MOR is less say Eric and
Graham to Tim Lott

SOUNDS 7 may 1977 p. 21
By Tim Lott

YOU'RE expecting a hatchet job, of course.

It would be easy fun. 10cc, already considered by many the doyens of boringold-fartdom, are set-up, media barb-fodder. For a start, they're over thirty, which is definitely a no-no right now. And then they've just produced an album which is further from the established 'rock' market than any they've done since the first.

What's more their defences are weakened by their halving in numbers after Lol Creme and Kevin Godley left to pursue their pioneering gizmo project.

What could be simpler than a swift, below the belt, kick-and-run?

But it all depends on perspective. Say what you will, 10cc as a four piece will be remembered as one of the most technically accomplished and compisitionally brilliant bands of their era (which still has a while to run yet). And the new 10cc album, close to the mainstream though it is, is in effect a debut for Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, something they perhaps haven't been given full credit for in the current crop of unecstatic reviews.

"I think we're due for a bit of credit, and nobody's given us that," says Graham, who sits in the semi-darkened Penthouse Suite at the Montcalm Hotel looking intense, well-scrubbed, but not particularly indignant.

"For instance, the review in SOUNDS said there were a lot of holes in 'Deceptive Bends' which is fair enough. But it has to be remembered that only two of us did it, not four. We've had a lot of pressure. We've had twice the responsibility because we've had to write twice as many songs, we've had to come up with twice the production ideas. That's been ignored a little bit.

"Yet I don't think the music has suffered. Look when Genesis lost Peter Gabriel last year. The media said, well what are they going to do now? What they did was produced albums, did a stage show, became a complete band."

Eric, who sits opposite Graham, displaying a misleadingly cynical expression, takes up the thread.

"We were left high and dry when Lol and Kevin left and we could have just given up. But so many people wrote to us saying don't throw it all away, carry on, do whatever you think is best. It was all very traumatic at the time, but as soon as we got into the studio and recorded the first few tracks — 'Good Morning Judge' and 'The Things We Do For Love', we suddenly became confident and realised we could do it ourselves so what the hell.

"I mean we're very pleased with the album. Obviously were going to miss Kev's voice on certain things and Lol's on others. But as an album — foreget about the old 10cc, it stands up against anything around.

"You might well say, and you might be right, that if Lol was there, there might have been this brilliant production idea or whatever, but Lol wasn't there anymore and it's up to us. It's like starting again. We'll still maintain the old maxim: it's got to be better than 'Deceptive Bends', the next album".

An interesting aspect of the new album is that it seems to represent a coming full circle for 10cc. In the beginning, they were considered very much a 'pop' band but infiltrated far enough into the 'rock' spectrum to play second on the bill (disastrously) to the Stones at Knebworth.

Eric: "The best album for us personally — and Graham and I agree on this — was 'Sheet Music'. That was 100 percent. After that point 10cc started to fragment so Graham and I went back to 'Sheet Music' and said let's have a look at that album and find out why it was such a good album. It was so diversified, so different in its own way, but coherent.

"Albums after that fell into a category of records that really annoyed me. Maybe you'd get three tracks that were great and another seven that were — not padding, we never padded albums — but tracks that we may not have agreed on four ways."

"You couldn't call something like 'Feel The Benefit' MOR... Could you call the Beatles MOR because they had a wide appeal?"

Of course there is a fine dividing line between pop and MOR. In an earlier interview, Graham had said that he thought that 'The Things We Do For Love' was almost MOR. Less charitable critics might say that applied to the entire album.

"No," responds Eric, bristling slightly for the first timed. "You couldn't call something like 'Feel The Benefit' MOR. Anyway the term 'Middle Of The Road' is loaded, absolutely loaded. Could you call the Beatles MOR because they had a wide appeal? It's my ambition to get an audience aged from 9 to 90, that would be amazing."

Graham: "It doesn't really worry us what people call it. I mean we just write and record for ourselves, we don't tailor anything to what we think people might like, we never have done. If it happens to be psychedelic it will be psychedelic, if it happens to be MOR it's MOR, if it's punk rock, it's punk rock."

Graham practically spits out the words "Punk rock", pronouncing them "poonk rock". There seems to be an undertone of bitterness against the new wave, which isn't entirely unexpected. In fact hearing the phrase, which seems to be a subject for revilation, Eric jumps in with a tailored condemnation.

"Punk rock is only here because people want to sell newspapers. So punk rock has been at the fore for six months or so and it doesn't mean one iota in record sales.

I try and correct him on this, citing the Damned, Clash and The Stranglers (the latter of whom are ostensibly not 'punk' which is a defunct adjective anyway, but would probably fit into Eric's terms of reference).

"No. No." he insists. "I've been into it with media people." Then digressing slightly; "We're talking about a trend which completely condescends to take over everything. There's so much violence around already. I don't want to sound like an old hippy but I was listening to the news last week and like some guy killed four chicks and some woman blinded a baby and the I thought what the hell, what's punk rock about, why this violence thing?"

This oddly disjointed statement makes me suspect perhaps Eric and Graham aren't as clued up on the new wave as they suppose. The suspicion is confirmed when both admit to having never seen a 'punk' band and clinched when Eric refers to Be-Bop Deluxe as a new wave band.

Be-Bop Deluxe?

Returning to matters closer to the heart of Eric and Graham - prima face, the reasons for Lol and Kevin's departure from the band was the gizmo. Assumedly there were other, contributing reasons.

Graham: "The gizmo was the prime reason. There was a slight musical fragmentation that started to show itself during the recording of 'How Dare You'. I think if it had been a purely musical thing we could have worked it out. But it wasn't purely musical, it was business.

"At the recording of 'How Dare You' we had a big discussion about What Is Music. We'd just recorded 'I'm Mandy' which Eric and I were pleased with, but they weren't certain whether it was right to do that type of song. I think they were musically unsatisfied, they felt the band should have been expanding in a different way.

Eric: "They were looking to extend the boundaries of music and felt that songs like 'Mandy' weren't doing that. Two members just didn't like the idea.

"But there were songs in the past that I'd recorded that I'd really hated - 'The Dean And I' for instance - but if two members really wanted to do a number, then I'd put one hundred percent into recording it.

"But it got to the state on 'How Dare You' when we were starting to say, 'listen, this is not good enough, the instrumentals on this album are just not good enough, so we were pulling apart in that way.

"So when the gizmo came along and had to be marketed they said 'well, it's going to be on the market we've got to produce an album. Do you mind sitting around for a year waiting for us and we said what the hell, what about 10cc. We've got commitments to the recording company, commitments to our public. We can't tell them to wait for a year, until you get the gizmo thing finished. So they said if that was the case then they'd have to leave the group."

That, of course, was the case, and the band became a two piece. But Eric and Graham working as a duo supplemented by drummer Paul Burgess has proved to be a transitory thing. Last week three other members were announced, transforming 10cc into a six piece, 15cc if you want to be glib about it.

The new members are Scot Stuart Tosh, ex of Pilot, who will join Burgess as the other half of the percussion section, keyboards man Tony O'Malley from Kokomo and guitarist Rick Fen, who was formerly with a Cambridge band called Gentlemen. All, except Burgess, contribute vocally and in future may contribute compositionally.

Graham: "We don't know yet if the new band will write stuff for us. Tony writes a bit but I don't know about the other guys. We're doing one thing at a time at the moment and at this moment it's going on the road.

"When we come to record then we'll deal with the writing. It would be very nice if they did write and contribute to the album. We wanted it to be a band and not Gouldman and Stewart plus."

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