GG: I think everything you do seeps into everything else you do. You mention that it was a useful experience. That was my brief, but actually quite useful, encounter with the bubblegum industry. I said to the guys there, "I'd like to take all the songs that I've written and record them, I'm involved in a studio back in the UK and I've got some musician friends who I'd like to work with on these tracks." They said, fine, and that went some way to bringing 10cc together. Anyway, the upshot of it was that I did it and got fed up with it.
WALL STREET SHUFFLE 10CC TOPIC PATCH
At first I was thinking it wouldn't be right for me, but then I thought, "To hell with it." I was going through a bit of a quiet patch and it was also an opportunity to work in New York, which I wanted to do. They wanted to legitimise their outfit and were talking to all kinds of different writers to work for them. Then in the late '60s I met up with some guys called Kasenetz and Katz, who had a bubblegum record label. Graham Gouldman: I was writing songs for other people during the '60s, people like The Yardbirds, Herman's Hermits, The Hollies. Graham, tell me about your experience of writing bubblegum pop prior to forming 10cc. In addition, they have been sampled by Hip Hop producers such as El-P and the late J Dilla, whose 'Workinonit' from 2006's Donuts plays fast & loose with the elastic brilliance of 'The Worst Band In The World'.ġ0cc's music endures - outside the confines of the trad canon - not because it epitomises a single aspect of mainstream rock, but because it's damn near impossible to summarise in a single paragraph, let alone a single word. Their commentary might seem laconic, even cynical, but Strawberry Studios in Stockport, their original HQ, was evidently a space where dreams and nightmares were allowed to run amok before being corralled into exquisitely crafted pop songs with disarmingly odd angles.Īlthough the group have released albums only fitfully since their '70s heyday, they still tour with sole original member, the congenial but precise Graham Gouldman, at the helm. 10cc alchemised the mundane into the uncanny, as on the gorgeous, Beatles-esque 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me' which used an airline poster as the launchpad for an adventure in a fictional dimension. This question could serve as an epigram for the group's career, during which they looked upon the human condition with a combination of prurience and bemusement. It's telling that one of 10cc's later albums, 1980's Look Hear, came with the blunt enquiry 'Are You Normal?' emblazoned on its sleeve. Bizarre near-dub experiments ('The Worst Band In The World'), interludes of music concrete ('Un Nuit De Paris', '24 Hours'), funk rock songs about common-or-garden ailments ('You've Got A Cold'), sinister confessionals from bombs planted on planes (‘Clockwork Creep’) and a recurring taboo-busting theme of money and power as the motivating factors in human activity ('The Wall Street Shuffle', 'Art For Art's Sake', ‘I Wanna Rule The World’) align 10cc not with Michael McDonald and James Taylor - but with perverse polymorphs such as Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren and Sparks. What's more, if we delve deeper into the oeuvre of the Manchester group (whose original configuration comprised Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley) we find that it's way weirder and more diverse than any one adjective can encompass, especially ‘smooth’. In addition, I can’t help thinking that if ‘smooth’ is a summertime thang, then 10cc are more autumnal, delineating a liminal space between light and dark, warm and cold, sweet and sour. But while that single wafted to the top of the charts on a cloud of multitracked vocal bliss, there's grit at its heart, a painful truth that belies its sonic perfection.
What of the heartache, the poignancy, the darkness? In other words, the stuff that keeps the listener coming back to these songs, time and time again?īritish art-pop pioneers 10cc have been namechecked as ‘smooth’ operators par excellence, largely due to the influence of their 1975 single ‘I’m Not In Love’ on the Gayngs aesthetic. It smacks of a smirky, ironic approach to pop that I simply can’t get behind, being mere shorthand for a single aspect of the music under discussion - the ease with which it is digested and absorbed. Call me a naysayer, but some of the recent talk concerning the resurgence of smoothness in popular music, inspired primarily by the slick stylings of US outfit Gayngs, just doesn't sit right with me.
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