10cc - Apollo Theatre, Glasgow, Britain, 2-25-1982

The British band 10cc put out a lot of great albums and singles in the 1970s. But the 1980s weren't so kind to them, as they lost two of their four songwriters in 1976 (Kevin Godley and Lol Creme). But at the time of this concert the other two remained, Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart. Stewart would leave just one year later, in 1983.

So this is a good time for a 10cc concert. True, they already were past their peak of popularity and creativity. But the Gouldman and Stewart version of the band had some big hits after Godley and Creme left, such as "Good Morning Judge," "The Things We Do for Love," and "Dreadlock Holiday." This concert contains those songs, plus all the hits from the earlier years.

The band's commercial fortunes fell fast in the early 1980s as music trends were changing. The album they were promoting on this tour, 1981's "Ten Out of 10," failed to chart in either the U.S. or Britain. However, there are only four songs here from that album, and naturally they are the stronger ones.

This concert is completely unreleased. In fact, there's no official live album from this era (between when Godley and Creme left in 1976 and when Stewart left in 1983). But I picked this one because of the excellent sound quality. 

However, there was one flaw. I found a list of all the songs the band played in this concert, and three were missing. I'm guessing it was broadcast on the radio and those three were cut out. I wanted to hear what the full concert would have been, so I found other live versions with similar sound quality. I had to use a 1980 concert in Mainz, Germany for two of them, "From Rochdale to Ocho Rios" and the sole cover, "Roll Over Beethoven." I used a 1983 concert in Rotterdam, Netherlands, for the other one, "Lying Here with You."

This album is one hour and 32 minutes long.

01 The Power of Love (10cc)
02 The Wall Street Shuffle (10cc)
03 talk (10cc)
04 Don't Ask (10cc)
05 I'm Mandy, Fly Me (10cc)
06 talk (10cc)
07 Good Morning Judge (10cc)
08 talk (10cc)
09 Memories (10cc)
10 The Things We Do for Love (10cc)
11 Art for Art's Sake (10cc)
12 talk (10cc)
13 Lying Here with You (10cc)
14 From Rochdale to Ocho Rios (10cc)
15 Les Nouveaux Riches (10cc)
16 Dreadlock Holiday (10cc)
17 Feel the Benefit (10cc)
18 talk (10cc)
19 I'm Not in Love (10cc)
20 Rubber Bullets (10cc)
21 Silly Love (10cc)
22 Life Is a Minestrone (10cc)
23 Roll Over Beethoven (10cc)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/F3Tz9DCc

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/FHCjSt4qPPI30T5/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/fMVnG

I couldn't find any good photos of the band in concert in 1982, or even 1981 or 1983. So I had to resort to this, from May 1980. It's from an appearance on a German TV show.

The Mindbenders - BBC Sessions (1966-1968)

I'll be explaining more what I'm doing in a different post soon, but I'm going through a phase where I'm posting as many BBC sessions as I can, even if it's from musical artists I'm not a big fan of. BBC sessions need to be better known in general, especially when there's no official album for a given artist. And now that I'm using the audio editing programs Spleeter and X-Minus to wipe the BBC DJ talking from the music in a better way than ever before, I feel even more of a need to post these sessions.

I'm happy to say that I'm not the only person working on improving BBC sessions lately. My musical friend Lilpanda feels the same way I do, and has also learned how to use the X-Minus program. This particular album is almost entirely his effort. Most importantly, he wiped the DJ vocals. I merely added the info to the mp3 tags and balanced the volume levels from song to song.

Lilpanda turned me onto the Mindbenders. I knew there was a British group called Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders that had the big international hit "The Game of Love" in 1965. I also knew Fontana split from the band in 1966 (for a solo career that quickly fizzled out), and the Mindbenders had a big international hit of their own later in 1966, "A Groovy Kind of Love." But after that, their popularity declined, and they broke up in 1968.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on them:

The Mindbenders - Wikipedia

Beyond that, I didn't know much, and I hadn't heard their music beyond a hit or two. However, I was intrigued when I found out that allmusic.com is very high on them. Here's what their write-up on the band says after discussing their "A Groovy Kind of Love" hit:

"Had the group only succeeded in locating a decent follow-up, they might well have developed into one of the finest British bands of the late '60s. Instead, a series of disastrous choices of 45s condemned them to the ranks of rank also-rans, and it is only later that the sheer quality of their other work -- material hitherto lost on two Mindbenders LPs -- had been re-evaluated sufficiently to let listeners state that here was one of the greatest of all Britain's post-beat bands."

