10cc: "The Things We Do For Love"--The Singles Collection: Part II

Here is Part Two of my liner notes to PolyGram's never-released 10cc compilation, The Things We Do For Love-The Singles Collection. (Part One appeared in the February issue.) As with Part One, it includes quotes from all four 10cc members, which have never before appeared in print.

After the foursome finished "Donna," Stewart brought that song and "Waterfall" to music mogul Jonathan King, head of the new label UK Records, who had made a failed attempt to woo the Mindbenders way back when. "I played him both of the songs that we had," Stewart recalls, "and he said, '"Donna"'s a smash.' The name of the band came through that meeting as well. He said, 'What's the name of the group?' I said, 'We haven't got a name.' He said, 'I had a dream last night and I saw the words "10cc" over Wembley Stadium, "the biggest band in the world."'" Afterwards, King, in typically flamboyant fashion, invented the better-known, X-rated explanation of the group's name.

After "Donna" raced to #2 on the UK charts, 10cc's follow-up, "Johnny Don't Do It," surprisingly, missed the charts entirely. To some, it may have looked like this new group would go the way of Hotlegs. However, the bad timing of the parody was a major factor. The genuine article, the Shangri-Las' "Leader Of The Pack," was re-released at the same time as 10cc's single and blasted 10cc off the charts. "Ironic, isn't it?" observes Gouldman. "To be honest, we followed a pastiche with a pastiche, and maybe that wasn't such a great idea. But I loved 'Johnny Don't Do It,' it was a great record."

Following the failure of "Johnny Don't Do It," 10cc quickly came up with one of the most memorable songs of its career: "Rubber Bullets." In an era when the singles medium had suddenly become uncool, "Rubber Bullets" burst forth with a gloriously compressed sound that validated all the Beach Boys comparisons that critics were making of the group. To borrow the slogan for a deodorant of the time, it was strong enough for AM, but made for FM.

Although "Rubber Bullets" was 10cc's first American chartmaker, gaining heavy airplay on album-rock stations, it was not heard on official British radio at all, thanks to a ban by the BBC. The ban was due to the controversy at the time over the British Army's use of rubber bullets in Northern Ireland. Fortunately, it did not prevent the song from making #1 on the British charts. Jonathan King quipped, "It is a milestone in British record history, because it went to Number One with hardly anybody noticing."

Gouldman says that, BBC assumptions aside, "That song was inspired by the film Angels With Dirty Faces. It's a song that Kev and Lol started off, and they couldn't quite get it finished. In fact, I remember them playing it for me and Eric, and they had these fantastic chords-absolutely brilliant-and I volunteered to finish it off for them. I do remember writing that brilliant couplet, 'We've all got balls and brains/But some's got balls and chains.' I'm rather proud of that."

One of the great mysteries of 10cc is why Kevin Godley did not sing on any of the group's A-sides, especially since all the other members consider him the best vocalist. Godley had to wait until his solo career as one-half of Godley & Creme before his undeniably commercial voice was featured on a single. When asked about this apparent disparity, Godley is modest and philosophical: "If you go back and think about it-think about it in terms of a 'Pop Group' with a capital 'P'-what a pop group requires more than anything else is a lead singer who looks great. I wasn't 'looking great' material. I looked better as a drummer than I did as a singer, unfortunately." That's as may be; compared with other Seventies idols, Godley looked positively godlike. "Well, that's sweet of you to say that," he says, " but another thing to take into consideration is that I was quite shy and I wasn't particularly into being a lead vocalist. I mean, I suppose I did feel that I had the best voice, but I didn't want to push it. I was happier being part of a four-man unit."

"The Dean And I" came out in the fall of '73, at the same time as the group's first album, 10cc, and was another British Top Ten. Penned by Godley and Creme, its melody and storyline were more complex than anything the group had done before, but the hooks were still irresistible. It also made the best use of "meows" since the Godz' ESP-label classic "White Cat Heat." "We were into the kitschiness of the old American musicals," Godley explains, "but, when you put that through your own system and stuff comes out of the other end, it won't come out sounding exactly the same. It'll have your own identity." So they were eating "South Pacific" and shitting "The Dean And I"? "That's precisely what it was," Godley confirms. "But it didn't go through the ass, it went through the brain." Eric Stewart has a slightly different take on "The Dean And I." "Honestly," he says, "I hated that song. I swear, I used to hate musicals like 'South Pacific,' and when we were doing it in the studio, I said, 'You can't do it, guys.'"

