Album review: 10cc – Live In Concert (Clever Clogs)

10cc - Live In Concert Clever Clogs

Wienerworld [Release date 10.03.14]

For the past few years Graham Gouldman has been touring “with friends” and keeping alive his 10cc legacy, bolstered with his own early history as tunesmith to The Yardbirds and The Hollies amongst others. This 2007 gig recorded at Shepherd’s Bush Empire is significant for the cameo appearance of original 10cc drummer Kevin Godley who contributes ‘Old Wild Men’.

There is absence of detail on this budget-style release, even the band are not named on the economical liner. Musically, it’s a greatest hits and the setlist repeats previous outings when Eric Stewart and Lol Crème were in the band, some 30 years previously.

The last classic line-up live album ‘Live And Let Live’- was released in 1977 with six of the seventeen tracks presented here and the lack of any new material is troubling. In fact the same setlist was given away on a disc in a UK newspaper in 2007 when at least ‘Welcome To Paradise’ was featured from 1992′s ‘Meanwhile’.

The inclusion of Gouldman’s own pop hit material including a song he wrote with Andrew Gold (although included on the last official 10cc album ‘Mirror Mirror’ in 1995) also belies the 10cc moniker, a tad disingenuous I think and I wonder what Stewart and Crème think of all this.

This album can only really appeal to those fans who have been to a recent gig, it’s an adequate if uninformative souvenir. Although Graham Gouldman has released an excellent solo album in recent years – ‘Love And Work’ – it does seem now that 10cc is locked forever in some sort of bubble-wrapped time vortex.

As you’d expect, the music is very well played by – amongst others – one-time 10cc members guitarist Rick Fenn and drummer Paul Burgess but there’s nothing here to entice the hardcore fan hoping to hear something fresh and challenging or the more obscure. Puzzling, and rather sad. ***

Review by David Randall

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