Considering this album contains a #1 hit, a #2 hit and a #10 hit, this album – the first proper debut album of 10cc after more false starts than a fixed Olympics – hasn’t half been forgotten over the years. Not as flashy as the follow-up ‘Sheet Music’, not as plush as ‘The Original Soundtrack’ or as downright weird as ‘How Dare You?’, this album always seems to get overlooked, which is poor reward for a record that's arguably the most 10cc-ish of 10cc albums and which simply by being the first release of a sound quite unlike any other around in 1970s music is hugely important. Like so many things with age the world has become blasé about 10cc, but when they arrived they were a breath of fresh air, music that could out-production glam while taking things more seriously and simultaneously being far less pompous than prog. Never before had pop music tickled the world’s funny bones and made them think and cry all at once while working on three levels: as tuneful pop fodder, as intellectual exercise and as emotional venting. Above all, this band were brilliantly weird, with this album especially full of ten catchy songs that could all have been big hits had the band written about normal subject matter, only they didn’t because mere pop songs would have been boring. This is a band with a message and who, a few holidays and re-thinks on from ‘Hotlegs’, are far readier for success this second (third?) time around and certain to make the most of it. Even by 10cc standards the sheer amount of ideas, hooks and switches in style are colossal and in other circumstances would be seen as showing off; instead its more likely that the band was simply grabbing a hold of their latest opportunity and grabbing it with every other limb in case it went away again.
Now, it was years before I knew this album as an album proper – all 10 tracks from the album are on the compilation ‘Best Of The Early Years’, a strong compilation with a weird name given that it contains ever-so-nearly all the recordings made by the band for Jonathon King’s record label – and I have to say that hearing this album in its proper order for the first time sounded really weird even by 10cc standards. That's a good weird though, in an unforgettable 'what the?... I've never heard anything like this before' kind of a way. Having been cooped up backing second-rate stars making second-rate albums for most of the past few years, the band are absolutely determined to stamp their authority all over this record and make an album that could never be confused for the work of anybody else. The topics, the sounds, the sudden interruptions from other 'songs' that really shouldn't fit - hearing the UK label recordings in one marvelous jumble of eccentricity is like having the happiest nervous breakdown of your life. Considering that this is the first record ever to carry the name '10cc' it's amazing in retrospect just how unlike anything else in popular music this is - and the band really don't get enough credit for that fact. Not least because Queen – working in the studio next door while the band were making follow-up ‘Sheet Music’ – stole the epic ideas, operatic values and even the vocal techniques for their own music which whatever you think about it is clearly working at a far lower frequency of levels.
What is perhaps interesting about this debut compared to the later albums is that while records like ‘The Original Soundtrack’ and ‘Sheet Music’ describe weird goings on usually without comment, the characters in these songs are in a struggle of some sort. Usually it’s against the establishment: ‘Rubber Bullets’ is underneath the laughs a plea for tolerance and that even life’s criminals deserve a break in life, taking in perhaps the bigger idea that we are all being punished for having fun. ‘Hospital Song’ has a hapless ignored patient getting revenge on the nurses and the visitors in the bed next door he doesn’t have, a tiny victory that’s the only thing that will bring him comfort (a lot of Godley-Creme songs are set in hospital, with ‘Get Well Soon’ from ‘Freeze Frame’ taking things even further by showing how thin the line between reality and hallucination is in a crazy world). ‘Headline Hustler’ is a particularly interesting song in this context, a reporter whose so jealous of the rich celebrities he writes about that he makes up stories about them to make a splash – a subversive idea of attacking authority. ‘Sand in My Face’ even has a victim standing up to a bully and winning his girl – and though it is an authority of one that’s kind of this album in microcosm. This is not as clear-cut as on later albums though and some rules are there to be followed: ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’ pays for the burglary of a motorbike with his life when the brakes fail, while ‘Speed Kills’ is another rule broken that ends in death (or so it is hinted by the sheer mood of the thing). ‘Fresh Air for My Mama’ is, underneath the sarcasm, quite a reverential portrayal of parenting when done with love, even if the narrator leaves anyway to give his mother space (though notably he regrets this when she dies). ‘The Dean and I’ too feels muddled in its message: what does its tale of ‘a working class boy not thought good enough for marriage who ends up marrying into the church’ really saying – that class rules are dumb? Or that the laugh is on the guy marrying the Dean’s daughter for working his way up the class and up the ladder to marry into a family when he’s then more worthy than they