Occasionally the people around me ask me what book I’m working
on. Very occasionally I tell them (all those ‘who are they? And when are you
getting to the Spice Girls?’ jokes are getting old now). The response to my
various drafts of all things Tencc can be separated into three categories that
I’m sure all of you who are fans enough to be reading this can identify with.
‘Ten what? Oo the hell are they?’ is the biggest response, scoring around half
of all the people we surveyed. ‘Why are you doing such a drippy band? I thought
you liked rock music?’ comes from about thirty per cent more who seem to have
confused [43] ‘I’m Not In Love’ and [64] ‘The Things We Do For Love’ as
representative of the other one-hundred-and-fifty songs in this volume. And my second-favourite
response: ‘What on earth can you possibly say about a comedy band?’ (Closely
followed by my favourite response ‘isn’t it about time you had a lie down and
stopped writing? I think you’re getting delirious – there can’t possibly have
been a band with that name’. Things get worse when I try to explain where the
name 10cc comes from – whichever of the two explanations I give, the least
controversial of which still involved mentioning Jonathan King).
Are 10cc a comedy band? I like to think they are. They have a
deliciously wicked sense of humour that matches my own, one where every
establishment figure and every societal norm is fair game for their biting
humour. Their wordplay, especially in the early days, is second to none: never
have I heard a song with more jokes in it per square inch than [20] ‘The Dean
and I’ and I say that knowing I inevitably probably missed a few there
somewhere. This isn’t obvious humour either: I know of no other band who ever
lived who would write a song about the topical 1970s setting of a bomb on board
a plane from the point of view of the
bomb itself! ([34] ‘Clockwork Creep’). Or a band who have such a view of
the absurd that even themselves are fair game (there are many great responses
to fame coming calling in the AAA circles from Oasis’ ‘but of course!’ purr of
‘Morning Glory’ to The Kinks’ cynical ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ through to The
Who’s ha-ha-ing that they were filling in a hole as a ‘Substitute Rolling
Stones’ but my favourite will always be the ‘why the hell did you lot buy our
records? Are you thick or something?!?’ shock of [31] ‘The Worst Band In The
World’). Not every 10cc song is funny – indeed my favourite music from the
brief finale in the early 1980s is about as funny as a Conservative Government
announcing more spending cuts without the letters falling off the wall behind
them to ease the monotony and hopelessness – but it’s fair to say that most of
their songs are meant to be heard with a chuckle or a throaty roar.
For many fans that’s enough. 10cc are the jesters to rock
music’s crown in the 1970s. They’re there to lighten up the top forty and spent
so long waiting for the big time (after roles in several leading band of the
1960s) that by the time they got to the top of the tree a second time they know
that the idea of rock musicians having anything deep to say is ridiculous. What
I love about this band though as opposed to, say, The Beautiful South is that
they don’t just exist to be laughed at and they can do more than cute. There
are some really bitey teeth going on underneath the humour and they always had
a clever balance which means you don’t have to dilute the message just because
you’re laughing your head off – and equally you don’t feel the punchline any
less just because they’ve metaphorically punched somebody or something that
deserved to be punched. In drama terms they’re the rare world where drama and
comedy can exist side-by-side, where the fact that you’re just been laughing
your head off at something a second ago doesn’t mean you aren’t meant to be
crying now. They’re a ‘Mash’ comedy, not a slapstick comedy, where the humour
comes from acknowledging that you’re living in a surreal world where if you
didn’t externalise how mad it was you’d go insane yourself.
