Godley + Creme : I Pity Inanimate Objects
In November of 1979, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley released Freeze Frame, their third album since departing 10cc. My favorite track is "I Pity Inanimate Objects" which anticipates the use of autotune.
Recently, I played I Pity Inanimate Objects from Freeze Frame and I remembered how and why we actually did that. The idea was driven by a new piece of equipment called a harmoniser. It's used in studios all the time these days as a corrective device to get performances in tune, but this early version came with a keyboard. You could put a sound through a harmoniser and if you wanted an instrument or voice to hit a certain note that it hadn't, you could play that note on the keyboard. So we got to thinking, 'Let's forget about singing for the moment. What happens if I vocalize these words in a monotone - do an entire song on one note - and get Lol to play my vocal on the harmoniser keyboard?' That was the experiment. It worked pretty well. Predated Cher's digital gurglings by a few years. I don't know where the lyric came from. Maybe because the harmoniser was inanimate.
Paul McCartney provided vocals on album closer "Get Well Soon", but the most famous track on the album is "An Englishman In New York". Released as a single, it charted in Germany (no. 25), Australia (no. 17), the Netherlands (no. 7) and Belgium (no. 4)
You can often find Freeze Frame with 1978's superior L on the same CD. That's a keeper!
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