I would say that checking out 10cc would be a superb use of your time and highly rewarding. They are one of my wife's favourite groups and she has a complete vinyl collection of their titles that I too have grown to love.
10cc were first and foremost a collection of top notch singer/songwriters -
Eric Stewart,
Graham Gouldman,
Kevin Godley and
Lol Creme. Each has a substantial set of writing credits to his name. You would be surprised to realise how many hits from the 60s were actually written by one of this quartet,
Gouldman especially so.
When they came together in the early 70s, they quickly acquired a reputation for writing and performing songs that pushed the envelope of pop music at that time. They were quirky, imaginative and quickly became a top drawer act, loved by fans and critics alike. They were great fans of late 50s US style vocal harmonies and had their
Frankie Vali routines down to a tee - they could
doo - wop like no-one else. In some ways they preceeded
Kate (and later
Queen), in showing that pop music could go in some very unexpected directions. They were also innovative in the studio, developing new techniques and better ways of doing some traditional things. Their song
I'm Not in Love demonstrates this perfectly, being a labour intensive love affair of tape loops and vocal tape texturing that provides a backing of great depth. This could have masked the emotional qualities of the song, but they took great care not to do this.
Highlights of their material are many:
Look at their run of innovative hit singles ~
Rubber Bullets,
Donna,
The Dean & I,
I'm Not in Love,
Life is a Minestrone,
Art For Art's Sake and so on. Another classic was the hit
I'm Mandy (Fly Me) which was the usual studio excellence and told the tale of a man seduced by an air company's promotional material, into taking an air flight. This went on to crash, but he and other passengers were saved by
Mandy, the ghostly air hostess and public 'face' of the company who may or may not have been on the flight at all - or indeed who may not have even existed.. Sounds odd in the telling, but it's still a perfect pop song, brilliantly set up by a higly stylised (and thoroughly inappropriate) air company jingle:
"Oh, you'll never get me up in one of those again, 'cos what goes up must come down down down down.." Great stuff and a hit all over Europe.
The albums are a delight, each showing their sustained excellence and some moments of out & out brilliance. Sheila mentioned
The Original Sountrack, and this is indeed considered to be 10cc's masterpiece. Particularly side 1 with it's
Une Nuit a Paris song suite. A longer concept piece, not unlike
The 9th Wave and
Aerial in construction. Look out also for the albums
"Sheet Music" and my personal favourite
"How Dare You", which explores their love affair with the telphone and communication generally. This was their last album as a foursome and it concludes with an aching ballard of lost love, failed marriage and regret, called
Don't Hang Up. Sung brilliantly by
Kevin Godley in his honey rich, velvet baritone, it lives with you long after the needle rises from the groove..
The talent and diversification were always going to be too much for one unit and 10cc split into 2 at that point.
Stewart & Gouldman (always the ones with the more advanced pop sensibilities) kept the brand going by recruiting members of their touring band into the recording set up. They went on to have good hits (some no1's) with
Dreadlock Holiday,
Good Morning Judge and
The Things We Do For Love, but something wasn't right. Particularly missed was
Lol Creme's falsetto harmonies/leads which were such a feature of earlier glories. To these ears, the innovation had gone and it was 10cc by the numbers, though others may not agree. To explore the band in this period, you should go for the album
Deceptive Bends.
Godley & Creme went on to explore futher innovation, by developing a mechanical guitar effect device that they had invented called the
Gizmo. This allowed for infinite sustain on guitar notes and a variety of unusual tone colours. They also developed a 3D recording technique based around a dummy human head loaded with condensor microphone capsules. All of this technical innovation went into a lavish and largely unfathomable triple concept album (
hey, it was the end of the 70s!) called
Consequences, which sold reasonably well despite it's considerable price.
Godley & Creme moved into the developing video direction market, making innovative videos for other mainstream artists. They continued to record and had hits with
Wedding Bells and a (maybe unintentional) re-telling of
10cc's haunted airliner hit, with
Under Your Thumb - This time, a ghostly victim of domestic abuse strikes up a conversation with a man on a train and subsequently rescues him from the wreck when it is derailed. The kicker is that she wasn't on the train at all, having previously thrown herself to her death from it some days earlier..
So that's 10cc, (
and I'm sorry I didn't mean to go on for quite this length of time..) Much missed, much admired. I regret that I only ever got to see them live in their later form after their original split. It was still a good show of greatest hits.
Talking of which, don't be tempted to buy one of the later compilation albums - even their 'official'
100cc.. Greatest hits. You would be missing out on some of the album tracks which are among their best work. In this order - and if you can get them cheap enough - acquire
The Original Soundtrack, How Dare You, Sheet Music and
10cc for the classic
Stewart/Godley/Gouldman/Creme experience.
And the name?
It was rumoured - though never confirmed - that it was a reference to the fact that 10 cubic centilitres is the average quantity of male ejaculate. So there you go..