To some extent 10cc’s career was set after the success of their
debut single [19] ‘Donna’ . This is an interesting one because it wasn’t the
debut of the performers (who’d been working for three years together by this
point under a variety of disguises and around ten separately somewhere in the
music business), just the name. 10cc had tried everything with the public in an
attempt to get a hit, most successfully with the surreal nuttiness of [7]
‘Neanderthal Man’ but also with pure heartfelt emotion (‘Umbopo’ credited to
‘Doctor Father’) and quirky purely comic hit singles (‘There Ain’t No Umbopo’
credited to ‘Crazy Elephant’). Fed up of getting nowhere with their brand of
quirky humour they actually planned to release the gorgeous [27] ‘Waterfall’ as
the A-side, a gorgeous slice of mystical prog rock that doubles as a marine
love song, with ‘Donna’ a last minute B-side until public reaction and Jonathan
King’s intervention saw the sides turned around. How different 10cc’s career
might have been with ‘Waterfall’ the hit song with dark and brooding thoughtful
songs their stock in trade. Instead Britain fell in love with a dark doo-wop
number about what’s arguably secretly quite an abusive relationship between
Donna and the narrator hidden behind all the joking. When this song, which
reads like a drama but sounds like a comedy the way the band do it, became a
hit it rather set the tone for everything else that followed, with 10cc veering
from one side of comedy-drama to the other.
At first the sequel decided to copy the fake doo-wop but [17]
‘Johnny Don’t Do It’ didn’t click with the public because it’s not as funny –
or as serious. Instead the defining moment came when 10cc came up with another
song that reads like heartbreak but sounds funny. [23] ‘Rubber Bullets’ was
celebrated as a hysterically funny comedy song about a prison riot which is
clearly a pastiche of 1950s movies set in prison like ‘Jailhouse Rock’. However
it’s not a gentle pastiche – instead it comes with fangs, with not an inch of
mercy to be found anywhere. Yes the prisoners are written as if they’re dancing
at a ball when they’re really dodging bullets and yes Lol, Graham and Kevin do
draw the parallels between a party and a riot (‘They’re having a tear-gas of a
time!’) But these bullets aren’t rubber and they sting like hell: just listen
to the venom that’s dripping from Lol’s voice who has never sounded this angry.
Or Graham’s uncharacteristic comic cameo as the jail owner who ‘loves to hear
convicts squeal’ and longs to use real truncheons instead of rubber ones. Or
Kevin’s angelic choirboy as the police chief thinking about his medals and
honours as he brings on the padre to make the prisoners think about God and
stop what they’re doing. It’s completely out of touch for what the prisoners
want: respect and maybe better conditions that make prisoners better people
when they come out the other side than when they went in. The verses tell us
that the people who go in to stop things are only using rubber bullets. But
what if they weren’t? It’s only a step away from someone getting hurt (the
flipside of almost all comedy, whether physical or verbal, against someone else
or against the person telling the joke) and it makes you think: if everyone
takes it to the next level the next time this won’t be compared to a party as
it will be a funeral. Though 10cc maintain the feel that everything is a party
until the ending, the lyrics say something different: ‘We don’t understand why
you called in the national guard, when Uncle Sam is the one who belongs in the
exercise yard!’ If that line had been an editorial in a newspaper column the
writer would have been thrown to the Republicans and never be allowed to write
another article again, but this band have realised very quickly that if they
treat a song as a ‘comedy’ they can get away with things that protest singers
can’t. You just know, though, that this is a song that’s less about laughing at
the jail antics than asking why these riots take place. This first #1 hit even
comes with the middle hook that turns to the world and asks ‘what you gonna do
about it?’ as the prisoners break their chains. ‘What you gonna do?’ Sadly 10cc
never played a prison concert Johnny Cash style during their time together but
you sense this song’s mixture of ironic celebration and grimaced frustration would
have been a huge hit with the convicts inside. ‘Rubber Bullets’ pulls no
punches despite the fact that the song itself references the idea that it’s
aiming softened blows at a target it really wants to kick in the shins; but a
song that came out and said that would not have been a #1 hit that got the
general public talking about these issues – it would have been banned from
radioplay and we’d have never heard of 10cc again.
