10 CC were a British band formed during the heydays of progressive-rock and hard-rock by four veteran songwriters and multi-instrumentalists: Graham Gouldman (author of the Yardbirds' masterpieces and of several Hollies' hits, and of one solo album, The Graham Gouldman Thing, in 1968), Lol Creme, Eric Stewart (who in 1965 had topped the charts with with the Mindbenders' Game Of Love) and Kevin Godley. They debuted with the demented bubblegum hits There Ain't No Umbopo (credited to the Crazy Elephant) and Neanderthal Man (1970), from the album Songs (Fontana, 1970) credited to the Hot Legs. They then changed name to 10CC for Donna (1972), the retro` ballad that established them at top of the charts and that coined their kind of parodistic kitsch.

The album 10cc (Mercury, 1973) spawned another hit, Rubber Bullets (a hilarious spoof on Jailhouse Rock) and The Dean And I. After offering more of the same with Sheet Music (1974), in particular the Wall Street Shuffle, and experimenting with even crazier arrangements, the foursome embraced the high-tech studio a` la Sparks and turned The Original Soundtrack (1975) into a stylistic tour de force, albeit still rooted in their weird sense of humour and in their poppy melodies. I'm Not In Love (a far more serious ballad, written by Gouldman and Stewart, and featuring a glittering sound that was the result of a veritable studio collage) even became a hit, while the extended collages of Une Nuite A Paris (a sort of grotesque operetta a` la Queen) and Life Is A Minestrone straddle the line between Frank Zappa's operettas and the Beatles' Abbey Road. Cartoonish wit and four-part vocal harmonies made them quite unique in their age, occasionally worthy successors of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. How Dare You (1976), which includes the self-parodistic Art For Art's Sake and I'm Mandy Fly Me, Godley and Creme launched a separate career with the triple-album rock opera Consequences (Polydor, 1976), that used a new technique to produce symphonic, choral and natural sounds, and pretentiously bizarre albums such as L (1978), Freeze Frame (Polydor, 1979), containing An Englishman In New York, Ismism (1981), Birds Of Prey (1983) and Goodbye Blue Sky (Polydor, 1988); while 10cc continued with Deceptive Bends (1977), Bloody Tourists (1978), with Dreadlock Holiday, Look Here (1980), 10 Out of 10 (1981), Windows In The Jungle (1983), totally ignored despite Food For Thought.