By the time of their fifth album, 1977’s “Deceptive Bends”, English art-rockers 10cc had split into two creative factions. Though initial recording sessions with all four core members had begun in October 1976, tensions between the band’s members had escalated so much that Kevin Godley and Lol Creme departed to pursue their own recording career as a duo. Godley and Creme were also in the midst of pursuing business opportunities that had opened up after the pair had invented the Gizmotron, a small mechanical device that could be attached to an electric guitar to create polyphonic synth-like sounds
The group now down to the nucleus of Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, and with the addition of drummer Paul Burgess, forged ahead with recording “Deceptive Bends”, an album that showed the band moving in a poppier direction.
“They’d developed the Gizmo and were making an album that featured it,” explains Gouldman today on the catalyst of Godley and Creme’s departure.
“And that album turned out to be a triple set album. We had commitments to record and go back on the road, but they were more interested in doing that album, and also at the same time, they kind of got tired and bored of the whole writing, recording, rehearsing, going on the road thing, whereas to Eric and me, it was fantastic as we loved doing that.”
Recording sessions resumed at the group’s own Strawberry Studios South in Surrey, England and continued until March 1977. The group decided to release a single, “The Things We Do for Love” just before Christmas 1976, so that the public and fans could hear a preview to the upcoming album. The song initially was poised to feature a darker subject matter than the more uplifting theme it ended up with.
“When we were writing it, Eric wanted to write something about suicide,” affirms Gouldman. “And I said I didn’t think it was a good idea to write a song on that subject or that it fitted musically with the melody that we had. But that feeling Eric had didn’t last long and he sort of saw the light quite quickly.”
For 10cc, it became a firm middle finger to the press who in the aftermath of the Godley/Creme split had been mocking the band as “5 CC.” The change from the melancholic minor key to the more uplifting major key played a key element in the song’s appeal to the masses.
“That’s a sort of device I’ve employed quite a lot in my songwriting,” reveals Gouldman. “Even when I when I was writing songs in the ’60s for The Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, I always liked that idea, which I admit, I was inspired to use from The Beatles.”
Once recording sessions wrapped up, the pair again tapped the creative art team of Hipgnosis who went to work on designing the cover art. “What we did was we first told them a title that we had for the album,” explains Gouldman. “Then we let them listen to the album and they spent like two or three weeks listening and getting into it. Then they came down to the studio and sort of turned the studio into an art exhibition with all these different concepts and we ended up picking one that we felt suited the mood of the album. I always felt that they reflected visually what we were doing on the record.”
Out of the album’s nine tracks, the album’s closer, the experimental opus “Feel the Benefit” is particularly noteworthy. The eleven-and-a-half-minute piece which is divided into three parts — 1- “Reminisce and Speculate”, 2- “A Latin Break” and 3- “Feel the Benefit” — snakes its way through tempo changes and diverse stylistic flourishes and evokes a Beatles-esque spirit throughout.
Released in April of 1977, “Deceptive Bends” released Two further singles from the album; “Good Morning Judge” and “People In Love”.
In 1997, the album was reissued and remastered on CD and included bonus material comprised of the three B-sides that appeared on the album’s three official released singles.
The Fat Angel Sings 