Collective brilliance of 10cc drove some of the best sounds of the 70s

Before Manchester’s Graham Gouldman was 20 he had written hit songs that have gone on to become rock and pop standards.

Portrait of 10CC superstar, Graham Gouldman, at Pennys Ln, Kings Cross, ahead of Australian tour. Picture: Dylan Robinson

Songwriters have long leant on the giants of classical music for inspiration: A Whiter Shade of Pale – among the bestselling singles in music history – borrowed from Bach’s Air on a G String; Eric Carmen nicked All By Myself from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2; the White Stripes’ thundering Seven Nation Army riff owes much to Bruckner’s compelling Fifth Symphony; and the melody from The Toys’ A Lover’s Concerto used to be attributed to Bach but was really the work of Dresden’s Christian Petzold.

Manchester’s Graham Gouldman hadn’t been exposed to much classical music. When he set out to write a hit song he went no further than the old shoebox his dad kept. In it were scraps of paper on which the would-be playwright and poet had scribbled ideas that might come in handy one day.

One day one did.

First keen to play drums, Gouldman took some lessons but turned to guitar, given one when he was 11. A few chords in, he ­realised music was for him. There was no alternative. It was a ­timely choice.

From 1963, the year Gouldman turned 17, all eyes were on Liverpool and the music revolution that had been festering there seemingly unnoticed by the rest of the world. That is not quite right. The Beatles – Ringo Starr had yet to replace Pete Best – played Manchester as early as February 1962. And Liverpool is less than 50km away, a distance that would not get you out of a city such as Los Angeles.

It soon became known as Merseybeat, but Manchester bands were very much part of the scene.

Art-rock band 10CC for What We're Loving Right Now.

Gouldman joined and formed a few local outfits. They all showed promise and one, the Whirlwinds, nailed a contract with HMV records and released a remake of a Buddy Holly song, Look at Me, in May 1964. While in London, Gouldman shopped some of his own songs along Denmark Street, London’s own Tin Pan Alley back then. There wasn’t much interest but these were early days; the Beatles had just launched the concept of a band as a self-contained songwriting factory.

Gouldman returned to Manchester, started to write his own songs and was instantly successful. Before the year was out, fellow Mancunians Herman’s Hermits had recorded For Your Love. Remade into a sharp rock classic by the Yardbirds, this would go top 10 in Britain and the US (although Yardbirds lead guitarist Eric Clapton, nonplussed by a mainstream hit, departed; no worries – Jeff Beck took his place). Gouldman then wrote a hit for Herman’s Hermits, the irresistibly clever No Milk Today.

A secretary working at the record company told Graham Nash, the singer of another Manchester band, the Hollies, which was just making inroads in the charts, about her friend’s son who wrote songs. Nash went around to the Gouldman house. The boy did have a spare song that he sang to them, Look Through Any Window (No.4 in Britain, No.32 on Billboard). “Any others?” Nash asked over his shoulder as the band left.

As it turned out, Gouldman had been working on something and had written a few chords but couldn’t match words to them. Back to the shoebox. On a piece of paper were these words: Bus stop. Wet day. She’s there. I say “Please share my umbrella”. Whether Hymie Gouldman had planned this as a poem or a scene for a play is not recorded.

Bus Stop is such an English song. When Americans sing of buses, they mean wide open roads and Greyhound buses (the Allman Brothers’ Ramblin’ Man, Paul Simon’s America); the English mean rainy suburban routes (the Beatles’ A Day in the Life, the Jam’s That’s Entertainment). Nonetheless, a good song works its own magic and the Hollies had their biggest hit, reaching the top five in Britain and the US.

Back in the day: band 10CC

In the meantime, Gouldman wrote another chart-topper for Herman’s Hermits: Listen People. It’s a sophisticated Lennon-like sermon and out of step with its era, like John Lennon, and this time Gouldman had not peeked in his dad’s shoebox. For perhaps the only time in his life he may have subconsciously borrowed a few notes from Johann Pachelbel. (American Christian singer Michael Card leant on this heavily for his dreary modern hymn Jesus, Let Us Come To Know You. We prefer Listen People.)

Gouldman, not yet 20, was embarked on a purple patch that would take him the rest of the decade and beyond with more hits for the Yardbirds (Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You – both top-three songs), Wayne Fontana (Pamela, Pamela), Jeff Beck (Tallyman), a song for the emerging Cher, and top 10 hits for Australian acts Normie Rowe (Going Home) and Mike Furber (You Stole My Love).

