10cc

Four Apprenticeships

Eric Stewart was born in Droylsden on 20 January 1945. In early 1963 he was at the Oasis club in Manchester, the same room where the Hollies had played their first gig under that name not long before, when a singer called Wayne Fontana turned up for a record company audition and half his band didn't. Stewart and a drummer called Ric Rothwell were asked to sit in. A few minutes of rehearsal, three songs everybody knew, and Fontana was offered a deal on the condition that the stand-ins stayed. That was the Mindbenders. "The Game of Love" reached number 2 in Britain and number 1 in America in 1965. Later that year Fontana walked off stage in the middle of a concert and didn't come back, so Stewart took over the singing. "A Groovy Kind of Love" went to number 2 in 1966.

Graham Gouldman was born in Broughton, Salford, on 10 May 1946. By day he worked in a men's outfitters. By night he played in a band called the Mockingbirds, whose drummer was a lad from Prestwich called Kevin Godley. Their label, Columbia, turned down the first song Gouldman offered as a single. It was "For Your Love". The Yardbirds took it instead. The Mockingbirds, meanwhile, had a regular job as the warm-up band for Top of the Pops, which in those days went out from a converted church in Rusholme. One night the Yardbirds were on the show, playing his song, while he stood there in the band nobody had heard of. He said later that it felt strange. I bet it did.

He kept writing. "Heart Full of Soul" and "Evil Hearted You" for the Yardbirds. "Look Through Any Window" and "Bus Stop" for the Hollies. "No Milk Today" for Herman's Hermits. All of them before he turned twenty-one.

Kevin Godley, born 7 October 1945, and Lol Creme, born 19 September 1947, were both from Prestwich. They had known each other since their teens and both went on to art college. They thought like art students for the rest of their careers, which turned out to be the making of 10cc and also the end of it. In March 1968 Gouldman joined the Mindbenders on bass for what turned out to be their last few months. The band played its final show that November. By then Eric Stewart had found something more interesting to do with his money.

Waterloo Road

Peter Tattersall, a former road manager for Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, had bought a small recording studio above a music shop in Stockport town centre in early 1968. It was called Inter-City Studios. In July, Stewart put in £800 and became his partner. In October they moved the whole operation into a Victorian warehouse at 3 Waterloo Road, and Stewart renamed it after his favourite Beatles song. Strawberry Studios. Within months Gouldman had bought in too.

It had no obvious right to work. In 1968 serious recording was something that happened in London. What kept the doors open was bubblegum. In December 1969 the American producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz booked Strawberry for three months and set Stewart, Gouldman, Godley and Creme to work writing, playing and singing disposable pop that went out under other bands' names. Gouldman later called it a creative low point. It also paid for new equipment, and it gave four musicians months of practice at making finished records quickly, in their own building, with nobody watching.

In 1970 Stewart, Godley and Creme were trying out new recording gear, and the result was released as "Neanderthal Man" under the name Hotlegs. It reached number 2 in the UK and sold more than two million copies around the world. Gouldman was not on it. Then Neil Sedaka came to Stockport. He made Solitaire there in 1972 and The Tra-La Days Are Over in 1973, with the four of them as his band and Stewart engineering. Sedaka's career restarted. Stewart has said that was the push they needed. If they could do that for somebody else, they could do it for themselves.

The Best Band in the World

In the summer of 1972 they had a song called "Donna", a doo-wop send-up sung in Creme's falsetto, and they took it to Jonathan King, who ran UK Records. King signed them that July and gave them a name. His version is that he dreamed he was standing outside the Hammersmith Odeon, looking up at a hoarding which announced 10cc as the best band in the world. The other version, the one everybody's uncle tells in the pub, involves a measurement of a rather more personal kind. Creme repeated that one in a 1988 interview. King and Godley have both said it isn't true, and Gouldman said in 2025 that the band simply got bored of giving the long-winded explanation. Believe whichever you prefer. Only one of them is suitable for a heritage website.

"Donna" reached number 2 in October 1972. "Rubber Bullets" went to number 1 in June 1973. "The Dean and I" made number 10. The second album, Sheet Music, reached number 9 in 1974 and gave them "The Wall Street Shuffle", another number 10. While they were making it, Paul McCartney was in the same building producing an album for his brother, Mike McGear, the two sessions sharing the studio in shifts. A Beatle, clocking on in Stockport, in a studio named after a Beatles song.

What made them different was that there was no weak link and nobody in charge. Four writers. Four singers. Four multi-instrumentalists. Their own studio, and their own engineer in the band. No outside producer and nobody to tell them to stop. The songs came roughly from two camps: Stewart and Gouldman, the craftsmen, and Godley and Creme, the art students. They agreed to split the record royalties four ways no matter who had written what. It was a generous arrangement, and it worked for exactly as long as all four of them liked what the others were writing.

