The departure of two key members of any band would usually signal said band’s fortunes were headed for a major downturn. 10cc was faced with just such a crisis prior to the making of their fifth album Deceptive Bends, which would be released in 1977.
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10cc not only soldiered on, but it delivered one of its most popular songs, the smooth-rocking Top-10 hit “The Things We Do for Love” in the wake of that near disaster. Here’s how they pulled it together and made a yacht rock staple.
Keeping “Things” Together
10cc aren’t your usual yacht rock suspects. For one, they were British, as opposed to the American soft-rockers generally associated with the genre. In addition, much of their music skewed toward the experimental and whimsical, with individual songs often tethered to ornate concepts.
The quartet often worked in pairs, with Kevin Godley and Lol Creme creating together in one duo, and Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman doing the same in the other. But Godley and Creme’s ambitions soon extended beyond what you might expect from typical pop music, even music as forward-looking as 10cc’s was known to be.
The pair decided to do their own thing shortly after the sessions for Deceptive Bends began, and the British press had their fun with this development, calling the depleted version of the band “5cc.” But they underestimated just what had been left behind in terms of the songwriting and performing abilities of Stewart and Gouldman, who possessed long track records of chart success from even before the time they joined 10cc.
Remember also that Stewart and Gouldman were the pair responsible for writing “I’m Not in Love,” 10cc’s worldwide hit ballad from 1975. They corralled a new drummer in Paul Burgess, and decided to focus the new album on a simpler, song-oriented approach, instead of worrying about any larger themes.
When it came to “The Things We Do for Love,” Stewart and Gouldman leaned into a Beatlesque feel, right down to the backing vocals and Stewart’s George Harrison-like weeping guitar solo. When it came to the lyrics, Stewart told BBC radio (as reported by Songfacts) he used some personal experience to liven things up:
“I remember walking through the rain and the snow when I lived in Manchester and we didn’t have a telephone. I had to go and find a phone box to ring the girl who was about to become my wife. The phones were down, and it was snowing, and these, these vivid pictures are there. If you put them in a song, a lot of people identify with a similar situation.”
Behind the Meaning of “The Things We Do for Love”
So many pop songs focus on romantic relationships that are either contentious or fracturing. “The Things We Do for Love” takes a somewhat novel approach in that it’s all about the techniques necessary to keep a love afloat. Stewart begins on a note of fear of what might happen without those techniques in place: Too many broken hearts have fallen in the river / Too many lonely souls have drifted out to sea.
Communication is the problem to the answer, the narrator explains in a bit of irreverent wordplay. The song captures the roller-coaster of love: You think you’re gonna break up / Then she says she wants to make up. To prevent doing damage from which you can’t walk away, you have to be willing to meet the other person in the middle: A compromise would surely help the situation / Agree to disagree, but disagree to part.
The Eric Stewart/Graham Gouldman collaboration would end up carrying 10cc throughout the remainder of its existence, which took them into the ’90s. Although they wouldn’t again score a hit of that magnitude in the U.S., the simple, solid songwriting pleasures of “The Things We Do for Love” ingratiated them with the soft-rock fans of the era, which paved the way to yacht rock exalted status so many years later.
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