"Later," Stewart adds, "I grew to love it!"

When 10cc released its first single of 1974, "The Worst Band In The World," as with "Rubber Bullets," it got flak from the BBC, but this time for what it didn't sing. In the first line, Gouldman sings, "We don't give a Š" Although he never actually sang the word that one might expect to come next, the implication was clear. As a result, the group had to cut a special radio version in which Gouldman filled the unseemly gap by changing the lyric to, "We don't give up." Unfortunately, by then, radio had given up, and the disc died a commercial death.

In the summer of '74, 10cc released its second album, Sheet Music. The previous year's tours paid off in the U.S., where the album reached #81 in three months on the charts, despite the lack of a hit single. "When we got to do Sheet Music," Stewart says, "we had a completely open palette. We said, 'We've got to do exactly what everyone feels they want to do.' We wrote in different teams on that album, more than we ever did after or before. We just split ranks; I wrote with Kevin and I wrote with Lol, et cetera. It was a hell of a mixture, but I think, seriously, apart from The Original Soundtrack, that was our best album." Godley agrees that Sheet Music was, artistically, an important album for 10cc. "When we did that album, we were just on a roll," he says. "We were probably at the height of our writing powers and we just let the stuff come out."

At the height of their powers individually or as a group? "Both, quite frankly," Godley says. "Everybody was very, very in tune at that particular moment in time....Subconsiously, we were thinking, 'It's our second album; it has to be absolutely brilliant, in every sense of the word. We have to show what we're capable of doing, not just in terms of producing commercial singles, but in terms of producing great music.' We just set out to do it, and we did it."

While the first single from Sheet Music ,"Wall Street Shuffle," restored the group to the Top Ten in England, in America it only shuffled up to #103 on Billboard's Bubbling Under chart. Lol Creme got the idea for the song while the group was riding a limo through Manhattan. While its crunchy guitars defied the image of 10cc as lightweights, its catchy melody stopped well short of self-indulgence. Eric Stewart recalls that the follow-up, "Silly Love," put a new twist on a timeworn concept: "I said to Lol, 'Let's write a song,' and Lol went, 'Let's make it a silly song. We can write a love song, but let's make it a silly love song.' Then McCartney later came up with 'Silly Love Songs' as well!" "Silly Love" only made it to #24 in the U.K., but Sheet Music did well, hitting #9.

In early '75, 10cc parted ways with UK Records to sign with a major label, Phonogram (now PolyGram). A new album, The Original Soundtrack, soon followed, and with it the British hit "Life Is A Minestrone." While "Minestrone" was a buoyant pop suite in the group's established mold, it did nothing to prepare listeners for the stunner that followed, "I'm Not In Love." Much has been written about that song's groundbreaking use of technology, particularly its hundreds of overdubs, but little has been told of its emotional genesis. Stewart reveals the intimate details for the first time: "It came about directly because of a situation that I was involved in at the time, when somebody actually said to me, 'Why don't you say you love me?' I said, 'Because if I keep saying it every day, it really isn't going to mean anything to you. "IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou." What's the point of keeping on saying it? I'll say it when I truly feel it.'

"Graham and I were gonna write a love song," Stewart continues, "and I said, 'What about a song called "I'm Not In Love"? But it will be a love song, because we'll give all the reasons why you're so hopelessly involved with this person that it is an obsession. You are in love, but you don't want to say it.' It was just a trip I was going through at the time." Correcting himself, he says, "A silly phase I was going through."

The female voice was that of Strawberry Studios secretary Kathy Redfern. "Originally, Lol wanted to do it as a whisper," Stewart explains. "We said, 'Now, hold on. We should really get a girl to do it.' And we shouted, 'Kathy!' She became a star in Manchester, from doing that; it's a piece of history for her." "I'm Not In Love" was a piece of history for 10cc as well, topping charts worldwide and becoming a musical blueprint for some artists' entire careers.

______________________________________________________

To reach any other page contained in this month's update on Fufkin.com, read the home page for the appropriate link and click on it. You can also search the site from any page using the search box located at the top of each page. Merely type in the word, phrase, name of the band, recording, name of the Fufkin writer that you are looking for or Whatever in the search box, and then click on "Search". If you would like to e-mail us, go to the About Us page for a list of e-mail addresses.

Go back to the home page by clicking here

______________________________________________________