10cc ~ The Rule Breakers

'most of our inspiration comes in Italian restaurants' says Lol Creme.

Publication Unknown circa late 1976 pp. 18-19
Author Unknown

FOR many decades the acceptable way to compose a song was to write the verses and a chorus and place somewhere in the middle an eight-bar passage known, logically enough, as the middle eight, to break up the monotony and add a bit more interest to the song. Once sure way to make an impact on the music scene is to do something different and 10 c.c. certainly did just that by breaking every rule in the book and giving free rein to their imaginations.

1975 was, without a doubt, their year. During the course of it they achieved three sell-out tours, two in Britain and one in Europe, a best-selling album, The Original Soundtrack and two hit singles, Life Is A Minestrone and the amazing I'm Not In Love, a song which topped most music polls as the best single of the year and finally established 10 c.c. not only as superb musicians but also as songwriting craftsmen of the highest calibre.

Every member of the band writes and each one is completely different in his style and way of seeing things and one thing which gives 10 c.c.'s songs a unique flavour is the way the various members of the band swop writing partners and constantly come up with fresh, different ideas.

Usually they write in combinations of two, so that while Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman wrote Wall Street Shuffle, Eric paired up with Kevin Godley to write Oh Effendi from the Sheet Music album. Eric explained how that came about.

"The Oh Effendi track was written by Kevin and myself in one afternoon. It was the first time we'd written together. He came up to my house and we said, 'What shall we write?' and I said, 'I've got this riff' and he said, 'I've got this line about a man on a four wheel drive oasis'. Which was crazy but it worked. The oil crisis was on at the time. It was a kind of anti rip-off song."

CARTOON

A comparison is often drawn between 10 c.c.'s lyrics and cartoon imagery. The characters in their songs are so well drawn you can almost see them. This isn't surprising when you consider that both Lol Creme and Kevin Godley studied cartoon drawing at art school and it's not too big a step for intelligent writers to put into words what they see on paper.

Guitarist Lol and drummer Kevin had played together in a number of groups and sessions before they met up with guitarist Eric Stewart. Both Eric and bass player Graham Gouldman are ex- members of the Mindbenders and it's Graham who is probably the most experienced songwriter in the band. He wrote a long string of hits including For Your Love for the Yardbirds, and Bus Stop and Look Through Any Window for the Hollies, but Graham was the last addition to 10 c.c.

Eric had helped to set up Strawberry Studios at Stockport, still the band's 'home' and now a successful business used by many other bands and singers. "It's got so busy now, we have to book ourselves in," said Eric. McCartney has been known to drop in for a 'blow' with the band. "He plays piano, we play guitar. He's tremendous, an incredible writer."

When Kevin and Lol joined Eric at Strawberry they came up with a massive No. 1 hit, Neanderthal Man which they recorded under the name Hotlegs. A tour with the Moody Blues followed and they then retreated back to Strawberry picking up Graham on the way, messed around for a bit and came up with Donna, a parody of all the fifties heartbreak songs. Jonathan King recorded it, called them 10 c.c. and a breath of fresh air blasted through the rock business.

It sounds easy but it wasn't and they all admit that they have to concentrate to write well.

"We get little starts on the road but we only really get down to it in the studio," said Lol. "It's concentrated hard work because we use everything we write. We haven't got a single thing to spare. If we don't like it the first time, we re-write it and we're very critical and honest with each other, we slag each other to death."

DUSTBIN

"I stand there for hours trying to put a solo down," said Eric, "and when I finish and I look round and nobody's smiling, I think 'okay, do it again' and I keep on doing it until everybody's smiling."

And where do the ideas come from?

"Most of our inspiration comes in Italian restaurants," said Lol. That must be where Life is a Minestrone was born!

"It wasn't actually. The true story is, me and Eric wer driving home from the studio listening to the radio and I could have sworn this guy sang 'Life is a minestrone'. He hadn't, but it kind of played on my mind and I thought, that's a great idea, a kind of hotch-potch. By the time we got home we had the four lines. As it happens, I hate minestrone and I love lasagne but it wouldn't work the other way!"

In the way that one thing leads to another, another song was spawned while they were writing Minestrone. It was The Second Sitting for the Last Supper, from The Original Soundtrack.

"We had this middle eight bit," said Lol, "Eric had a chord sequence and I started singing 'another fishead in the dustbin' and we were thinking what to call Minestrone. We came up with Second Calling for the Second Sitting of the Last Supper. Then we thought, no, that's too good, let's save it. The mood of that title was out of character with Minestrone."

Listening to Minestrone and I'm Not In Love is the best advert for the light and shade of 10 c.c. which is why it's impossible to slot them into a handy musical pigeonhole. It was Eric who wrote I'm Not In Love.

"I wrote it with Graham, but I'm not in love with him! It would be nice to think we wrote a great song but it gave us a lot of trouble." "We recorded it once," added Lol "and it wasn't right. There was something wrong in the structure of the writing. Eric was really depressed by the whole thing. When he first played it on guitar, there was something about it and I thought 'I bet we've got a new single here' but when it was finished the middle bit was all words, harmony vocals and a no-no tune. So I brought in the axe, chopped a whole bit out and suggested the 'big boys don't cry' bit."

"It's not consciously about anybody," said Eric. "Subconsciously, maybe, because I have these dizzy spells! It was just that one line really, 'I'm not in love'. I thought, a lot of people reverse things, we do when we're writing. Here's a man who says 'I'm not in love' but he is."

Why did he decide to write it with Graham?

"It didn't have to be Graham. Sometimes one of us has a riff, a few chords or a line and we ask the others if they've got any ideas and someone usually has."

Above, l-r: Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman. Below, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley.

Unlike a lot of their contemporary writers, the songs recorded by 10 c.c. are so stamped with their unique style that it's almost impossible for other people to cover them. Do they mind that?

"We'd like other people to do our songs but we've no choice. We write the way we write and that's it. In fact we can't really write for other people because we're not that productive. As I said, we use everything we write. I'm sorry we didn't place Old Wild Men (from Sheet Music) actually I thought that was a possible and I think I'm Not In Love could be done by almost anyone. Andy Williams could do it."

IDEAS

With four heads to put together it seems unlikely they'll run out of ideas, but Lol admitted "We have that fear every time we're going to write an album. We spend three weeks kicking out the cobwebs but something always comes up. We thought, 'How are we going to follow the first 10 c.c. album' and we were thrilled with Sheet Music. Then we thought we were really in trouble but we brought out The Original Soundtrack. Your standards have to keep going up and up and you can't rely on past successes. Of course it becomes harder and harder if you're conscientious." Now, looking at their latest album, How Dare You! one wonders how they can possibly follow that!

Because 10 c.c.'s songs are so visual, why not branch out into musicals?

"We'd like to get involved in film music and a musical is something we were talking about a few weeks ago," said Lol. "We looked at some of our songs and they follow a story. A guy falls for Donna. To pull her, he builds himself up with Dynamic Tension, and so on.

"In fact, One Night In Paris which is one half of the Original Soundtrack would make a good film. It started off 20 minutes long. Soundtrack was originally going to be a double album with One Night In Paris as one album. But we thought it would be too badly weighted so we cut out tons of it and finally got it down to eight and a half minutes. It's a story really. We're waiting for someone to say 'Go on, complete it' and we'll make it into a film."

Between them they play a fantastic number of instruments including the Gizmo, an extension to the guitar, which they developed with some Manchester University students. Visually and musically they're crowd-pullers and diverse enough to surprise even their most faithful followers, switching from the frenetic Rubber Bullets to the haunting Somewhere in Hollywood so that you can hardly believe it's the same four guys.

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