides, a venture remarkably similar to the white label
promotion album released just prior to the original release. In commercial
terms, the, 10cc would remain the kings of the castle. In early spring, 1977,
10cc, complemented by Tony O’Malley (keyboards), Stuart Tosh (drums) and Rick
Fenn (guitar), undertook a major tour, later captured for posterity on the Live
And Let Live double package. A particularly unsatisfying venture, the album
merely duplicated all but one track from Deceptive Bends, peppering the
remainder of the show with “highlights” from the original line-up’s repertoire
– all Stewart/Gouldman compositions, naturally. It was a sad indication of how
far the band’s standards had declined : expecting fans to fork out for the same
songs twice in less than eight months was pure and simple exploitation, and the
album’s chart placing was deservedly low.
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… |