10cc

The story of 10cc is so long and convoluted that it lends itself readily to being turned into a novel, as shown by the various books written on the subject. "10cc: The Worst Band In The World", by Liam Newton, was reissued just a month ago in a revised and updated edition. Not bad for a band whose last hit dates back to 1978, but which in the UK still enjoys a ravenous cult following thanks to the tangled "behind the scenes" story surrounding it.

Currently carried forward by a heavily reshuffled lineup tasked with stoking the nostalgia factor with enviable professionalism, the 10cc that everyone remembers were the quartet who lasted from 1972 to 1976, or at most the pair they were reduced to - albeit with a few hired hands - still capable of landing hits for a couple of years after the split.

They were all singers and multi-instrumentalists, even though they carved out more or less defined roles for themselves, with Eric Stewart on guitars, Lol Creme on keyboards, Graham Gouldman on bass and Kevin Godley on drums. Lead vocals usually went to whoever had written the song, though there was often such a wealth of backing harmonies that it became hard to tell who actually had the most important part.

10cc were anything but a band born in a schoolyard, a pub or some basement. Every member was a seasoned old hand who had already tasted success, or at least rubbed shoulders with the elite of the Sixties music industry. Gouldman, in fact, was without a shadow of a doubt one of the greatest songwriters of that era: he wrote the two biggest hits for the Yardbirds ("For Your Love" and "Heart Full Of Soul", the former alone enough to upend the course of rock), the song that launched the Hollies worldwide ("Bus Stop", one of their masterpieces), the two finest songs by Herman's Hermits ("No Milk Today" and "Listen People"), and the only notable solo track by Wayne Fontana (the little orchestral gem with western overtones "Pamela, Pamela").

It was in the very band Fontana left after a couple of years of hits, the Mindbenders, that Stewart played guitar. After the leader's departure he also became their singer, taking them to the top of the Anglo-American charts with "A Groovy Kind Of Love".

Less fortunate were Godley and Creme, who tried without success to establish themselves as a pop-folk duo, but who nonetheless spent a good deal of time moving in the same circles, not least thanks to their ties with Giorgio Gomelsky, the Yardbirds' legendary manager.

After orbiting around each other for several years, Godley, Creme and Stewart formed Hotlegs, scoring an immediate smash with the single "Neanderthal Man" (number 2 in the UK in the summer of '70). Joined shortly after by Gouldman, they changed their name to 10cc.

"The Original Soundtrack" is their third album, and unquestionably their most accomplished work, whereas the first two - "10cc" and "Sheet Music" - suffered from the presence of explosive singles not always matched by adequate filler material. They certainly deserve undeniable credit for establishing and cementing their formula, but it was with "The Original Soundtrack" that the rough edges were smoothed out and their creative effort reached its peak, both in terms of song structure ("Une nuit à Paris", their longest track to date) and production (the outlandish experiment that was "I'm Not In Love").

Starting out as a band more or less affiliated with the glam rock bandwagon, thanks to songs with a choral pop feel cut through with sharp boogie guitars (think of infectious anthems like "Silly Love" or "Rubber Bullets"), 10cc soon ventured into particularly ambitious territory, where a song could run four minutes and still aim for the charts despite being packed with ideas and shifting tempos. From this point of view, they can be considered part of a sort of ideal triumvirate of radio-friendly progressive pop that defined the mid-Seventies, alongside Electric Light Orchestra and Supertramp. Of the three, 10cc were without doubt the most unhinged, so much so that today they've been somewhat forgotten by the general public, or are at best remembered as the band who sang "I'm Not In Love".

Their most famous song very nearly never saw the light of day. Written by Stewart and Gouldman as a bossa nova ballad, it was initially shelved because the other two didn't like it, and was only rescued on the condition that its original form be completely overhauled. Godley suggested scrapping the instrumental part entirely and singing it purely over a bed of voices. Not a simple a cappella track, but something that would generate a whole new concept of choral arrangement, capable of leaping over every stereotype rock music had relied on up to that point (be it the interweaving harmonies of the Beach Boys, the unison choruses of Phil Spector, the harmonies of the West Coast or beat groups, or the theatrical assaults of glam - all of them, in fact, audible to some degree in 10cc's music, whether parodied or not).