For their next big target 10cc pick bankers. In the age of the
credit crunch most of probably think ‘why didn’t they go further?’ but for 1974
[30] ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’ is a pretty hard-hitting little song. Once again
we’re at a dance, but the people who dance are doing so with our money, our
taxes, our hard-earned pay. Eric’s vocal drips with an ice-cold venom even Lol
couldn’t match as he portrays a cold hard banker getting rich on everyone’s
money who doesn’t have time (or sympathy) for the homeless he sees on the
streets. Eric imagines the bankers with their priorities twisted, lured by bits
of green paper to the exclusion of anything else, to the point of selling their
mothers (‘You can buy another!’) as he cries ‘you’re living on instinct’ – and
the problem with instinct is it doesn’t have a heart. There’s a namecheck for Howard
Hughes too, amongst the richest yet most unhappiest of men, locked away in a
cocoon of his making, paranoid of the germs that people lived amongst to the
point where he cut himself off from being able to enjoy his money with anybody.
This is a song that cries for the bankers as much as us because everybody
loses: the bankers lose their humanity as they lose touch with humanity while
the rest of us suffer from a lack of money when these people’s spare change
would make so much difference to ‘us’. Tell me another song from the 1970s pop
world – the middle of three peaks in the Cold War – that could get away with
saying out loud what a terrible system capitalism was and is and still have a
top ten hit with it (just about anyway).
In case you’re thinking I’m getting carried away and 10cc just
wrote songs to laugh at – sometimes you’re right. But it’s the brand of humour
that’s interesting. This shift in writing is a far cry from the humour with
which the band could have done, such as when 10cc started as ‘Hotlegs’ which is
more quirky than thoughtful. [7] ‘Neanderthal Man’ is a great song but its most
definitely not one you’re meant to analyse and think about deeply or read between the lines of the lyric sheet for
(all studio albums under the 10cc name came with lyric sheets, at a time when
not every band did this automatically). I adore the cavemen chant of [1] ‘Um
Wah Um Who’ but it’s meant to take us back to the start of music-making, not
forward to the contemporary day and the problems people face. Equally [9]
‘Desperate Dan’ is one of the funniest, silliest things 10cc ever dad but the
idea of a comic strip hero eating cowpie doesn’t excite my subconscious the way
other 10cc songs do. Equally even 10cc’s serious songs have something going on
in them – [61] ‘Don’t Hang Up!’, a devastating song about a longterm
relationship going wrong and waiting for your lover to dump you is livened up
no end by the wordplay that includes a cameo from the local dustbinmen
commenting on the relationship and a line that skirts as close as any band can
dare get away with on 1970s radio to the word ‘mass debating’ (which is, uhh,
really easy to mishear). This is surely deliberate too because so many Hotlegs
songs come over as po-faced – you spend thirteen whole minutes sitting through
[13] ‘Suite FA’ for a punchline but the only joke the band can manage is the
one in the song title.
It’s not just the A-side either – early album songs also laugh
while crying and on which the band can get away with things that just wouldn’t
work if they were all comedy or all serious. Can you imagine a band this young
sneering at all the reporters getting stuff about them wrong? They’d be told to
stop being so wimpish and look on it as the downside of fame. Yet 10cc can
safely write a song like [21] ‘Headline Hustler’ and pretend it’s a comedy
about a reporter whose so eager to score a scoop he doesn’t realise that the
joke is on him; he’s meant to represent the public who send him letters ‘but I
haven’t got time’ and he’s stabbing everybody around him in the back, little
realising that they’re going to stab him too. He’s a pathetic little figure who
is creating his own comeuppance – had someone outside done it to him we’d be
accusing 10cc of being too cruel but being hoisted on your own petard is fair
game in comedy. [25] ‘Ships Don’t Just Disappear In The Night (Do They?!?!?)’
makes fun of fear and paranoia in a song no other band could have possibly
created. It’s a natural response to human living to be afraid of death and all
it entails. We don’t know what comes next and don’t want to acknowledge that
out short time on Earth might all be for nothing. But it’s hard to get a song
like that on an album – so in 10cc’s hands it becomes a question about ghosts
and zombies with the cheery chorus that ‘you better be nice to Vincent Price’
because his ghost might come to get you and take you other to the other side.
