We're Still in Love... With 10cc

Graham Gouldman of 10cc fame was an 11-year-old Salford schoolboy when he got his first guitar. Sixty years on, he tells Paul Taylor, he still loves performing

A HUGE part of Graham Gouldman’s life has been turned into a museum exhibit. Just opened at Stockport Museum is the exhibition Strawberry Studios: I Am In Love, telling how, in the 1970s, 10cc made some of the most artful music in British pop history, right there in Stockport.

Though the story now belongs in a museum, the songs of 10cc remain very much alive, even if Salford-born Graham, 71 next month, is the only one of their four creators willing to perform them. He is about to set out on a 10cc greatest hits tour.

Does gigging hold the same appeal now as it did as a teenager in the 1960s Manchester beat boom? ‘It does actually,’ says Graham. ‘It’s much more relaxed in a funny sort of way. We stay in nicer places and we also try to get home as often as possible. But the same mechanics are at work in my brain, even though my brain is a bit older. ‘

One of the highlights of the show, he says, will be Somewhere in Hollywood, during which the band will accompany a video of 10cc original member Kevin Godley singing the song. Kevin could not be persuaded to join the tour in person, and anyone betting on a full reunion of 10cc – Gouldman, Godley, Eric Stewart and Lol Creme – should save their money. Even the excellent 2015 BBC4 documentary I’m Not In Love: The Story of 10cc did not get all four in the same room at the same time.