The band thus overdubbed their voices 256 times, transfiguring them into a stream of sound that was at once echoing and muffled, with so many shades and nuances that it became hard to make out its edges. Recognisably human, yet at the same time so ethereal as to raise suspicions of electronic instrumentation, the choir was also the fruit of masterful sound engineering, with the mixing desk taking centre stage, anticipating the age of sampling by several years.

The authors still wanted an instrumental backdrop, however minimal, that wouldn't overshadow the work done with the voices: Godley and Creme thus added a soft percussive sound, produced by a Moog synthesizer, while Stewart recorded an electric piano track that would go on to influence generations (think of Billy Joel's “Just The Way You Are”), as well as the lead vocal, being the most affable and romantic of the four.

Amid so much refinement, the lyrics risk being overlooked, but they're a real gem, a genuine love song in reverse: “I keep your picture upon the wall, it hides a nasty stain that's lying there, so don't ask me to give it back. I know you know it don't mean that much to me. I'm not in love, no no”.

Released as a single and played by nearly every radio station in its full-length version despite running six minutes, “I’m Not In Love” became a worldwide hit.

The rest of the album delivers worthy companions to such a classic. The opening run is nothing short of astonishing, with “Une nuit à Paris” widely regarded as the blueprint for Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It's a genuine rock operetta, eight minutes long and sung in turn by all four members of the band, each striving to create as varied a set of vocal timbres as possible in order to bring the different characters to life.

The instrumental variations range from a caricatured little march to a prog-style piano gallop (like the one that kicks in around 3'25"), while the exaggerated vocal tones and the tongue-in-cheek opening, with a tourist shopping amid the most overused clichés about Paris, hid from part of the audience the song's tragic nature, which shifts in its second part to a red-light district and ends with a policeman murdered.

The arrangement is pared right down to the bone for such an elaborate design, relying almost exclusively on piano, bass and drums – but once again it's the voices that steal the show.

To find a guitar-driven track you have to wait for "Blackmail", a sort of skewed funk rock in which Stewart unleashes his slide guitar in digressions bordering on delirium.

If "Second Sitting For The Last Supper" is a whirling hard rock number, "Life Is A Minestrone" brings them back to that crossover between surf atmospheres and glam rock grandeur that had defined many of their earliest songs. Creme drives the track with a hammering piano cadence, singing gastronomic and geographic metaphors in a collage that's maybe nonsensical, maybe a perfect portrait of the speed at which capitalism was already moving back in 1975.

Closing the album is “The Film Of My Love”, a gorgeous ballad built on the contrast between its technological arrangement (electronic percussion, syncopated electric guitar) and Gouldman's vocal performance, delivered in an old-fashioned, heart-wrenching style that harks straight back to Dean Martin's “That's Amore”. It's surely no accident that a mandolin pops up at some point.

It isn't entirely clear what led the quartet to choose the album's title. One theory points to the strong visual imagery of the lyrics, particularly on “Une nuit à Paris”, or perhaps it was simply meant to grab attention. Whatever the reason, “The Original Soundtrack” cemented 10cc's standing on the album charts too, reaching number 3 in the UK, where it spent seven months in the top twenty, and a respectable number 15 in the notoriously tough American market.

The relationship between the band's two souls — the one geared toward composition (Stewart and Gouldman) and the one devoted to deconstruction (Godley and Creme) — sadly wore thin not long after. The classic line-up's final album, “How Dare You!”, would arrive the following year, offering further proof of their irrepressible eclecticism (“Art For Art's Sake”, “Don't Hang Up”, “I'm Mandy Fly Me”).

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06/05/2018