“It was Neil Sedaka’s success that did it, I think”, agrees Gouldman. “We’d just been accepting any job we were offered and were getting really frustrated. We knew that we were worth more than that, but it needed something to prod us into facing that. We were a bit choked to think that we’d done the whole of Neil’s first album with him just for flat session fees, when we could have been recording our own material.”
10CC
The first recording that the four made together, in the spring of ’72, was a Stewart- Gouldman composition,“Waterfall”. Stewart took an acetate of it with him when he went to the Apple studios tomaster that first Sedaka album, hoping that he could persuade Apple to release
it.Months later, he received a rejection slip saying that the song wasn’t commercial enough to be put out as a single... by which time, Godley and Creme had come up with another song which was.
‘Donna’ was initially intended as a possible B-side to ‘Waterfall’, but it took only a couple of listens for everyone to agree that the falsetto-led rock ’n’ roll spoof had “something.” ‘Waterfall’ was shelved; ‘Donna’ was promoted to the top of the band’s pile of potential singles, and everyone put on their thinking caps.“We only knew of one person who was mad enough to release it,” admitted Stewart, “and that was Jonathan King.” They were right, too. King signed the quartet, named them and released their first single. 10cc were off and running, on course to becoming the singlemost inventive British band of the early ’70s, and one of themost reliable hitmachines of that same era. The past, at last, was behind them. But Godley admits he wouldn’t have changed a thing.
“It’s all satisfying, in hindsight. It all puts a big, fat smile on my face. It also helps me understand why 10cc sounded like it did.
Stupidity, art, crap, gold dust, adventure. It’s all there in the big sponge of influences that 10cc became. I guess we were sampling, in our heads, before sampling existed.
“We suddenly understood why a studio control room looked like the flight deck of Concorde. The big window with all the flashing lights and buttons were there to take you places, so we set out to take ourselves to as many as possible. We didn’t have the expertise or the focus we had later, but the sheer thrill of pushing
songs to its credit, both musicians are adamant that there are many more to come. And, in the meantime, one of their first prolusions, ‘Son Of Man’, is already perfectly poised to bring about a wholesale revival of the old pre-10cc magic.
ourselves and the technology was enough.
“I believe we pretty much learned the basics for everything during those years – C.I.A.: Craft/Inspiration/Accident. Not necessarily in that order, and with a little hashish thrown in to help glue it all together. It’s also that certainty you feel at some point that what you’re doing will stand up, and you actually might have something worth saying.
“I’d do it all again in a flash – particularly the ventriloquist.”
Today, in fact, he is enjoying precisely that same opportunity, the chance to “do it all again.” GG06 was formed by a reunited Godley and Gouldman in 2006 and though, so far, it’s been a strictly web-based endeavour, with no more than half a dozen
Godley: “The lyric sums up a lot of dues paying from 1969-72, and is how I remember the years of transition from Hotlegs to 10cc via good spliff, bad curry and unlikely recording sessions. The lyric was written in the mid-90s, at our ex- manager’s suggestion, and hung around waiting for a reason to be completed. GG06 seemed the perfect reason.
“The audiovisual version, should it ever be completed, will feature archive/ documentary Hotlegs/10cc footage plus, if I can pull enough strings, a fucked-up CGI Neanderthal grotesque performing the song. [Godley/Creme’s mid-80s milestone] The History Mix, the long form video was a first stab at something in this vein, but we were assembling new material from old, and framing it with us pissing about in the edit suite. ‘Son Of Man’ will attempt to do the precise opposite… whatever that means.”
Many thanks to Peter Wadsworth at
www.strawberrynorth.co.uk
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