What also intrigued me is the band's connection to the 1970s group 10cc. After Wayne Fontana left, the band's lead vocalist and main songwriter was Eric Stewart. He would later be one of the lead vocalists and songwriters in 10cc. And when one of the other three members of the band left in early 1968, the replacement was expert songwriter Graham Gouldman, who would be one of the other lead vocalists and songwriters in 10cc. Unfortunately, the record company wasn't very interested in Stewart's songwriting, so most of the songs they did were covers. And Gouldman joined too late to have much of an impact, although "Schoolgirl" and "Uncle Joe the Ice Cream Man" were written by him. (He probably plays on the last five songs here.)

If you enjoy British pop from the 1960s like the Hollies and the Move, you should enjoy this. I wish they would have done more originals and fewer covers of very well known songs, but you can't have everything. 

Thirteen of the 22 songs here have "[Edit]" in their titles. Those are the ones where Lilpanda wiped the BBC DJ talking while keeping the underlying music. 

All of the songs are officially unreleased. Many of the songs here were not released by the band in studio versions, such as "Ride Your Pony," "We Can Work It Out," "Rock Me Baby," "Omaha," and "My White Bicycle." to name just a few.

This album is 55 minutes long.

01 A Groovy Kind of Love (Mindbenders)
02 Love Is Good [Edit] (Mindbenders)
03 Don't Cry No More [Edit] (Mindbenders)
04 The Way You Do the Things You Do [Edit] (Mindbenders)
05 Can't Live with You, Can't Live without You (Mindbenders)
06 All Night Worker [Edit] (Mindbenders)
07 Land of 1000 Dances - In the Midnight Hour - See See Rider - Jenny, Jenny (Mindbenders)
08 Seventh Son (Mindbenders)
09 Ashes to Ashes (Mindbenders)
10 Ride Your Pony [Edit] (Mindbenders)
11 Cool Jerk [Edit] (Mindbenders)
12 I Want Her She Wants Me (Mindbenders)
13 Homework [Edit] (Mindbenders)
14 The Morning After [Edit] (Mindbenders)
15 We'll Talk about It Tomorrow (Mindbenders)
16 The Letter [Edit] (Mindbenders)
17 We Can Work It Out (Mindbenders)
18 Rock Me Baby [Edit] (Mindbenders)
19 Blessed Are the Lonely (Mindbenders)
20 Hold On Baby (Mindbenders)
21 Omaha [Edit] (Mindbenders)
22 Uncle Joe the Ice Cream Man [Edit] (Mindbenders)
23 My White Bicycle [Edit] (Mindbenders)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700806/TMINDBNDRS1966-1968_BBSessons_atse.zip.html

The photo used for the cover art is from 1967, before Graham Gouldman joined the group.

Various Artists - Covered: Graham Gouldman, Volume 3: 1972-2017

In recent weeks, I've posted the first two albums in this series. Here's the third and last. Note that this period covers Graham Gouldman's success with the band 10cc, but I haven't included any 10cc versions of songs whatsoever. The whole idea of this album series is to present other musicians doing his songs, not versions by bands he was in.

1972 was a pivotal year in the musical career of Gouldman. Prior to that year, he'd had many successes as a songwriter, but his own career as a singer and performer had never really gotten off the ground. But he hooked up with three other talented singer songwriters as 10cc, and they started having hits. Gouldman is still leading 10cc as I write this, though the other three fell away and the hits generally stopped coming after the 1970s.

One thing about 10cc is that they were always considered quirky, often classified as "art rock" instead of just rock. Their style was so unique and unorthodox that it means few other bands have covered their songs, with the exception of a couple of their more mainstream sounding love songs, "I'm Not in Love" and "The Things We Do for Love," which have been covered a lot. So I had a really hard time finding cover versions of some songs. Certain ones, such as "Art for Art's Sake" and "I'm Mandy, Fly Me," haven't been included because I couldn't find any good covers at all. (If you know of some, please let me know.)