[26] ‘Fresh Air For My Mama’ reads like an utterly devastating song – it’s the
tale of a slum kid who is desperate to make money so he can rescue his mother
from the bad part of town and get her some ‘fresh air’. But there are so many
kids doing the same thing that it takes him ages and then she dies, in poverty.
Two minutes in the song switches gears from wry chuckle to needing some tissues
to cry into as we return to a re-make of an older song ([3] ‘You Didn’t Like It
Because You Didn’t Think Of It’) which sounded out of place there in the middle
of a jazzy jam but makes perfect sense here. ‘Take me away. I’m just about
ready to hit the road – and I’ve got to believe in something’.
Some 10cc songs just sound funny but are actually all-sad when
you look at them properly. [33] ‘Old Wild Men’ is sung in the same wry
chuckle-voice of 10cc’s most famous songs, but it’s really about a youthful
rock and roll band in old age, hanging around an old folk’s home and still
‘waiting for a miracle’ and a chance to show what they can do. For a band like
10cc, who’d waited a long time to be a success in one configuration or another,
it’s clearly not a joke at all. [24] ‘Hospital Song’ is performed by Lol as if
he’s in ‘Carry On Hospital’ in an effort to lighten the mood when he’s really
such a scared man coming round after an operation and really needing the loo.
Then there’s the chilling [22] ‘Speed Kills’ with its comic riff and a rare
example of four-way harmonies that sounds like it’s going to be a cute song –
but is really about speed-driving, the idea that the narrator got away with it
this time (but might not next time he tries it). [37] ‘Baron Samedi’ sounds
like a cartoon version of a cannibal, but what he’s really up to in between the
origami of his victim’s bodies is blatant murder. At last [32] ‘Hotel’ sounds
as if it’s a genuinely funny song about Americans away from home and completely
out of place in an African tribe and their stupidity – and even that song steps
outside itself for an angry middle eight as the poor tribe turns on their
potential benefactors with the lines: ‘We’re sick of all things American, we
ate our way through half the Pentagon, Yankee go home!’ As for [38]
‘Sacro-Iliac’, as fun as it is to hear a dance especially for the old and
disabled that only they can do so they can keep up with the youngsters and
abled, I still can’t hear this song without wincing.
Things turn darker on third album ‘The Original Soundtrack’
(even though it contains the first 10cc song that is an out and out comedy with
no hidden motives – [49] ‘The Film Of My Love’, which really doesn’t fit). [42]
‘Un Nuit En Paris’ is a tale of corruption, a whorehouse that exploits its
girls and can’t be shut down in a raid because the chief of police ‘was up in
my boudoir with some other fella’. Funny as all the voices are, it’s corruption
and scandal like this that means the poor and struggling are always going to
struggle. [43] ‘I’m Not In Love’ has the joke on the narrator with the idea
that he can’t see that he’s in love and is letting a beautiful potential
life-changing romance drift away from him, with comical ideas as he gets out of
the relationship-that-isn’t with all sorts of comic excuses. [44] ‘Blackmail’
too has the joke on the narrator and again deals with scandal as he’s a nasty
piece of work – desperate to make a girl go out with him, he blackmails her by
filming her every time she goes to the loo. He sells the pictures to a magazine
and is shocked to have turned her into a star that is too far above him to ever
want to date him. [46] ‘Brand New Day’ is about a slave whose really happy with
his lot in life, fooling you into thinking that this is a sweet song about
having a long and happy life to look forward to – until you realise how ironic
this song is (it represents a change in tactic too as Kevin sings this song
‘straight’ for his change and it’s his angelic vocals as much as anything else
that doesn’t give the game away until right near the end). [47] ‘Flying Junk’,
meanwhile, is about that laugh-out-loud subject: drug addiction. The song is
about a sleazy dealer whose your best friend but only as long as you have
money, making income off the people he got addicted. [48] ‘Life Is A Minestrone’
is another dark song about what it means to die – that then decides to compare
it to a ‘cold lasagne’.