are anyway? Then of course there’s ‘Ships Don’t Just Disappear In The Night’, a song that questions the ‘rules’ of how the world is meant to work with its horror movie coming to life which sounds in many ways like one of Godley-Creme’s beloved art school lectures about how the world doesn’t have to work one way just because enough people tell you it does. Though 10cc and especially their debut are often described as ‘anarchic’ and ‘free-wheeling’ what’s interesting in retrospect is how staunchly this band believe in some rules for the betterment of humanity (namely the ones that prevent people from being killed). Breaking rules is, incidentally, a natural thing for a new band to do on their debut record: The Who and Pink Floyd, to name but two, had a similarly anarchic sense of fun on their debut records. The difference was though that both bands were barely out of their teens and slowly changed their minds about this; 10cc are already in their late twenties and will keep this irritation of the establishment up their whole career through, arguably long after they joined that very establishment and even on matters other ‘snarlier’ bands take as a good thing (it’s hard to imagine another band spending their reunion albums moaning about charity fundraisers the way 10cc do on [131] ‘Charity Begins At Home’ or annoyed at the high [140] ‘Age Of Consent’).
This is, of course, a debut in name only, not line-up. By the time of this album's release in 1972 (perfectly mopping up the sounds of the end of the glam rock and prog rock eras) 10cc had been working together, off and on, for almost as long as The Beatles' entire seven-year recording stretch. All four members of the band – Laurence Creme, Kevin Godley, Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart - had been veterans of the 1960s scene with a number of hugely successful, semi-successful or not-successful-at-all bands and between them had already chalked up some dozen top three hits (mainly courtesy of Eric’s stint in the Mindbenders and Graham’s compositions for The Hollies, Yardbirds and Herman’s Hermits) and became friends as well as rivals. In time The Mindbenders recruited Graham Gouldman as an extra guitar and songwriting voice; school pals Gouldman and Kevin Godley worked in 'The Mockingbirds' where they 'borrowed' spare songs from Godley's art college pal Lol Creme and when Eric Stewart decided being an engineering might turn into a valuable career and sunk all his money into a recording studio in Stockport he had three mates willing to help him out. By the 1970s the four members had worked, together and apart, on a quite mind-numbing array of wacky names, desperate to score a hit (we’ve already covered the only long-playing record among these names, Hotlegs’ ‘Think...School Stinks’ and if you think that’s an odd name for a band and a record you clearly haven't heard about Godley and Creme as Frabjoy and The Runcible Spoon yet ...) The minute they found one – with the hypnotic tape testing jam [7] ‘Neanderthal Man’ – it was typically for a song they couldn’t possibly hope to repeat and after doing everything in their power not to repeat it and turn into pastoral ballad-wielding hippies instead the band fizzled out.
It was more chance than anything else that the band's breakthrough hit 'Donna' (a #2 hit in the UK, matching 'Neanderthal Man') happened to come under the name 10cc rather than, say, 'Doctor Father', the other moniker used that year. The band used and discarded names with every release back then so didn't pay much attention to the name - actually the idea was one of UK Records founder Jonathon King's and related both to a dream that he'd recently had where he picked up a music paper and read that a band named '10cc' were top of the charts (he was just a couple of singles early too, with third single [23] 'Rubber Bullets' making it to #1). At around the same time he’d read that a new medical report had revealed that the average force of a male ejaculation was 9ccs (the joke being that 10cc were clearly better than average). The band probably didn't think twice about the name, never expecting to get a hit (for starters they'd actually intended the more 'Hotlegs' style B-side [27] 'Waterfall' would be their first release, not the more cutesy-pie 'Donna', and had to re-think their career when it was) and had to pretend not to hear for the next few decades whenever the press asked them where they got their name from (especially one legendarily embarrassing appearance on kids TV program 'Saturday Superstore'. 'We'll tell you when you're older!' Eric deadpanned to a hapless presenter). 10cc had waited so long for a hit and after rather letting the success of 'Neanderthal Man' slip away from them with a series of songs that often sounded great but sounded perhaps a little bit too much like 'other people', they decided to make a record that couldn't have sounded like anyone else and built on every single novelty single they'd released during their many years in isolation. As a debut '10cc' is best summed up as free-wheeled anarchism, or the sheer joy of being able to break rules you've been dying to break for years, with no need to pander to an established fanbase, teeny-bopper fan or even, by and large the record label (after the success of 'Donna', King let the band do what they wanted by and large, which is a great quality to have a in a record boss even if events since have put King's selling of novelty acts to impressionable teenagers in a rather questionable light).
