Founding member of 10cc Graham Gouldman is back with a new incarnation of the band. He tells Tony Clayton-Leaabout the group's legacy
The bug cannot be relinquished. The bug refuses to budge. The bug is lodged in your system, snags your innards and stays put. If you're a musician in your 60s and are still heading out on the road to play theatre venues in such salubrious destinations as Preston then you are either a sad sack desperate for money and ego gratification or you're a successful songwriter raking in the royalties and touring for the love of it, touring because the bug ruthlessly spurns your entreaties to get the feck out of your body.
Graham Gouldman falls into the latter category. Well-informed music fans would know him to be a founding member of 10cc, a Manchester band that effortlessly created some of the smartest pop songs of the early- to mid-1970s. And when we say smart, we mean smart - not just intelligent pop music, but material wrought with skill, invention, technical precision and lyrical nous.
Gouldman's pop credentials are pretty much impeccable, anyway; prior to joining 10cc in the early 70s he provided certified hits for the likes of The Hollies (Bus Stop, Look Through Any Window), The Yardbirds (For Your Love) and Herman's Hermits (No Milk Today) - songs that form part of "classic hits" playlists on radio stations throughout the world. Then came 10cc - which has in one shape or another filtered in and out of existence over the past 25-odd years.
AND NOW? WELL, it's 10cc time again, with Gouldman at the helm and flanked by various people who at one time or another were also 10cc members. Not, however, the three other original members: Eric Stewart, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley. Why so? There wasn't a Pink Floyd-type wrangle over the band name (which, incidentally, reputedly derives from the amount of semen in an average ejaculation; profound apologies for spoiling your breakfast), but rather, says a cheerful Gouldman from his hotel room in downtown Preston, "because no one else from the original band wanted to do it. That made life very simple. If any one else had wanted to do it, though, we would probably have done it together. It would have been as simple as that."
Gouldman readily admits that 10cc were viewed in their heyday as being too clever for their own good. "You have to be sober when you play 10cc material - they're complex pop songs. And besides, it's my view that it's better to be too clever than too stupid. We did get the 'too clever' criticism - indeed, one writer called us the 'professors of pop', which I quite liked. Primarily, we wanted to please ourselves - we were never conscious of public tastes. It was just a happy coincidence - the public happened to like the records we liked to make. Also, when you're working with three other harsh critics it raises your game, and that applied to all of us."
UNUSUAL, IF NOT unique for a band of their stature and success, all four original members wrote songs. The band also had their own studios, while Eric Stewart engineered and other members produced. Gouldman is convinced that being so self-contained and so isolated, creatively and technically, gave 10cc the edge in pop production and craft.
How were songs chosen? "The beauty of it was that we never chose songs from a batch or a pool - whatever songs we wrote were never rejected. There were two main writing teams - myself and Eric, and Kevin and Lol. The guiding principle was that whoever wrote the songs would play it to the other team; nobody ever said that a song was crap or that there was no way they were going to play or sing it. The guiding principle was that the songs were adopted by the other team, and if they so wished the other team could make suggestions to improve or enhance. There was no rejection - we all took ownership and responsibility for a song no matter whose it was. Looking back on it, it was such a great principle to work on. It was never a case of not liking a song; even if it was just okay or good, the collective work ethic was to make it better."
The songs featured in the present live shows include the hits (Donna, Rubber Bullets, The Dean and I, Wall Street Shuffle, I'm Not in Love, Mandy Fly Me) and some choice album tracks. The audience at the recent gigs, says Gouldman, is a mixture of the band's original fans and younger people who are into, say, Orson and The Feeling - "I love that band, and I know they've been listening to a lot of 10cc records, because my son Louis is their A&R guy at their record label."
The band's legacy - apart from lyrical profundities such as "life is a minestrone wrapped up in Parmesan cheese" - and commitment to excellence is beyond reproach.
"It was all about original songwriting and dearly wanting to avoid writing about the obvious. We even avoided writing a love song because of what people might think, so instead we wrote I'm Not in Love, an ironic, anti-love song.
"We were lucky as a band in that all the constituent parts clicked, the chemistry was around at the right time for something brilliant to happen."
10cc play Wexford Arts Centre on Thursday and Dublin's Tripod on Friday