However, I was able to find good versions of most of the other key 10cc songs which Gouldman wrote or co-wrote. There are five of those here. The rest are a mixed bag. Gouldman has remained an active songwriter to the present day, and has taken part in lots of songwriting collaborations in addition to his solo albums and 10cc albums. The two songs he cowrote here with Kirsty MacColl are a case in point. I didn't track down and listen to every single song he had a songwriting share in, so I probably missed some good ones, but hopefully I got most of the really worthy ones.

As a finally note, Gouldman is 74 years old as I write this, but he's still going strong. He put out a solo album in 2020, "Modesty Forbids," and I honestly think it's one of the best thing he's done since the 1970s. So if you like his style, you should check that out.

Meanwhile, the "Covered" series will continue. I've got a lot more songwriters who made their names in the 1960s coming up, including some who are best known for writing Motown hits.

01 Warm Me (Festival)
02 Travelin' Man (Tristar Airbus)
03 I'm Not in Love (Richie Havens)
04 Love's Not for Me [Rene's Song] (Carole Anne Berry)
05 Rubber Bullets (Men They Couldn't Hang)
06 The Things We Do for Love (Gregson & Collister)
07 Things Happen (Kirsty MacColl)
08 Treachery (Kirsty MacColl)
09 I've Got You (McFly)
10 Dreadlock Holiday (Jake & Flo)
11 The Wall Street Shuffle (Take It Easy)
12 Say the Word (Hornal with Matt Berry, Graham Gouldman & Kevin Godley)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15904626/CoveredGrahamG_1972-2017_Volum3_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from an awards show in 2015. There was song writing on the wall behind him, but I found that distracting so I erased it in Photoshop.

Various Artists - Covered: Graham Gouldman. Volume 2: 1967-1971

A few days ago, I posted the first album in this series celebrating the songwriting of Graham Gouldman. Here's the second, and there's one more to come.

That first album largely covered Gouldman's big successes in the mid-1960s, when he wrote some big, classic hits for different artists. The first half has some more in that vein, still with some success. For instance, "Tallyman" was a hit for Jeff Beck in 1967. However, in 1967 and 1968, music trends were changing rapidly and drastically. Gouldman's pop style fell out of favor as music grew increasingly "heavy" and serious towards the end of the 1960s. Note how many of the bands here like the Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana, the Mindbenders, and so on went from often being near the top of the charts to dropping off the charts altogether.

As a result, Gouldman spent a few years more or less in the music wilderness. But during that time, he increasingly linked up with the three other songwriters in 10cc. They finally went by the 10cc in 1972, and soon had a series of hits on their own. Yet during this time, Gouldman never lost his knack for writing catchy and good songs, as you'll see here.

Note that, once again, these are all songs without Gouldman singing lead on them. While he continued to write for others during this period, he often sang and wrote songs for himself, though under a variety of names. I will be compiling the best of those on a different album in the future.

01 Schoolgirl (Hollies)
02 Ooh She's Done It Again (Herman's Hermits)
03 Naughty Nippon Nights (Shadows)
04 Tallyman (Jeff Beck)
05 Upstairs, Downstairs (Herman's Hermits)
06 The Impossible Years (Wayne Fontana)
07 The Love Was in My Eyes (Applejacks)
08 My Father (Jonah Jones)
09 The World Is for the Young (Herman's Hermits with Stanley Holloway)
10 Uncle Joe, the Ice Cream Man (Mindbenders)
11 It's Nice to Be Out in the Morning (Herman's Hermits)
12 Some People (Chords Five)
13 It's Alright Now (Herman's Hermits)
14 Crickets (Peter Cowap)
15 Come On Plane (Silver Fleet)
16 Because You're There (Peter Noone)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17181030/COVRDGrhmGuldmn1967-1971Volum2_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3ZuHXf7f

I'm not exactly sure when or where this cover art photo is from, but I'm guessing it's the late 1960s or early 1970s. There was a bunch of stuff behind him that I found distracting, so I replaced all that with a blank background.

UPDATE: On September 30, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

10cc - Civic Center, Santa Monica, CA, 11-26-1975

A few days ago, I posted a live acoustic album by Graham Gouldman, who in my opinion is one of the best songwriters ever. I highly recommend that album. Putting that together got me in a 10cc mood, since Gouldman has been a key member of that band since its founding in the early 1970s. It dawned on me that I didn't have any live 10cc album. Long story short, I looked around and decided that this is the best live 10cc album out there, even though it's a bootleg.

