‘Queen blew us off stage.... we didn’t have a Freddie’
I’M NOT In Love, Rubber Bullets, Donna... 10cc were one of the biggest British bands of the 1970s. So why aren’t they more revered? “It was our fault,” drummer Kevin Godley explains. “We didn’t look like rock stars.we weren’t snake-hipped wonders.we didn’t have an image.we were ordinary guys and our dress sense was ordinary.
“Our contemporaries – Roxy Music, Bowie and T Rex – either spent time and money to manufacture a look or naturally had some kind of visual connection.we didn’t, which I find puzzling now as we had two art school guys with a graphic design background. Elvis wouldn’t have been Elvis without the way he looked and how he moved. But we weren’t capable of doing it.”
What they were capable of was writing hits, including Life ISA Minestrone,art Forart’s Sake and I’m Mandy, Fly Me.
Singer-songwriter Kevin, 74, still is. His first solo album, Muscle Memory, finds him penning songs around other musicians’ unfinished numbers.
He got the idea after two people sent him instrumental music out of the blue, asking if he’d turn them into songs. It worked well, so Kevin posted an invitation on the now defunct Pledge Music site, asking if anyone fancied doing the same. “I thought
I’d get maybe 10 or 20 responses,” he says. “I got 286!”
Godley listened to the tracks before looking at who’d sent them “to give everyone the same chance, it was like being blindfolded.the standard was good and very diverse. Some were nothing like anything I’d ever done before. It was fascinating”.
He whittled them down to 11, then added melodies and lyrics.the album is out in December but he’s already releasing a track every fortnight.
His lyrics are surprisingly dark, tackling gun control, racism and civil unrest. “I wasn’t intending to be political but I wrote the first song in response to the 2017 Charlottesville neo-nazi rally. It was the opposite of what I’d done before but it gave me the confidence to believe I can do stuff like that.”
After a 50-year pop career, and decades as a sought-after video director, he’s rich enough never to have to work again, but Kevin says, “every time I stop, I get fidgety, I feel guilty; I get such a thrill from discovering things and making things.”
Born in Prestwich, Lancashire, to Jewish parents, Godley grew up in the same street as bandmate Laurence “Lol” Creme. Kevin played drums in 10cc but started out as a self-confessed dire guitarist and bassist.a neighbour’s son had a white Premier drum kit he couldn’t play...
“I quickly discovered that I was 10 times better than he was – without having a single lesson.” He never needed one. Instead, Kevin picked up his technique by listening to Motown classics.
Both he and Lol were art students, Godley at Stoke-ontrent, Creme in Birmingham. “We used to get together on
‘I quickly discovered I was a 10 times better drummer than he was – without a lesson’