And then there’s this song. [45] ‘Second Sitting For The Last
Supper’ is a blasphemous joke about how the Bible can’t be right because if God
thought things were a mess enough two thousand years ago to send us his only
son then surely we’d have a whole tribe of them running round now things are so
bad in the modern age. Underneath the jokes though is the thought that
underlines many a 10cc song: the poor are starving, the blacks are being
discriminated against, the women don’t have equal opportunities and lie is
unfair for everyone; on that evidence even non-believers start thinking ‘you’d
better come down’ (actually this is an interesting song for this band to write.
We’ve tried to be relatively equal on the religion front in the AAA books so
you can read about Christianity in the Byrds book, Sikhism and Hare Krishna in
our George Harrison book and Cat Stevens’ conversion to Islam in our book on
Cat/Yusuf Islam. Most of 10cc met at Jewish Boy’s Brigade, which is basically
Scouts without the woggles, not that you’d know it from their music where this
is their only religious song). The world is a wicked place, but you’ve got to
laugh – because otherwise you’d cry.
I’m not quite sure what happened on ‘How Dare You!’ (the band
were breaking up) but the ethos changes again. The Stewary-Gouldman songs [56]
‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’ and [58] ‘Art For Art’s Sake’ are gentler digs than before,
imagining a James Bond-style film epic where a man hallucinates being saved
from a plane wreck by a pretty air stewardess and a landscape where the
creative world exists to serve money not the other way around. Godley-Crème,
meanwhile, have gone weirder: [55] ‘I Wanna Rule The World!!!’ is the sound of
a psychotic who clearly isn’t in charge of his marbles never mind should be let
loose on an entire planet, with the hinted theme that he’s got to this breaking
point after being bullied his whole life (what usually happens in the 10cc
universe is that the nastier we are to people, the nastier they are to us and
why can’t everybody just get along?) [60] ‘Head Room’, meanwhile, is a horny
teenager’s desperation to understand sexual words he doesn’t quite understand
yet and perhaps the makings of a sexual deviant who won’t be satisfied the
normal ways (was he too not shown enough loving as a kid?) Only when the two
duos meet in the middle do they sound like their old selves: the highlights of
the record are [59] ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Lullaby’ (in which weary parents try to
croon their child off to sleep with some swear words hoping he won’t notice or
understand them) and [54] ‘Lazy Ways’, an ode to being lazy that sounds like
one of the busiest productions 10cc ever made. Godley-Crème admitted that they
didn’t like the recent batch of their partner’s songs and Gouldman-Stewart
probably concurred. Did they both ‘forget’ to use their traditional template on
this album? Had they outgrown it? Or had they simply never noticed it was
there?
To some extent the band stay in their separate grooves from now
on. Godley- Crème make some truly bonkers albums that sacrifice emotion for
intelligence for the most part (though highlighted by the gorgeous ‘Freeze
Frame’, their most drama-comedy album, in which singing toasters despair that
they can’t move and live full lives and in which an Englishman is completely
alien in New York, a world that works to different rules he doesn’t
understand). Gouldman-Stewart, though, get more serious. There are exceptions
(the chord-name referencing [69] ‘I Bought A Flat Guitar Tutor’, the furious
rocker [70] ‘You’ve Got A Cold’, the ‘I don’t like…I love it-ah!’ singalong
chorus of their third #1 hit [74] ‘Dreadlock Holiday’, the ‘my broker is broker
than me’ gag in [101] ‘Overdraft In Overdrive’) but for the most part the funny
songs stop being funny because they’re too silly (the ‘old’ band would never
have allowed a song as one-dimensional as [82] ‘Don’t Squeeze Me (Like
Toothpaste)’ into the act, while single [63] ‘Good Morning Judge’ confused many
people in being a tale of a habitual criminal who never learns rather than a
‘Rubber Bullets’ style plea for better understanding of the causes underlying
crime rather than attacking the people who commit it.
Instead the humour works best when it gets very dark indeed.
[79] ‘The Anonymous Alcoholic’ could be really funny had it been done by the
earlier band, but instead this drunk chatting up his boss’ wife at a Christmas
party who loses his job and his wife as a result is having a horrific time.
