I’M MANDY FLY ME BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 20/03/1976
Highest Position: 6
Weeks in Chart: 9
SILLY LOVE BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 14/09/1974
Highest Position: 24
Weeks in Chart: 7
I’M NOT IN LOVE BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 31/05/1975
Highest Position: 1
Weeks in Chart: 11
THE WALL STREET SHUFFLE BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 15/06/1974
Highest Position: 10
Weeks in Chart: 10
THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 11/12/1976
Highest Position: 6
Weeks in Chart: 11
RUBBER BULLETS BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 19/05/1973
Highest Position: 1
Weeks in Chart: 15
THE DEAN AND I BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 25/08/1973
Highest Position: 10
Weeks in Chart: 8
DREADLOCK HOLIDAY BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 12/08/1978
Highest Position: 1
Weeks in Chart: 13
DONNA BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 23/09/1972
Highest Position: 2
Weeks in Chart: 13
ART FOR ART’S SAKE BY 10CC
Entered Chart: 29/11/1975
Highest Position: 5
Weeks in Chart: 10
10cc were consisted of four guys. Graham Gouldman who played in bands in the 1960s and it was he that wrote For Your Love for the Yardbirds and he also wrote No Milk Today for Hermans Hermits. In 1970 as a member of a group called Hotlegs he had a big UK hit with Neanderthal man where he was with soon to be 10cc members Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Eric Stewart was the fourth member
Kevin Godley and Lol Creme became a duo in the 1980s with many chart hits.
10cc were named after the amount of sperm a guy can produce. With that in mind,we move on. Some of the group members were producing and being backing singers to Neil Sedaka on his Solitaire single, but at the same time they were working on their very first single that reached No.2 in 1972 and was called Donna written by Godley and Creme.
In 1973 they had their first number One hit single with Rubber Bullets a song supposed to be about the troubles in Northern Ireland. But it was so vague that the BBC let it get airplay.
The next single the same year was another Godley and Creme song called The Dean And I getting to No. 10 in the UK charts. The song tells the story of how an American guy met his sweetheart and the story is told to his child.
1974 and the group were still on Jonathon Kings record label but they were not earning money. But, there was another hit called Wall Street Shuffle, which was a form of homage to the fact their last single hit the U.S. charts. Two more hits one at No.24 followed, and that was Silly Love and the much bigger top ten hit Life Is A Minestrone.
Eric Stewart (from a BBC Radio Wales interview): "We'd finished in the studio, Strawberry Studios, we'd finished recording and Lol was staying with me at the time, Lol Creme, and we were driving home and listening to BBC radio and this guy says 'mmmrrhhr mmhmrmr strone' and Lol says, 'Did that guy say life is a minestrone?' I said I don't know but what a great song, what a great idea for a song, what a great title. Life is a minestrone, isn't it. It's a mixture of everything we pile in there and of course once we sat down to start writing 'Life Is A Minestrone,' well, what's death? Death's got to be a cold lasagna, you know, 3 days old, stuck in the fridge, you don't want to eat it, and once you get on, on a roll like that about food and, and feeling, we had it written in a day."
In 1975 the group changed record labels and appeared on Mercury Records. The first song to be released was I'm Not In Love a huge international hit going to No.1 in many regions. The song came from the album Original Soundtracks. The song was a massive technical hit by overdubbing 256 voices to make the choir effects. The song launched the group globally and was written by Stewart and Gouldman.
That same year the group had Art For Arts Sake based around a saying of Graham Gouldman's father.
1976 saw the group only have one big hit with I'm Mandy Fly Me, this was the year the group split up.following creative differences between all the band members.
In a radio interview,[2] Stewart recalled the origins of the song:
“
National Airlines used to have this beautiful poster that they displayed of this gorgeous stewardess inviting you onto the plane. Now her name wasn't Mandy actually, it was something like, er, oh gosh knows, "I'm Cindy", a very American name. "I'm Cindy, fly me" which was a quite sexual connotation as well, but I remember seeing in Manchester this beautiful poster and just below it was this tramp, I mean a serious tramp, quite a raggedy guy, looking up at this girl, and I thought God, do you know, there's a song there. Look at that guy looking up at Cindy-fly-me and I know he's never gonna get on an aeroplane, I don't think, except in his dreams.
So I brought it back, the idea back to the studio, where we were writing for the How Dare You! album, and put it to the guys: "Anybody interested in this 'I'm Mandy Fly Me'". I'd switched it to Mandy. And Graham said "yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I've got some ideas, I've got some chords. Let's slot those things in, try it, mess it around". We wrote it, and we didn't like it. We, we scrapped it. It just wasn't going anywhere.
But, enter from stage left, ha ha, the "wicked villain" Kevin Godley, twiddling his moustache, says "I know what's wrong with it. Let's sit down again." He said "I think it just gets too bland, it just goes on, on one plane, your verses and your middles and your der-der-der, they're all going on the one plane. What it needs is someone to go 'Bash' on the side of your head". So we changed the rhythm completely, and we put two whacking great guitar solos in there, in the middle of this quiet, soft, floaty song. Once we'd got that idea in, it, it just gelled into something else. Again, impossible to dance to, as a lot of 10cc tracks were, but once Kevin had put that in, he became the third writer in the song so we were quite democratic in that way.
The next album Bloody Tourists produced a surprise No. 1 for the group. In fact when played people did not believe it was 10cc as it was a reggae style song. It was Dreadlock Holiday which was inspired by their keyboard artist.