You might not quite think that from hearing the albums as nature (or at least as Jonathon King) intended though. At first 10cc's productions sound repetitive and recycled and nearly the whole of the first side finds the band trying to spoof doo-wop in the style of their first hit ‘Donna’. That's clearly a mistake and slows the record down to a crawl - 'Donna' was one of those singles that just got lucky, released at a time when nostalgia for the 1950s was at a peak and when Lol's pretty brazen asexual falsetto caught the mood of the David Bowie and Marc Bolan world. It is funny but it's a punch-line that can only really be told once and hearing it straight after the failed second single 'Johnny Don't Do It' (another 1950s doo-wop spoof, this time of biker films and rebels without a clue, this time with an all too sarcastic synthesizer laugh to make sure we get the 'joke', something 10cc thankfully never feel the need to use again) and 'Sand In His Face' (which is punchier in all senses of the word, but still a 1950s joke about bodybuilding at the beach that stopped being funny circa 1959) is tiring. Hearing these three songs in a row might well be the biggest struggle of the entire 10cc catalogue as you fear with a heavy heart that the whole record's going to be full of songs about stereotypes like Donna and Johnny Kowalski (also known of course as 'Johnny Angel') and a nine-stone weakling. It's like hearing Shakin' Stevens ten years early, only the songs are actually funny - just as Stevens' albums sank without trace compared to his singles, though, these songs work best in small doses - you certainly don't need three of the things together (four if you count the nostalgia opening to 'The Dean and I' on track four until the song gets seriously weird from track five onwards and goes in directions only 10cc could walk in). 10cc are treating the first third of the album as if they're learning from the mistakes of the past when they couldn't find a second song for [7] 'Neanderthal Man' to evolve into and went in the opposite direction, confusing everyone - only when 'Johnny' flops badly do 10cc realize that maybe doing something different isn't such a bad thing. Sadly, the opening of this record is, I think, the one reason why '10cc' never gets talked about in the same breath as the other Godley-Creme albums, even though the rest of it is every bit as clever, original and downright bonkers.
Thankfully the third single is when 10cc are properly born. 'Rubber Bullets' always gets overlooked compared to [43] 'I'm Not In Love' and [74] 'Dreadlock Holiday', but it's the most 10cc-ish of the grand trilogy of 10cc number ones; deeply funny but also bristling with very real feelings of indignation and outrage below the surface. There's a party in the prison that gets out of hand – that sounds hilarious. There are savage beatings from the prison guards who don't get the joke – that sounds terrible. Where's the point at which we stop laughing? The 10cc canon is full of songs like this: [35] 'The Wall Street Shuffle' [58] 'Art For Art's Sake' and most of the late-period, overlooked 1980s 10cc are drawn from similar wells of comic-tragedies where life is absurd and only funny till someone gets hurt by that, while later album tracks like [55] 'I Wanna Rule The World!!!!' (in which a 'weedy four-eyed creep' plots vengeance on bullies everywhere) and [59] 'Rock and Roll Lullaby' (in which a weary parent swears his boy to sleep in the sing-songy voice he likes so much) are drawn from similarly 'real' places. The big difference from side one to side two (and unlike most albums this one was made more or less in order, ish) is that the prisoners of 'Rubber Bullets', the victims of 'Speed Kills' and even the over-exaggerated full-bladdered narrator of 'Hospital Song' are all real and recognizable. Yes, the situations are funny (well maybe not the middle song, which is more bitter dark irony) but the people in them aren't laughing. There's a real crusade for things that have to change underlying these songs that will serve 10cc well and make them far more than just another novelty band who are only trying to make us laugh with their daftness and who more, often than not, aren't that funny (try The Beautiful South for one, who are to 10cc what a knock-knock joke about being a pair of curtains is to Douglas Adams). People tend to dismiss 10cc as a 'clever' band who wrote 'comic' songs, but that's as wrong as saying Gilbert and Sullivan only did the same for the Victorian age: both are at their best holding up a mirror to the then-modern world and showing how daft and as a result how tragic it is, getting away with more political commentary than their more serious-minded colleagues precisely because nobody takes a joke seriously (except fans in on said joke). There's a lot more anger, particularly on this first album, than 10cc are ever given credit for: anger on behalf of the bullied, generally, from prisoners to beach-going weaklings to scared movie-watchers terrified of Vincent Price. Godley and Creme will mine this source of phobia and frustration later on their own series of songs about bullies (most of them on their impenetrable second album 'L' in 1978), but for now it's the loudest shouting part of a whole lot of ideas on this record which are never really studied by the band as a unit again.
