Once you know my age my musical tastes as a teenager are very easy to guess. Obviously Dylan, Mitchell, the Kinks and the Beatles – equally obviously not the Stones or the Who. Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Fairport, Steeleye Span, Roy Harper, The Watersons, Carthy, etc, etc and more than any of them, Kevin Coyne. It was hard to hear any of these on the radio, and, addicted to Radio 4 from the age of 3, I turned to Radio 2 only for Folk on 2, the weekly Jazz hour, and the Sunday lunchtime comedies (when I was 15 Steve Mulliner told me to listen to Peel on Radio 1, which I probably did twice a week). I never listened to top-40 music deliberately: obviously I heard plenty of it by osmosis as it were, and especially during wet school breaks in which I remember one girl in particular whose desk was in front of mine always tuned to Radio 1. When punk started I enjoyed it, rather than being enthusiastic about it: and that was easier to hear on the radio than other stuff I liked because of John Peel (who was also the main location for the other stuff I liked, just less frequently).
But I love a lot of the music now in which I had no interest at all at the time. When I notice a band is playing nearby that I am curious about, and whose members I suspect might be on or near their last legs, I often go, usually taking at least one of my children with me. So last week it was the turn of my son to accompany me to see 10cc. At school my more musically adventurous friend Guy owned one of their albums, which I must have listened to, but I’d never really paid much attention to them. After buying the tickets I started sort of listening to their (voluminous) output, though without really paying much attention.
Seeing them, on their first US tour in 47 years, I discovered they are nothing like I thought. As presumably all of their fans and everyone else who was actually paying attention in the 70’s know, they’re basically an extremely sophisticated comic song band. They opened with The Second Sitting of the Last Supper, and followed up with Art for Art’s Sake, both of which had more or less passed me by, and both of which are very funny. Even the songs with unhumourous lyrics are often musically funny (a lot of pastiche). Graham Gouldman has a huge smile on his face when performing, partly just because he’s doing what he loves, but also because it’s all sort of a joke. The set goes on from there. Even their biggest hit [1], the one song that even I know by heart, sounded so different live. I’ve always assumed its at best a sad song about self-deception with a little cruelty thrown in, but live, in context, I got the feeling that not only does the subject know perfectly well that he’s in love but that she knows it too, and he knows that she knows it, both of them are happy about it, and the song is actually an exercise in elaborate Gricean implicature.
The boy didn’t enjoy the show as much as I did. But he did enjoy it enough, and is now regularly humming Life is a Minestrone. They’re touring the UK and parts of Europe in the Fall: highly recommended.
[1] A friend says that as a teenager she used to dread “I’m not in love” being played at parties. I think I went to a total of 5 parties as a teenager (4 of which she must have been at) because I gradually realized that there was no specific aspect of parties that I dreaded.