The phrase “like nothing you’ve ever heard” really only works when you’re talking about 10cc, the best—and, possibly, last—of 20th-century music’s true English Eccentrics. Though there have been noisier avant-garde post-punks (Rip Rig + Panic, Throbbing Gristle), wiggier, wilding-out psychedelic practitioners (Julian Cope, Kevin Ayers) and devoted American acolytes (Jellyfish), only 10cc couched its smartly sardonic and usually absurd lyrical sentiments and complex, oddball time changes in gorgeously contagious pop melodies and lush, four-part harmonies.
10cc could be art rock, power pop, prog, schmaltz, doo wop, cinematic soundtrack-y—often all at once—and only existed in its purest, most dynamic quartet form with Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme from 1972 to 1976. As 10cc lost Godley and Creme to their own strangely beautiful duo music, the second-gen Gouldman/Stewart ensemble (1977 to 1983) focused instead on slightly more straight-ahead pop songs such as “The Things We Do For Love.
Now, bassist/composer/vocalist Gouldman has decided to tour his 10cc nearly 50 years since its last U.S. dates, with longtime live members Paul Burgess (drums) and Rick Fenn (guitars, vocals), together with keyboardist Keith Hayman and singer/multi-instrumentalist Iain Hornal. That vocalists Gouldman, Fenn and Hornal could maintain the original 10cc’s lustrously quirky and richly comported brand of pop in a live setting (on this night at the Keswick Theatre to a devoted, nearly sold-out mob who knew every lyric) was amazing. They didn’t need to replicate every bloop or bleep to exactitude, as Fenn and Co. found new ways into the old wine of this catalog.
Because 10cc’s boldly intelligent music and lyrics have forever been filled with complex twists and turns, there wasn’t time or chance to wallow in nostalgia on the stage of the Keswick. Gouldman’s original vocal parts (mostly in the lower range) blended beautifully with Hornal and Fenn’s upper registers in coverage of Stewart, Creme and Godley.
This meant going from the cranky art pop of “The Second Sitting For The Last Supper” and the stuttering pulse of “Art For Art’s Sake” to landing the epically silly (or silly epic) “Life Is A Minestrone” with ease and grace. More rock-y than their album versions and definitely adoring of Pink Floyd’s whifty “Brain Damage” (Fenn’s guitar work throughout “Feel The Benefit”), this 10cc gave the boogie of “The Wall Street Shuffle” extra bite, proved that “The Dean And I” and “Clockwork Creep” could be as cutting as they were complicated and brought genuinely tender and romantic tremors to one of pop’s tangiest, metaphoric drug songs, “I’m Mandy Fly Me.”
10cc’s whimsical lyrics from 50-year-old tunes such as “Old Wild Men” (“Old men of rock ’n’ roll came bearing music/Where are they now?”) couldn’t have been more poignant, and removing the treated vocal effects from haunting 1975 hit single “I’m Not In Love” gave it an edginess you would never have imagined it could have in its original billowy-clouds form. When Gouldman performed “Floating In Heaven,” a 2022 song that he recorded with Queen’s Brian May (whose earlier work benefited from 10cc’s more operatic inspirations), the track’s lilting peculiarity and gentle bizarre breeziness was in league with the rest of the set’s proceedings.
Ending the evening in encore with an icy-cool acapella “Donna” and the tartly rocking “Rubber Bullets” (two of the band’s earliest, quaintly funny British hits) made you hope, instantly, that 10cc would continue to tour, maybe welcome back additional first-quartet members (though Fenn and Hornal do just fine without impersonating anyone) and delve further into one of odd pop’s richest veins.
—A.D. Amorosi