Most 10cc albums sound positively schizophrenic, with every single track pointing in an entirely new direction that the band will never attempt again, but this first album especially sounds as if it's being pulled in two, with the tongue-in-cheek parodies of the first side giving way to a much more serious and worried sounding second. Not everything on this album works – opener ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’ and the Beach Movie spoof ‘Sand In My Face’ take the joke a little too far and are uncomfortable for fans more used to the subtlety of 10cc at their peak – but then there are other tracks like the truly unique horror comedy song ‘Ships Don’t Disappear In The Night’ and the under-rated near instrumental ‘Speed Kills’ that demonstrate that 10cc had already mastered their craft this early on and knew at least some of the time what they were doing. No one else was writing material like this, no one. The band even get a joke in at tabloid journalists before any tabloid journalists have shown any interest in the band yet (with 'Headline Hustler' a far funnier look at the paparazzi than the sort of things most 'star' bands ever come up with, including most AAA ones).
A word, too, about how different 10cc were to anybody who had come before – and’ let’s face it, there haven’t exactly been many bands like them since. We’re used to the band’s sound nowadays but back in the shallow, empty world of glam rock (the worst music genre of all in my opinion, as at least disco was fun, sort of and punk had something to say, even if it didn’t always say it well) this was a completely new revelation – it was catchy, it was glamorous and it was easy to understand and singalong to but shallow it was not. There’s always so many levels going on in 10cc’s songs that it's hard to know whether to enjoy them as simple memorable pop songs, diatribes about the society at the time or a knowing song that’s already laughing at its clichés before we’ve had a chance to notice them. This album’s ‘Speed Kills’ is a case in point. Its sounds at first like a car song, with a song about ‘driving home’. Then we notice the gentle sexual innuendo about finding it ‘hard to make it’ one night and how its ‘got to be the right time’. But no, the song switches on us again and it really is a song about a car crash, with the song switching from finding ‘the right time’ to finding ‘the main line’ and we’re suddenly back in the driving seat again, as it were. Suddenly it's a song in mourning: it's not a fine day at all; the title was right, not the lyrics. All that in barely twelve words (and a lot of repetition). Nobody, but nobody else was making songs this complex for mainstream radio and the few that had tried it occasionally – The Beatles, Beach Boys, The Hollies and The Kinks – had pretty much given up by 1972, either breaking up or settling for simpler songs to soothe their dwindling audiences.
Part of the band’s magic sounds comes from the musicianship in the band. All four members were multi-instrumentalists of sorts, with a distinctive guitar-led sound that equally owed its sound to both Eric Stewart and Lol Creme (both playing lead guitar – and I mean lead guitar, as both are tugging the song quite forcefully in different directions – on most of these early recordings), a flashy sound completely in keeping with the glam rock sounds of the early 1970s and yet somehow deeper, successfully channeling the deeper feel of the lyrics. Not that you ever get much time to focus on any one part of each song as 10cc are always moving, always switching between keys, verses, lead singers and production values. It’s like hearing a bunch of mini-rock operas (back in the days when 10cc were still recording songs short enough to be mini not maxi rock operas) condensed into three minutes. There’s never been a sound quite like it since, which is possibly just as well as I’m not sure if my brain could cope with another quickfire band on this website. If you’re a fan its fascinating to hear 10cc’s early sound being put into practice for the first time here.