At the end of the 1960s, Gouldman passed through the ranks of local band the Mindbenders. The band had originally backed Fontana but had scored big hits on their own in Britain and the US, particularly with the song A Groovy Kind of Love, a song written by Carole Bayer Sager and Toni Wine – with the melody lifted from Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina No.5 composed in 1797.

The Hollies had their biggest hit with Bus Stop reaching the top five in Britain and the US.

Also in the band, and the singer of that hit, was soon-to-be 10cc bandmate Eric Stewart. After a messy few years during which Gouldman worked as a sausage-machine songwriter for the New York team of Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz, who inflicted on the world the Ohio Express song Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (Gouldman called it prostitution), 10cc came about accidentally in 1972.

Manchester musicians Kevin Godley and Lol Creme had been on the local scene for years, and Godley and Gouldman had attended the same school. Each man was a creative force of his own and musical ideas ­fired from them as if from a Catherine wheel.

Sensibly, they built a crude studio locally so they could experiment freely without a record company’s meter ticking. They called it Strawberry Studios, a Beatles reference, and dreamt that one day that band might record there. One day, decades later, Paul McCartney did.

To test the studio’s equipment, the boys came up with daft songs and silly band names. One was Doctor Father, which released the single Umbopo in 1970. It is irritatingly catchy, but very few people heard it. Changing the band’s name to Hotlegs, the next single was Neanderthal Man, and they had a gimmicky British chart-topper. It rose to No.22 in the US and No.24 in Australia at the end of 1970. No one took it seriously, certainly not Hotlegs.

Into this unsettled mix came a bolt from the blue: Neil Sedaka bumped into Gouldman in New York and discovered his association with the others. Remarkably, he had heard Umbopo, loved it and wanted to record at the studio from which such adventurous sounds had been created. In June 1972 he travelled to Manchester to record his Solitaire album.

Only five musicians appear on that record – Sedaka and the men who would soon be 10cc. The title song – the chorus of which steals a bit of Chopin – was a hit for Andy Williams in Britain and the Carpenters in the US.

“We did that album in about two weeks,” Gouldman says on a call from London. Sedaka was performing not far away in Leeds, so Gouldman went over and Sedaka introduced him to the new songs. “I made a tape and wrote a rough chord sheet of the songs and he came over and recorded them.” Gouldman considers Sedaka a great artist and says 10cc learnt much from him. “He’d sing the lead vocals while putting the piano down.”

An impressed Sedaka recorded his next album there and Strawberry Studios was on its way. Over a Chinese meal, after Solitaire was done, Gouldman, Stewart, Godley and Creme decided they should pool resources and focus on becoming a band. By ­October they had issued their first single, a corny doo-wop pastiche called Donna that sounded like, well, Donna, a 1958 hit by Ritchie ­Valens (whose B side was the more famous La Bamba). Like Valens’ song, the 10cc song hit No.2 on the charts. With the first album ­almost complete, the band dropped its next single, Rubber ­Bullets.

The band’s first No.1 single broke the band in Britain, across Europe and in Australia, but did less well in North America, despite being inspired by the Attica prison riot in upstate New York.

UK band The Hollies in 1965. Source: Supplied

A year on, a second album, Sheet Music, showed a band of four distinctive artists throwing odd-coloured ideas – avant-garde, glam, art rock – at the same canvas. It came with a witty hit, Stewart and Gouldman’s The Wall Street Shuffle, but songs with titles such as The Sacro-Iliac and Oh Effendi were complex for a pop audience. Gouldman says the band had not set out to be challenging. “We weren’t trying to be anything,” he says. “We didn’t follow any trends.

“We were four writers, musicians, producers, and we had our own studio, our own playground if you like. We did exactly what we liked and we hoped you liked it too.”

Many 10cc songs were overlong for the radio formats of the day, and the band members’ edited their ideas reluctantly and minimally. “We weren’t happy about doing it but we did it for commercial purposes,” says Gouldman, although they would readily modify songs for valued television spots.

