Quiet craftsman
Marcus Berkmann Iheard a rare thing the other day: a humorous 'hidden' track on a CD that might actually raise a smile. It cropped up on the first solo CD in more than 30 years by Graham Gouldman, once of 10cc and Wax, If you have never heard of him, it's not wholly surprising: he has been plying his sortgwriterly trade in the quietest possible way all these years, while actually writing an amazing number of hits, from The
Yardbirds' 'For Your Love' and Herman's Hermits Bus Stop' onwards. I became a fan during lOcc's heyday in the mid-1970s. Gouldman played bass, cowrote many of the hits (I'm Not In Love' being his pension plan) and usually sang one track an album, which was often the best thing on it. He was the archetypal quiet craftsman, and true to his craft he has carried on writing and recording while his lOcc colleagues have drifted out of view. And yet, perhaps inevitably, it is lOcc for which he is best known. 'What comes first, the music or the words?' he sings over a one-take acoustic guitar, 'Do you still see Key and Lol? Did you split amicably, you and the lads from lOcc?' There follows a list of stupid questions that he is presumably asked nearly every day of his life, mainly by German journalists with wispy beards, who are famous for this. It's 17 years since the band split, 22 years since they had a hit worthy of the name, and yet it's all anyone wants to know about. It must drive him up the wall.
lOcc, of course, couldn't be less fashionable these days, which may be why I still feel perversely fond of them. Their clever, funny, adventurous and viciously tuneful pop was, at its best, the missing link between Roxy Music and The Beatles. In 1976, after four increasingly sophisticated albums, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme left to record a three-record set based around some ridiculous guitar-synthesiser gizmo
they had invented, called the 'Gizmo'. In response Gouldman and Eric Stewart recorded the wonderful and virtually ignored Deceptive Bends, then hired a new backing band, toured to death and lost the plot, releasing some dreadfully dull albums before giving up in 1983. (It's a story well told in Giles Smith's superb pop memoir Lost In Music, recently reissued by Picador. Smith was equally entranced by lOcc in his youth, and seems equally embarrassed by it now. But those later albums do take some forgiving.) Gouldman, however, soon found a new collaborator. Andrew Gold was an American singer-songwriter best known for the song that later became the theme tune for The Golden Girls, 'Thank You For Being A Friend'. Somehow Gouldman managed to overcome this, for together they formed Wax and recorded three albums for RCA in the late 1980s. None of the three has aged well, dominated as they are by the clattery drum machines and blankets of synthesiser that smothered so much 1980s pop. But 'Bridge To Your Heart', from 1987, remains an inspiring piece of work, and all the albums have great pop moments. Gouldman is a pop man through and through — he writes marvellous tunes and makes records that sound great on transistor radios, just as everyone used to. In the 1990s such skills went out of fashion, and Gouldman disappeared for a while. Then a record company waved large cheques in front of him and Eric Stewart to record again as lOcc. Pathetically, forlornly, I rushed out to buy both the albums they made. The first was a real pudding, horribly overproduced by Steely Dan's Gary Katz. The second was like two halves of a solo album. Gouldman and Stewart, who may not have been getting on as well as they used to, were now writing and recording separately. Stewart's songs were feeble, Gouldman's crisper than you might have expected. End of lOcc for good, then more silence, until Gouldman's album, And Another Thing. . . , appeared just before Christmas.
I don't want to oversell this album. It's a very low-key affair, recorded for little cost and virtually unpromoted — I have yet to see a single review. Gouldman's songs these days are relatively gentle affairs, with strictly workmanlike lyrics often written by other people. There's little of the technical adventurousness of the lOcc albums, or the production sheen that characterised Wax. But the muse is still intact. Half a dozen songs here have a McCartney-like directness that burrows its way into your subconscious. If he were American, we'd all be applauding a great pop survivor. As he's from Manchester, we pay him no attention at all.
Still, at least everyone remembers lOcc. According to his hidden track, Gouldman is still asked to play 'Art For Art's Sake'. That must be an interesting challenge, with only an acoustic guitar. .. .
Previous page