The debut album isn't perhaps the smartest card in the 10cc deck, thanks in the main to those opening three songs that let the side down rather. There is though much witty wordplay and a lot going on to distract you even on the first three songs, plus tracks four-ten end up not just going in a different direction to each other but in a different direction to anything the band - or anyone else - would ever do again. That partly stems from the fact that 10cc are already doing the single greatest thing that any band could do to widen their scope: they're writing in pairs or threes, with everyone getting a chance to write at least one song with somebody else (true democracy in any band). However all the band get their 'own' albums at one stage of another and compared to the records that come later this is Lol's shining moment: all but silenced by 1976 he takes lead on 'Donna' 'Rubber Bullets' 'The Dean and I' 'Johnny Don't Do It' 'The Hospital Song' and much of 'Sand In My Face'. Many of the quirky touches on this album sound much more like his contributions than the others' do, perhaps because that sudden success with 'Donna' has boosted his confidence. It helps that Lol belongs in this era a bit more than the others (Eric and Graham tend to have a very 1960s sound, even if they came to their biggest fame in the 1970s while Kevin is pretty much spot on for the slightly falsetto 1970 sound, but Lol is right at home in the era of Bowie and Bolan with a campiness and sarcasm that's entirely fitting for this age). What’s interesting is that he is in many ways the least experienced: the only hit he’s ever been a part of before this is [7] ‘Neanderthal Man’. In many ways this album is more what people were expecting from that single – singalong surrealness. Don't worry though, like all 10cc albums (at least until 'Windows In The Jungle' and the two reunion albums) this is a democracy at work and it works precisely because there are four visionaries embellishing each other's songs and making them work (elsewhere on this album Eric gets just two lead vocals, Kevin just one, Graham nothing and 'Speed Kills' is shared meaning that Lol dominates half this record). In truth everybody gets to shine somewhere on every song and will until Godley-Creme leave the band, which is why their loss is such a heavy one - a band this tight-knit can't make up for missing members when everyone is so integral to the sound and spirit of a unified group. That split is in the future though (albeit unthinkably close at four years' time given how in tune the band are here), for now 10cc are one of the brightest and bushy-tailed bands of the 1970s and have stuffed their arrangements full of so many goodies I'm still discovering them years into owning them. '10cc' might not be the very best evidence of their talent, but it's not as far off as many people say - you can laugh, you can cry, 'Speed Kills' 'Headline Hustler' and 'Ships Don't Just Disappear In The Night' are three of the juicer oddball 10cc comedies and you can add in three hit singles ('Rubber Bullets' coming in gorgeous extended raucous minute-long feedback-drenched guitar solo nirvana which gets cruelly cut from all the compilations around); that’s not actually a bad return on a ten track album by a 100-watt band limited by the blandness of the opening three songs.


Here's what Wikipedia said:

10cc is the debut album by British rock band 10cc. It was recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, which was part-owned by guitarist and engineer Eric Stewart, and released on Jonathan King's UK Records [No: UKAL 1005] label. The album reached No.36 in the UK.

Release and promotion
Three of its four UK singles reached the Top 10 in the charts, including #1 hit "Rubber Bullets". The fifth single "Headline Hustler" was released only in the American market to promote a tour in the USA.

The closing track, "Fresh Air for My Mama", was a reworking of "You Didn't Like It Because You Didn't Think of It", the B-side of 1970's "Neanderthal Man", an international hit by the band under its former name of Hotlegs.

Some versions of the album have an altered running order.

The 2000 CD reissue of the album featured all the b-sides of the album's singles. The album in its entirety along with 2000's bonus cuts appeared, along with 10cc's second album, "Sheet Music" and all its released bonus cuts, on 2004 "10cc - The Complete UK Recordings," on Varèse Sarabande Records.

Critical reception
Reviewing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau wrote: "If you only know the forty-five-rpm version of 'Rubber Bullets,' then you missed their best rhyme: 'balls and chains' with 'balls and brains.' A calculated, devilishly clever version of what the Beach Boys ought to be doing. Or the Bonzo Dog Band should have done. Or something."[2]