10cc in its prime was a collaboration between four talented songwriters: Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Needless to say, it's highly unusual to have four talented songwriters in one band. Even the Beatles only managed three (since Ringo Starr only dabbles in writing songs). The problem is, songwriters generally want to do their own things with their own songs. Sure enough, 10cc proved to be unstable. The line-up with all four songwriters only lasted four years, from 1972 to 1976. At that point, Godley and Creme left to form a duo, logically named "Godley and Creme." 

I wanted a live album from the time all four songwriters were in the band, preferrably near the end of that time, so that most of their best songs as a foursome could be included. It turns out there are very few good bootlegs from that era, and no official live albums. Luckily, there's one that stands far above the rest, and that's this one. (The band's first live album, "Live and Let Live," comes from 1977 concerts, so it doesn't feature Godley and Creme or feature their songs.)

This bootleg was in very good shape. It obviously comes from a soundboard source. I didn't have to do any tinkering, except to break up the banter between songs into their own tracks. In my opinion, it sounds as good as their official 1977 album. There was only one album with all four songwriters released after this, "How Dare You!" in 1976. The best known song from that album is "Art for Art's Sake." Happily, that played that song here. Thus, all the best known songs from that era are included, with the exception of "I'm Mandy Fly Me," also from the "How Dare You!" album.

By the way, in 1971, the group "Hotlegs" had a huge hit with the song "Neanderthal Man." In actuality, that group really was 10cc, before they settled on that band name. During this concert, someone in the audience knew Hotlegs and 10cc was one and the same and loudly shouted out for "Neanderthal Man." The band seemed amused and obligingly played it, but only for less than a minute, since it was a silly novelty hit that they probably weren't that fond of.

This album is an hour and 45 minutes long.

01 Introduction (10cc)
02 Silly Love (10cc)
03 Flying Junk (10cc)
04 talk (10cc)
05 Baron Samedi (10cc)
06 Old Wild Men (10cc)
07 talk (10cc)
08 The Sacro-Iliac (10cc)
09 talk (10cc)
10 Somewhere in Hollywood (10cc)
11 talk (10cc)
12 Donna (10cc)
13 talk (10cc)
14 Ships Don't Disappear in the Night [Do They] (10cc)
15 talk (10cc)
16 I'm Not In Love (10cc)
17 talk (10cc)
18 The Film of My Love (10cc)
19 talk (10cc)
20 Art for Art's Sake (10cc)
21 talk (10cc)
22 The Worst Band in the World (10cc)
23 talk (10cc)
24 Neanderthal Man (10cc)
25 talk (10cc)
26 The Wall Street Shuffle (10cc)
27 talk (10cc)
28 Rubber Bullets (10cc)
29 talk (10cc)
30 Une Nuit a Paris (10cc)

https://www.imagenetz.de/mptkm

alternate link:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6V7TM4bp

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/GVau10m6KNxhd7A/file

I wanted to use a photo of the band in 1975, showing all four members. I couldn't find a really good one though. But I found a good one from 1974, from them doing an appearance on the "Top of the Pops" TV show.

Graham Gouldman - Live Acoustic (2013)

Graham Gouldman is a songwriting genius. Have you heard of him? He wrote all sorts of 1960s hit songs you know, such as "For Your Love" by the Yardbirds, "Bus Stop" and "Look through Any Window" by the Hollies, and "No Milk Today" by the Hermin's Hermits, then in the 1970s and after he's been a member of 10cc, and wrote or co-wrote many more hits by them, such as "I'm Not in Love," "The Things We Do for Love," "Rubber Bullets," and "Dreadlock Holliday."

As I write this, Gouldman is 74 years old, yet he's still going strong, frequently touring both as the leader of 10cc and as a solo artist. As someone who has a particular fondness for acoustic music, I am most interested in his occasional solo acoustic tours. However, there are basically no official or unofficial recordings from any such tour, except for one. In 2014, Gouldman released an album of his 2013 solo acoustic tour, simply called "Live!" (It also is sometimes called "Heart Full of Songs," which is his name for his acoustic tours in general.) But he only released this as a promotional item to radio stations, then sold it at his 2014 concerts. Since then, it's totally disappeared. It's not listed in his discography on his personal website, nor is it listed on his Wikipedia page or most other places where one would find such things. It seems to have totally disappeared down the memory hole.