[80] ‘Reds In My Bed’ has 10cc playing behind the Iron Curtain and trying to
keep their British stiff-upper-lips despite all the poverty they see; paranoid
about being bugged or mugged they realise the people around them just want
money and food. [83] ‘Old Mr Time’ is a mad scientist everyone laughs at – but
‘we didn’t understand’ that he actually offered us the greatest gift of
time-travel and we laughed in his face. [88] ‘Welcome To The World’ sounds like
it will be a funny, sunny song – until you play it. Infants are being born to
parents who don’t want them and can’t afford them, on an Earth whose population
is rapidly outgrowing its means and where violence and misery are commonplace.
Some welcome that is! [90] ‘Don’t Send We Back’ is the plight of refugees who
know they will be doomed to an ugly death if they get deported, ‘we know you
don’t want us’ they tell the officials, ‘but we’ve got no one’. Even the long
awaited sequel to ‘Worst Band In The World’ titled [98] ‘We’ve Heard It All
Before’ is darker, a band who have written themselves out of ideas because
everything they do is always going to be compared to something that already
exists. So why bother?
The last two 10cc albums are, for me, the epitome of why music
exists. Delayed for a year that all but split up a group because of a car crash
that nearly killed Eric Stewart, the band’s most prolific writer and singer is
never quite the same past 1980. ‘Ten Out Of Ten’ is a dark album. It opens with
[100] ‘Don’t Ask’, about a man whose recently been divorced breaking down at
night when he’s all alone and misses his girl with all his heart. It includes
[102] ‘Don’t Turn Me Away’ where a friend is rejected when all he is trying to
do is help and understand someone else’s pain before realising that sadly he
can’t – that he’s helpless to stop the misery. [103] ‘Memories’ tries hard to
be a cute nostalgia song, but it can’t be that, not with what Eric has just
been through, so instead it becomes a song about missing the ‘important’ parts
of life that you held so tight when you were young, the halcyon days that meant
so much to you once but got forgotten. [105] ‘Les Nouveux Riches’ is a morality
tale about a girl who longs to have money so she can swan around and lord it
over her lessers – only to find that because she’s ‘new money’ the people with ‘old
money’ still lord it over her. And [106] ‘Action Man In Motown Suit’ is stuck
in a career that doesn’t suit him at all but he’s so trapped in it he can’t
escape. So much for belly-laughs.
10cc’s finale and their unsung masterpiece ‘Windows In The
Jungle’ goes further. Eric writes about his near-death experience with the angry
desperation of someone who needs to get a message across and the message is
this: ‘stop wasting time’. Life is precious, the only things that really matter
are who you love and who loves you and everything is window dressing, unworthy
of even being laughed at. The album opens with the majestic [114] ‘24 Hours’, a
song about a world waking up each day with so much potential that we then waste
competing with each other when we should be helping. Every day could be treated
as special, like our birthday, but instead we wait a year to make the most of
the world and what we could do with it. Throughout the day the narrator is
angered rather than amused by what he sees in the world: [115] ‘Oomachasooma’
sighs over how unlikely it is to find a loved one compatible enough to stay
with you but our inbuilt desire to look for that nonexistent person anyway. [117]
‘Americana Panorama’ sighs over politics and the fact we might all get blown up
any minute with the classic line ‘Reagan is a right banana!’ [118] ‘City Lights’
makes a break for a night out but it’s over in minutes after a busy dreary day –
why are we living our lives this way round? Before too long we’re heading home
in a [1231] ‘Taxi! Taxi!’ having learnt nothing, even though the narrator has
spent all day thinking of his love and how to propose to her. No one else cares
though – for them life is just another ordinary boring day and this romantic
couple are just getting in their way when they want to shut up shop. Eric knows,
though, how precious life is and how frightened he is that it could be snapped
away at any time – the trouble is he can’t always afford a taxi-far home if he
stops working and one day his beloved will have to make her own way home on the
subway. Is it worth the risk though? There are lots of funny and clever moments
on this LP, but it’s the fact that it’s so dark and bleak and serious,
delivered by a band known for being so funny and light and commercial, that
makes it all the more powerful. You’re almost lulled into a false sense of
security if you hear their catalogue in order before it hits you how cruel,
bizarre and twisted the world really is. After doing that the reunion albums
fail not just because the band don’t want to make them and don’t work together
that much (not to mention how uncharacteristically mean-spirited a lot of it is
such as [ ] ‘Charity Begins At Home’)
but because they’ve seen how important and precious life is and still waste our
time on trivial songs that are there only to be funny and nothing more.
