10cc review — a royal success from the court jesters of prog

Times

18-06-2025

A grand courtyard of red-brick Tudor splendour (the extremely civilised Hampton Court Palace Festival, with a cushion-bellied Henry VIII roaming the gardens) seemed a fitting locale for 10cc, the court jesters of Seventies art rock.
Where their peers traded in po-faced prog, cult glam and cocaine experimentation, their speciality was in boogie-based collage rock, amalgamating strains of blue-eyed surf pop, vaudevillian operetta, new wave, calypso, and colourful semi-comic storytelling and metaphor. Life is a minestrone and death a cold lasagne, they famously posited in 1975, like a profoundly existential edition of Nadiya Hussain's Cook Once, Eat Twice. And you know what, if you thought about it for long enough on the frankly smashing drugs knocking around back then, it kind of was.
Here, they were clearly a reduced outfit, with only the bassist Graham Gouldman remaining from the original line-up, his decaying vocals bolstered by his co-frontman Iain Hornal and the long-standing guitarist Rick Fenn. But like the jesters of old, their opening few songs spoke truth to power even at 50 years' remove. The hyper-capitalist parody The Wall Street Shuffle is still powerfully prescient and the wiry, industry-skewering Art for Art's Sake, with its rock-as-commodity chorus of 'Art for art's sake, money for God's sake', could be Spotify's theme song.
The satire may have been ageless — witness a bloodthirsty boogie-woogie National Guard loading up on Rubber Bullets, then turn on Newsnight — but the music was firmly nostalgia-zone. Bar one 2024 Gouldman solo song — the languid cruise ship ballad Floating in Heaven featuring Brian May, who was (dramatic pause) 'not here tonight' — nothing was dated post-1978. Dreadlock Holiday in particular, their infamous cod reggae tune about being mugged by Jamaican locals, sat in the realm of 'things they got away with in the Seventies' — although the crowd, themselves largely in their seventies, lapped it up.
The overriding sense was one of envious amazement that such imaginative, shapeshifting stuff was ever mainstream-adjacent. The Things We Do for Love drenched a classic Beatles-style doe-eyed doo-wop in unutterable anguish, while Clockwork Creep unravelled the dialogue between a bomb and the passenger jet it's about to blow up to the sound of operatic music-hall art pop with Disney whistles on. And though there were undoubtedly sags in the set and a covers-act sheen to the affair, there were also sublime passages, where the airline jingle turned dreampop drama I'm Mandy Fly Me gave way to the gorgeous phantom harmonies of I'm Not in Love, or when the full band gathered centre stage for a stunning barbershop take on their debut single, Donna. In philosophical dining terms: mostly minestrone.★★★★☆
10cc play the Sign of the Times Festival, Herts, on Jun 20 and the Brit Festival, Cheshire, on Jul 6, 10cc.world