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10CC...From stone cold to cool


KiwiCoromandel

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In 1976, Manchester quartet 10cc's I'm Not In Love, ubiquitous since its release the summer before, was voted No. 1 in an all-time top 100 survey before the Beatles's Hey Jude, Simon and Garfunkle's Bridge Over Troubled Water, the Rolling Stones's Satisfaction and Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Britain's music critics, too, loved 10cc's cerebral pop. "A masterpiece of composition, performance and production", NME wrote of their self-titled 1973 debut album. By the release of 1975's The Original Soundtrack, 10cc's peers could only gaze on in awe. Queen, for one, were blown away by album-opener Une Nuit a Paris, a nine-minute pop-operatic song suite.

"It irks me now to listen to Bohemian Rhapsody," says Graham Gouldman, bassist and vocalist with 10cc.

Uniquely, the band's line-up comprised four singers, writers, producers and multi-instrumentalists. Hit singles Rubber Bullets, The Dean and I and The Wall Street Shuffle were bursting with musical ideas and dazzling wordplay. Kevin Godley, drummer with the group and, with 10cc singer-guitarist Lol Creme, one half of 1980s hitmakers Godley & Creme, believes 10cc's sleights of language lost them fans.

"If anyone used humour well in music, we did," he says. "But humour's not considered cool. The punning definitely has a cheese factor."

In those days 10cc may have been cheese personified but fast-forward 30 years and they are finally being embraced: hot new band the Feeling, who were signed to Island Records by Gouldman's son, Louis Bloom, frequently name-check them and the Flaming Lips use I'm Not in Love as their concert intro music.

Yet somehow, in their heyday, they were too clever for their own good. Take the name: they chose 10cc because the average male ejaculation is 9cc and they felt they offered just a little more. When label boss Jonathan King signed them to UK Records in 1972, they already had an impressive track record. Gouldman had written hits for the Yardbirds and the Hollies. Eric Stewart (keyboardist, guitarist and vocalist) was singer with the Mindbenders (of Groovy Kind of Love fame) before becoming a recording engineer. Gouldman and Stewart would prove to be 10cc's commercial wing; ex-art school kids Godley and Creme were its "extreme experimental wing".

So why did 10cc become rock's forgotten heroes? Godley blames their lack of a strong visual identity. "Roxy Music had a very strong 'brand image', so did Queen and punk obviously had a strong visual attitude. We never did. Every one of our stage sets was shite! We were too busy with the music."

After Godley and Creme left in November '76, Gouldman and Stewart had further success as 10cc with the melodious The Things We Do for Love and Dreadlock Holiday. Godley and Creme, meanwhile, worked on their magnum opus, Consequences. Unfortunately, it coincided with punk.

"There was a seismic paradigm shift," Godley says. "We emerged blinking into the light and everyone was wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. We'd been working on a semi-avant-garde orchestral triple album with a very drunk Peter Cook and me singing with Sarah Vaughan, while outside it was like a nuclear bomb had dropped."

For Godley and Gouldman, who have just written their first songs together (as GG/06) since the original four-piece's swansong, How Dare You!, there are some hard feelings about 10cc's reputation. "Had we not split up we would have been as big as Queen," Godley says. Gouldman adds: "Queen supported us once. They had a fabulous lightshow and we didn't. They also had a showman out front. But they sounded the same on every record. With us, every song sounded like a different band. That made it harder to pigeonhole us."

Godley reckons it's the fault of "cool". "If 10cc acted like Pete Doherty, we'd be cool. But there's a change in the way 10cc are being perceived. Maybe we can be cool after all."

source:AP

image:AP:10CC...HITMAKERS....Graham Gouldman..Lol Creme..Eric Stewart and Kevin Godley.

post-193-1163798856_thumb.jpg

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