Friday, December 2, 2016

Crawling up the Wall


10cc : The Things We Do For Love


On the week of  December 2, 1976 10cc returned to the UK charts at #37 with a new single, "The Things We Do For Love". But there was something missing on the 45 single cover. Actually two somethings : founding members Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Intrigued by their invention, the gizmotron, a device that made electric guitars sound like synthesizers, Godley and Creme bailed on Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman earlier in the year.


Godley recalls why they departed 10cc after four superb albums on the excellent podcast Sodajerker On Songwriting:

When Eric and Graham came in with a song they'd written to begin the next album, it was like "Oh God, that is so fuckin' dreary. It's so predictable and boring. Why don't we just fuck off and do something with the Gizmo? "And of course at that age, you are very ballsy and you take chances and that's what we did.


Stewart recalls his reaction to the split in a BBC radio interview:

We were on such a winning curve, Graham Gouldman and I had to decide, are we going to be 5cc? Are we gonna scrap the name completely? Well, we thought we, no, we'd better carry on because we, this is 10cc, we are 10cc, this band. Two of our members are leaving us and that's not our problem, but we've got to carry it on.   

While Stewart and Gouldman kept the 10cc name and spent the rest of the 70's with hits like "Good Morning Judge" and "Dreadlock Holiday", Godley and Creme explored their artistic indulgences with a sprawling three record set called Consequences, which eventually came out in late 1977.



"It turned into a monster. It turned into our Heaven's Gate," Godley admits. " For God knows how many reasons. And the idea was to make the kind of music that was nothing remotely like 10cc...when we realized that 'Oh.We've actually spent 14 to 18 months doing something that people think is a pile of shite".

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