Within a year they had tamed some of the eccentricity and recorded their most popular song, but it almost didn’t happen. I’m Not in Love started as a bossa nova curiosity until drummer Godley told Stewart abruptly: “It’s crap.” The tape wiped, they moved on. But studio staff were still humming its melody days later and the band returned to it, building Manchester’s own multi-tracked, soaring, 624-voice wall of sound for the most distinctive hit of its era. The whispered instruction in the middle – “Be quiet. Big boys don’t cry” – was uttered by 19-year-old front desk receptionist Cathy Redfern.

Trevor Horn of the Buggles, who won a Grammy for producing Kiss From a Rose, had ever since measured every song he has been involved with by saying: “Yes, but it’s not as good as I’m Not in Love.” 10cc never considered in advance how such complex music might be performed live: “We never thought ‘we’ll never be able to produce this on stage’, but you just have to. You compromise.”

The Original Soundtrack album had another hit with Life is a Minestrone.

From then on 10cc could do little wrong while remaining adventurous beyond the scope of bands that sought validation on the charts. And it was still co-operative. Stewart saw a vagrant looking up at a poster for an airline that had the photo of a cute steward with the line “Fly Me”. Such crude sexism was common then. At Strawberry that morphed into I’m Mandy Fly Me, with musical help from the others and a lyrically ponderous gem emerged: “If it hadn’t have been for Mandy, her promise up above me, well I wouldn’t be here at all.”

The album from which it came, How Dare You?, had another hit, Art For Art’s Sake. Gouldman again turning to his dad for the idea. Hymie had a favourite saying: “Art for art’s sake, money for god’s sake.” Gouldman remembers: “It’s a very cynical saying, but he wasn’t cynical at all … he found it funny.”

Portrait of 10CC superstar, Graham Gouldman, at Pennys Ln, Kings Cross, ahead of Australian tour. Picture: Dylan Robinson

From that album on, Godley and Creme went off on their own successful tangent but later admitted that they didn’t like, and ran out of patience with, Gouldman and Stewart’s pop sensibilities. The albums in any case had become battlegrounds of barely contained inventive forces.

The changed line-up toured Australia in September 1977 and hit singles flowed: The Things We Do For Love, Good Morning Judge and People in Love. The album Deceptive Bends (notwithstanding the helmeted diver on the cover, the title comes from a road sign Gouldman saw in Surrey, and long since stolen) also included the 11½-minute Beatles-like three-part folly Feel the Benefit, which, perversely, fans loved from the start and demanded at shows.

That band featured Rick Fenn on lead guitar and drummer Paul Burgess, and with Gouldman they will tour as 10cc across Australia this month.

10cc’s fall from favour was swift, but the band left us with a final flourish of cheeky invention. Dreadlock Holiday, with its reggae centre, spiky timbales and West Indian vacation stories of exploitation, drugs and street crime, was anchored in a phrase recalled by Gouldman. Talking to a man at a hotel about sport, Gouldman inquired of him: “Do you like cricket?” The fellow surprised the songwriter by saying “no”, then followed up with “I love it!”

The single topped charts across Britain and Europe (it was No.2 here in September 1978), but Americans didn’t get reggae then and still don’t get cricket. The song stalled on Billboard at No.44. The truth is that neither did the song’s author get cricket. He went to his first game – England v the West Indies at the Oval – just last month. Did he like it? Of course, you know the answer to that.

And that was the end for 10cc. Four albums followed, but music was changing and the band that would not compromise found that neither would the listening audience. Elvis Costello, the Police, Nick Lowe, the Boomtown Rats and Dire Straits took charge with flinty, earthier sounds that were less experimental.

But the 10cc catalogue runs deep with imaginative songs that can still surprise you – golden leftovers from an era when music was less contrived and not necessarily made to be marketed.

“Yes, we’ve got so much 10cc material, obviously. First of all, there’s all the hits, of which there are 11,” Gouldman says. There were 12, but he leaves out Silly Love, presumably because it did not make the top 10.

“But we’ve got other album tracks, like Feel the Benefit, that we do, and various other songs.”

He spends a lot of time on the set lists. “We could play for two or three days, but I get bored very quickly.”

I interviewed Gouldman 48 years ago in Melbourne and, for some reason, threw in at the end some of those mindless questions reporters asked the Beatles in Australia, like when will you get your hair cut and how long can you keep doing this, which presumably amused me at the time. I owned up to this inanity the other day, but I couldn’t help myself and asked again how long he could keep doing this.

“I told you last time,” he says.

10cc’s Ultimate, Ultimate Greatest Hits Tour starts on July 16. Tickets: davidroywilliams.com