In October of 1977 former 10cc members Lol Creme and Kevin Godley released Consequences, a boxed triple disc that began as a demonstration album for the pair's invention, the gizmo. The album too 18 months to make, during which the punk scene exploded all over the U.K.
Said Kevin Godley :
"There was a seismic, paradigm shift. I knew we were doomed. We emerged blinking into the light, and everyone was wearing safety pins and bondage trousers. We'd been working on a semi-avant-garde orchestral triple album with a very drunk Peter Cook and me singing with Sarah Vaughan, while outside it was like a nuclear bomb had dropped."
The reviews were devastating. Lol Creme shook them off but he says his partner was hurt by the negative feedback :
"Kevin was heartbroken, I don't think he's got over it yet. He was really, really upset about the way it was received, like a big turkey, really. I didn't take it the way Kevin did, to be honest, because I loved doing it so much and I learned so much, got so much out of it, a totally selfish thing, I didn't give a shit, I really didn't. And I never have, to me it's the doing of something that's the vibe, it's not necessarily the result. It's always a bonus if what you do does well, but it's not that precious, you know. I've always thought like that. "And I could see why it was laughed at, it does look like a pretentious pile of old stuff. We were self-indulgent pop stars, there's no question about it."
I have yet to get through the entire thing without fast forwarding through the dialogue sections. Godley and Creme would make up for their indulgences with a remarkable follow-up in 1978 called L.
On the week of December 2, 1976 10cc returned to the UK charts at #37 with a new single, "The Things We Do For Love". But there was something missing on the 45 single cover. Actually two somethings : founding members Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. Intrigued by their invention, the gizmotron, a device that made electric guitars sound like synthesizers, Godley and Creme bailed on Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman earlier in the year.
Godley recalls why they departed 10cc after four superb albums on the excellent podcast Sodajerker On Songwriting:
When Eric and Graham came in with a song they'd written to begin the next album, it was like "Oh God, that is so fuckin' dreary. It's so predictable and boring. Why don't we just fuck off and do something with the Gizmo? "And of course at that age, you are very ballsy and you take chances and that's what we did.
Stewart recalls his reaction to the split in a BBC radio interview:
We were on such a winning curve, Graham Gouldman and I had to decide, are we going to be 5cc? Are we gonna scrap the name completely? Well, we thought we, no, we'd better carry on because we, this is 10cc, we are 10cc, this band. Two of our members are leaving us and that's not our problem, but we've got to carry it on.
While Stewart and Gouldman kept the 10cc name and spent the rest of the 70's with hits like "Good Morning Judge" and "Dreadlock Holiday", Godley and Creme explored their artistic indulgences with a sprawling three record set called Consequences, which eventually came out in late 1977.
"It turned into a monster. It turned into our Heaven's Gate," Godley admits. " For God knows how many reasons. And the idea was to make the kind of music that was nothing remotely like 10cc...when we realized that 'Oh.We've actually spent 14 to 18 months doing something that people think is a pile of shite".
