10cc and beyond
HE HAS written some of the greatest songs ever recorded — I’m
Not in Love for one – but 10cc’s Graham Gouldman still has musical heroes. So he felt both “honoured” and “slightly scared” when he was asked by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr to join his All-Starr Band tour of America and Europe in 2018.
“I’d be on stage playing and he would stand next to me, and sometimes I’d get lost in the music and then look around and go, ‘bloody hell, that’s Ringo Starr!’ It was impossible for me to forget who he was. And the reason being because the Beatles were my biggest influence.”
Growing up in Salford, Gouldman discovered music aged seven and at 11 fell in love with guitar-playing when a cousin brought him a cheap six-string back from Spain. It was at his local Jewish Lads Brigade that he met two of his future bandmates, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, while Eric Stewart of The Mindbenders completed the fourpiece, who in 1972 became 10cc.
Gouldman’s love of The Beatles was sparked by hearing Love Me Do in 1963. “I remember being really moved by it and seeing a picture of them on a magazine called Mersey
Beat. They were really mysterious looking, holding guitars that I’d never seen before, and those things hooked me and many other people into what they were doing.”
Not long before, Gouldman had started playing in local Manchester bands: the Jewish group The Whirlwinds, followed by the Columbia-signed Mockingbirds with Godley on drums. A raft of hit songs written for The Hollies, The Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits followed (For
Your Love, a song rejected by
Columbia nevertheless became
The
Yard
birds’ first Top 10 hit in 1965, Heart Full of Soul, Bus Stop, No Milk
Today are all his). His songwriting success led to a stint in New York, writing with pop producers Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz, before he returned to his friends back home.
Now inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Gouldman credits not just the Beatles for inspiring him, but his encouraging parents Betty and Hymie who never pushed him to take a “proper job”.
“I think they recognised that I had a gift. What was quite fun was we [The Whirlwinds] used to play working men’s clubs and in the north of England they’re pretty rough places. So they would never in a million years have gone to these places, but they came because it was supporting us.”
His father also happened to be a writer himself, writing plays, poetry, newspaper articles and running an amateur dramatic society alongside his paid day job in fashion. “He was very helpful to me when I started writing songs. He was a wordsmith and sometimes I’d write something and take it to him and he’d make it better, or he’d come up with ideas.” One such song was No Milk Today, to which
Gouldman’s father contributed the title and many lyrics.
Long before meeting Starr, Gouldman met Paul McCartney around 1973 when the Beatle used 10cc’s Strawberry Studios in Stockport to record his brother’s album. “They used to commute every day because Strawberry Studios was probably the best studio in the north of England at the time. We were recording our Sheet
Music album during the day and then Paul would come in later and record. So I saw a lot of him then; it was great.”
And, yes, he was starstruck when they first met. “I had a stupid conversation with him about guitar straps or something that, as I was saying it, I thought ‘this is idiotic’, but he was always very charming. He was quite used to normal intelligent human beings becoming babbling idiots. But then the more I saw him, the more comfortable it got.” Perhaps his most prized compliment is McCartney saying he wished he’d written I’m Not in Love, although backstage at Cropredy Festival a few years ago Robert Plant thanked him for writing For Your Love, a song that helped him through the audition to join Led Zeppelin.
Ringo has now repaid Graham the favour on his new, fifth, solo album, Modesty Forbids — his first in eight years (he released the EP
Play Nicely and Share in 2017) — on which the drummer plays on the opening song. Given that pretty much the only instrument Gouldman doesn’t play on the album is drums, and that Standing Next To
Me sounds like it’s come straight out of the Fab Four’s songbook, it was a vacancy waiting to be filled. “The record is an homage to Ringo and the Beatles,” says Gouldman. “I was thinking there’s only one person to get to play on this song, it’s daft otherwise.”
Gouldman by chance had a lunch booked with Ringo’s lawyer, and posed the question. He sent the track and eagerly awaited Starr’s response. “A few weeks later,