That’s not unique in comedic terms of course. Comics are often
the saddest people in the room in real life (the world’s best comedians - Tony
Hancock, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, even Eric Morecambe in his fictional
works – all were being eaten by something that made them miserable and the only
way they could cheer themselves up was by making people laugh. There was
something eating all of these men, who felt compelled to show how ridiculous
life was. Surface comedians, like Sarah Millican or Michael McIntyre, just don’t
have the depths to their jokes to see life as absurd and so will never make the
most out of their humour). So it is with music’s funniest band: far from being
court jesters who love being silly, 10cc are funny precisely because they *get*
how dark and depressing life can be and yet choose to laugh at it anyway (at
least until near-death experiences changed their outlook). Laughter is a great
gift, a most under-rated technique for surviving the slings and arrows of
misfortune, mistreatment, mis-treatment and mistakenly celebrated music (like
The Spice Girls).
The few people who understand my 10cc fetish can assume that I’m
into other comedy bands as well, that I guffaw to the deeply pretentious
Beautiful South and that I groove to The Wombles while having a complete
collection of Benny Hill singles. But they don’t do anything for me because the
humour isn’t hiding anything, except how badly the writer wants a novelty hit
to make them rich. 10cc, though, understand that the best comedy comes out of
tragedy and that humour in music can be richer than the equivalent of someone
slipping over on a banana skin. Yes 10cc can be hilarious. There are lots of
their songs that make me laugh my head off even now several thousand playings
on (we didn’t even get onto [35] ‘SSSSSSSSSSSSSSilly Love’ the greatest love
song either, which throws away every cliché and comes up with something plain
but heartfelt). There are other songs so deftly and cleverly written that you
can’t help applauding (the complex lyrics to [36] ‘Somewhere In Hollywood’ and
[61] ‘Don’t Hang Up!’ deserve an essay each themselves). But I love my 10cc
best when they are making us laugh while turning red with anger the way they do
on [23] ‘Rubber Bullets’ or [30] ‘The Wall Street Shuffle’, while making us
long for change through the unfairness of [44] ‘Blackmail’ or [45] ‘The Second
Sitting For The Last Supper’ or which merely remind us how fleetingly beautiful
wonderful and magical life can be (Most of ‘Windows In The Jungle’). What’s one
of the best things you can do with such a short, brilliant and pretty life?
Why, laugh, the greatest gift human beings ever gave each other (that goes for
music too).
A NOW COMPLETE LIST OF 10cc ARTICLES TO READ AT ALAN’S ALBUM
ARCHIVES:
'How Dare You!' (1976) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/10cc-how-dare-you-1976.html
'Meanwhile' (1992) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/10cc-meanwhile-1992.html
'Mirror Mirror' (1995) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.nl/2016/09/10cc-mirror-mirror-1995.html
Pre-10cc: 1965-1973, A Guide to Mindbenders, Mockingbirds and Frabjoy and
Runciple Spoon!
Non-Album Songs Part One
1972-1980 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/10cc-non-album-songs-part-one-1972-1980.html
Non-Album Songs Part Two
1981-2006 https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/10cc-non-album-songs-part-two-1981-2006.html
Surviving TV Clips, Music Videos and Unreleased Recordings https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/10cc-and-godley-creme-surviving-tv.html
Solo/Wax/Live/Compilation
Albums Part One 1971-1986
https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/10cc-solocompilationlivewax-albums-part.html
10cc Essay: Not-So-Rubber
Bullets http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2018/06/10cc-essay-not-so-rubber-bullets.html
