A grand courtyard of red-brick Tudor splendour (the extremely civilised Hampton Court Palace Festival, with a cushion-bellied Henry VIII roaming the gardens) seemed a fitting locale for 10cc, the court jesters of Seventies art rock.
Where their peers traded in po-faced prog, cult glam and cocaine experimentation, their speciality was in boogie-based collage rock, amalgamating strains of blue-eyed surf pop, vaudevillian operetta, new wave, calypso, and colourful semi-comic storytelling and metaphor. Life is a minestrone and death a cold lasagne, they famously posited in 1975, like a profoundly existential edition of Nadiya Hussain’s Cook Once, Eat Twice. And you know what, if you thought about it for long enough on the frankly smashing drugs knocking around back then, it kind of was.
Here, they were clearly a reduced outfit, with only the bassist Graham Gouldman remaining from the original line-up, his decaying vocals bolstered by his co-frontman Iain Hornal and the long-standing guitarist Rick Fenn. But like the jesters of old, their opening few songs spoke truth to power even at 50 years’ remove. The hyper-capitalist parody The Wall Street Shuffle is still powerfully prescient and the wiry, industry-skewering Art for Art’s Sake, with its rock-as-commodity chorus of “Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake”, could be Spotify’s theme song.
