Do your worst

I HAD the pleasure and the privilege of seeing 10cc live the other week. Founder member Graham Gouldman is still on board, as are Paul Burgess and Rick Fenn, long-serving members of the expanded touring line-up.

The set they played was nothing short of miraculous; it's easy to forget just how many hit singles they notched up, and just how idiosyncratically brilliant those singles were. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn't play my favourite one.

The Worst Band In The World, from 1974, nosed into the outer reaches of the charts for the briefest spell then headed straight on out again. It is scarcely remembered these days, and usually with little fondness by those that do remember it, but it impressed the shorts off of this particular 13-year-old when I happened to catch them performing it on some-programme-or-other at the time (I can't believe they would have been allowed on Top Of The Pops with it, but then those were different times indeed).

Even by 10cc's bloody-minded standards, this was a determinedly weird choice of single - stranger even than the magnificent Ire Feelings by Rupie Edwards, which weirded up the charts in fine style the following year.

Melodically, The Worst Band In The World is built upon a stark, unfriendly, unresolved chord sequence which sounds like a string of non-sequiturs. It periodically builds momentum then tails out into nothingness, leaving notes hanging around like sullen and rudderless teenagers.

Lyrically, it simply drips with acid cynicism, jaded ennui and self-loathing: or just loathing, in fact, as it's a fairly safe bet that 10cc didn't have themselves in mind even though the song is written in first person:
Well we've never done a day's work in our life
And our records sell in zillions
It irrigates my heart with greed
To know that you adore me;
Up yours, up mine,
But up everybody's, that takes time
There's no big finish either: the song simply fades as Lol Creme distractedly sings "fade me, fade me". The whole thing is so exhilaratingly uncommercial that it should really have shot to No 1 purely for its brazen cheek and its withering distaste for the whole hit-making process.