Luckily, I have a copy, and it's fantastic. The sound quality is excellent, and the performance is excellent. He played most of his famous songs, both from 10cc as well as his 1960s hits done by others. He was supported by a couple of his 10cc touring band members, but they kept things acoustic, with only occasional light drumming.

However, there is one thing sorely lacking for the album, and that is any kind of banter between songs. Because the album was made as a promo for radio stations, I guess the idea was to deliberately not include any such banter, since it was more of a selection of individual songs (taken from different concerts on the tour, not just one concert), than having a natural flow of a concert. So, for instance, sometimes songs start with the audience still clapping from something that had just happened, or a song comes to a sudden halt in the middle of the audience applause. The songs themselves were great, but the transitions between them were problematic.

So I decided to fix this, because I love Gouldman's songs so much. I spent way too much time finding banter to go before almost every song, but I'm proud of the result. I didn't have much to go on, since, as I said, there's very little in the way of official or bootleg live Gouldman tracks. But I scoured YouTube and all the bootlegs I could find, including 10cc ones from the last 20 years or so, and I found just enough to come up with fitting banter for most of the songs. As I said, I put a lot of work into this, so hopefully it sounds just like a normal concert, with thank yous at the ends of songs and the like. But every single word has been added by me. The original album didn't even have a single "thank you" on it!

I didn't keep track of where all the different talking bits came from. It would have been a bear to mark all that down. In some cases, even for only a short comment, I had to piece it together from more than once source. There are a few comments where the sound quality is noticeably poorer than the rest, and/or his voice sounds a little different. That couldn't be helped, since the rare material I had to go with was so scanty.

The other thing I did which took some work was getting the applause at the end of each song just right. Because the songs came from different concerts, those were all over the map. Some were quiet, some were loud, some faded out, some stopped suddenly, and some actually ended as they should, with the clapping trailing off. I fixed the applause for almost every song in some way. Hopefully, it should now sound normal, with the flow of a typical concert, instead of being a bunch of live songs collected together.

I changed the title slightly, since "Live!" is so generic and I changed the album significantly. I also changed the cover, since the original just had some text on it.

The album is an hour and ten minutes long. Seven of those minutes consist of the extra banter that I added.

I highly, highly recommend this album. The vast majority of the songs here are classic hits. Hearing them done by Gouldman reveals what a songwriting genius he truly is. Plus, these well known songs are shown in an appealing new light being done in the acoustic format.

By the way, I like Gouldman so much that I plan on posting a collection of covers of his songs for my "Covered" series, as well as a separate collection of his own performances from his pre-10cc years.

01 talk (Graham Gouldman)
02 Pamela, Pamela (Graham Gouldman)
03 talk (Graham Gouldman)
04 Heart Full of Soul (Graham Gouldman)
05 talk (Graham Gouldman)
06 Good Morning Judge (Graham Gouldman)
07 talk (Graham Gouldman)
08 No Milk Today (Graham Gouldman)
09 talk (Graham Gouldman)
10 Sunburn (Graham Gouldman)
11 talk (Graham Gouldman)
12 Love's Not for Me [Rene's Song] (Graham Gouldman)
13 talk (Graham Gouldman)
14 Look through Any Window (Graham Gouldman)
15 talk (Graham Gouldman)
16 Bridge to Your Heart (Graham Gouldman)
17 talk (Graham Gouldman)
18 Daylight (Graham Gouldman)
19 talk (Graham Gouldman)
20 Bus Stop (Graham Gouldman)
21 Dancing Days (Graham Gouldman)
22 talk (Graham Gouldman)
23 I'm Not in Love (Graham Gouldman)
24 talk (Graham Gouldman)
25 Ariella (Graham Gouldman)
26 talk (Graham Gouldman)
27 Ready to Go Home (Graham Gouldman)
28 talk (Graham Gouldman)
29 The Things We Do for Love (Graham Gouldman)
30 Memory Lane (Graham Gouldman)
31 talk (Graham Gouldman)
32 For Your Love (Graham Gouldman)
33 talk (Graham Gouldman)
34 Donna (Graham Gouldman)
35 talk (Graham Gouldman)
36 Dreadlock Holiday (Graham Gouldman)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15844999/GrahmGouldmn_2013_LivAcoustc_atse.zip.html

I don't know where Gouldman was when the photo for the cover art was taken, but apparently it dates to September 2013.