The hits did not make them rich. By Creme's account their royalty rate under King's contract was four per cent. In February 1975 they announced they were leaving for Mercury, part of the Phonogram group, in a five-album deal reported at a million dollars. What sealed it, as Stewart tells the story, was a single track they played the label from the album they were finishing.

Six Hundred and Twenty-Four Voices

Gloria Stewart told her husband that he didn't say he loved her often enough. They had been married eight years. His view was that saying it all the time would wear the words out, so he set about writing a song that said it by denying it. He had the chords, the melody and the first verse, and he finished it with Gouldman over two or three days on a pair of guitars. As a bossa nova. They recorded it that way and played it back. Godley told them it was rubbish and should be binned. Creme wasn't keen either. So they wiped the tape. That version no longer exists.

The tune refused to leave the building. Kathy Redfern, the studio secretary, kept singing it around the place and told them she loved it. So they went back to it, and this time Godley's idea was to throw the instruments out and build the whole thing from voices. Creme suggested tape loops.

This is how they did it. Godley, Creme and Gouldman stood around one microphone and sang a single note, "aah", in unison. Then again, and again, sixteen times over, until that one note was a choir of forty-eight. Then the next note. Thirteen of them, the full chromatic scale. It took about three weeks. Stewart mixed each note down and spliced it into a loop of tape about twelve feet long, so long that it had to run out of the machine and around a microphone stand across the room. Each loop was then recorded for seven minutes onto its own track of the sixteen-track tape. Thirteen tracks, thirteen notes, each one a choir that never needed to breathe.

Then they played the mixing desk like an instrument. All four of them at the faders, three or four each, pushing notes up and pulling them down to make the chords as the song went by. Strips of gaffer tape stopped the faders closing all the way, so every note is always faintly there, which is the soft hiss you can hear underneath the whole record. On top went Stewart's Fender Rhodes, Gouldman's bass, a bass drum that is really a Moog synthesiser, and a child's music box at the very end. And in the middle, after some persuading, Kathy Redfern whispering the line about big boys and crying. The secretary who rescued the song is the voice everybody remembers.

It ran to six minutes. The label thought that was too long for a single and put out "Life Is a Minestrone" first, which made number 7. Then they gave in. The band cut it to just over four minutes for radio, and once it charted the stations went back to playing the full version anyway. It was number 1 for two weeks from 28 June 1975. It spent three weeks at number 2 in America. It won three Ivor Novello awards the following year. No outside producer. No session choir. A converted warehouse in Stockport, four lads from round here, and the secretary.

Two and Two

How Dare You! reached number 5 in 1976 and carried two more top ten singles, "Art for Art's Sake" and "I'm Mandy Fly Me". It was the last album the four of them made as a working band. Godley and Creme had invented a gadget called the Gizmotron, which clamped to the bridge of a guitar and bowed the strings with small motor-driven wheels, and they wanted to spend their time on that. They had also, as Godley put it years later, stopped liking what the other two were writing. At the start of the sessions for the next album they left. Stewart thought they were mad. Godley has since said he regrets how it ended.

Both halves landed on their feet, eventually. Godley and Creme's demonstration record for the Gizmotron grew into Consequences, a triple album in a box with Peter Cook playing most of the speaking parts, released in 1977 straight into the teeth of punk. The critics savaged it and it reached number 52. Then came "Under Your Thumb" at number 3 and "Wedding Bells" at number 7 in 1981, "Cry" in 1985, and a second career directing other people's videos: "Girls on Film", "Every Breath You Take", "Rockit", "Two Tribes". Art students to the end.

Stewart and Gouldman opened a second Strawberry in a former cinema in Dorking and carried on as 10cc. Deceptive Bends reached number 3 in 1977, with "The Things We Do for Love" at number 6 and "Good Morning Judge" at number 5. "Dreadlock Holiday" went to number 1 in September 1978. It was their third chart-topper and their last top ten hit, and Gouldman has since said there are lines in it he wouldn't write today. In January 1979 Stewart was badly hurt in a car crash and could not work on music for about six months. The band never got its momentum back and wound down after 1983. All four appeared on one more album in 1992. Stewart left after 1995. Gouldman has toured as 10cc since 1999 and is still out there now, on something called the And Another Bloody Greatest Hits Tour. Three number ones and eleven top ten singles, all between 1972 and 1978.

Waterloo Road carried on without them. Joy Division recorded Unknown Pleasures there with Martin Hannett over three weekends in April 1979. The Smiths made "Hand in Glove" there in a single day in February 1983, for £250. The Stone Roses cut their first single there with Hannett in 1985. The studio closed in the early 1990s. A plaque went up in 2007, the council locally listed the building in 2009, and in 2017 Stockport Museum put the old equipment on show while the control room was rebuilt the way it looked in the late 1970s. It is a three-storey red brick warehouse on a side street in Stockport, and most people walk straight past it. Stop for a minute anyway. Six hundred and twenty-four voices went onto tape behind that wall.