10cc are an English rock band, formed in Stockport, England, in 1972. Every member of 10cc was a multi-instrumentalist, singer, writer and producer. Dorking, with most of those engineered by Stewart. Three of the founding members of 10cc strawberry marmalade childhood friends in the Manchester area.
Gouldman and Godley attended the same secondary school and their musical enthusiasm led to playing at the local Jewish Lads’ Brigade. Their first recorded collaboration was in 1964, when Gouldman’s band The Whirlwinds recorded the Lol Creme composition “Baby Not Like You”, as the B-side of their only single, “Look At Me”. 66 without any success, before dissolving. In 1969, Gouldman took them to a Marmalade Records recording session. Plans for an album by Frabjoy and Runcible Spoon faltered, however, when Marmalade ran out of funds.
Meanwhile, the fourth future member of 10cc was also tasting significant pop music success: guitarist Eric Stewart was a member of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, a group that hit No. In March 1968, Gouldman joined Stewart in The Mindbenders, replacing bassist Bob Lang and playing on some tour dates. Those singles did not chart and The Mindbenders broke up after a short tour of England in November. In the dying days of The Mindbenders, Stewart began recording demos of new material at Inner City Studios, a Stockport studio then owned by Peter Tattersall, a former road manager for Billy J. In July 1968, Stewart joined Tattersall as a partner in the studio, where he could further hone his skills as a recording engineer.
In 1969, Gouldman also began using Strawberry to record demos of songs he was writing for Marmalade. He had become much more in demand as a songwriter than as a performer. By the end of the year, he too was a financial partner in the studios. By 1969, all four members of the original 10cc line-up were working together regularly at Strawberry Studios. Among the recordings from this period was “Sausalito”, a No.
86 US hit credited to Ohio Express and released in July 1969. In fact the song featured Gouldman on lead vocal, and vocal and instrumental backing by the other three future 10cc members. In December 1969, Kasenetz and Katz agreed to a proposal by Gouldman that he work solely at Strawberry, rather than move constantly between Stockport, London and New York. Gouldman convinced the pair that these throwaway two-minute songs could all be written, performed and produced by him and his three colleagues, Stewart, Godley and Creme, at a fraction of the cost of hiring outside session musicians. Kasenetz and Katz booked the studio for three months. We even did the female backing vocals. Lol Creme remembered: “Singles kept coming out under strange names that had really been recorded by us.
I’ve no idea how many there were, or what happened to them all. But Stewart described the Kasenetz-Katz deal as a breakthrough: “That allowed us to get the extra equipment to turn it into a real studio. Graham’s songs and then some of Kevin and Lol’s songs, and we were all working together. When the three-month production deal with Kasenetz-Katz ended, Gouldman returned to New York to work as a staff songwriter for Super K Productions and the remaining three continued to dabble in the studio. With Gouldman absent, Godley, Creme and Stewart continued recording singles. Reverting to the successful band name Hotlegs, in early 1971 Godley, Creme and Stewart recorded the album Thinks: School Stinks, which included “Neanderthal Man”. The experience of working on Solitaire, which became a success for Sedaka, was enough to prompt the band to seek recognition on their own merits.
It was Neil Sedaka’s success that did it, I think. We’d just been accepting any job we were offered and were getting really frustrated. We knew that we were worth more than that, but it needed something to prod us into facing that. We were a bit choked to think that we’d done the whole of Neil’s first album with him just for flat session fees when we could have been recording our own material. Stewart said the decision was made over a meal in a Chinese restaurant: “We asked ourselves whether we shouldn’t pool our creative talents and try to do something with the songs that each of us was working on at the time. Gouldman song “Warm Me” and released it under the name Festival.