10cc - I'm Mandy Fly Me

A typically enigmatic, melodic and eloquent mix of music and wordplay, I’m Mandy Fly Me gave 10cc one of their biggest hits. But, nearly four decades after they wrote it, its genesis has become a distillation of the bitterness and clash of characters that sadly defines 10cc today.

Despite an impressive run of UK Top 10 records that included the No.1 singles Rubber Bullets and I’m Not In Love, by 1976 10cc’s original line-up was on its last legs. The following year’s album, How Dare You!, would be the last by the Stockport art-rockers with Kevin Godley and Lol Creme.

With all four members contributing vocals, various instruments and song ideas and being involved in the production of their records at the group-owned Strawberry Studios, the band’s internal mechanism was more complicated than most. Along with Art For Art’s Sake, I’m Mandy Fly Me was one of two hits from a highly inventive album conceived amid ever-growing tension. Indeed both Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, who would drive the band onwards for eight more years after Godley and Creme’s exit, have both claimed the idea for Mandy’s title and lyrics as their own.

“I saw a tramp standing in front of an American Airlines poster that featured a beautiful stewardess, smiling seductively and beckoning with her finger: ‘Hi, I’m Cheryl… Fly Me!’” Stewart recalls. “The statement was obviously a pseudo-sexual invitation: ‘Come on, big boy, book a flight with us and I’m all yours.’ But watching this poor, ragged soul, I wondered if he was fantasising about getting on the flight, and ‘getting off’ with her, when realistically he would never board any aeroplane – [let alone] with her.”

“Eric didn’t see the poster, I did,” insists Gouldman, citing a United Airlines billboard that he claims said: ‘I’m Susie, fly me to Miami’. “That intrigued me because there was a real sexual connotation.”

Although Gouldman also professes to have switched the stewardess’s first name (“I changed Cheryl to Mandy!” Stewart objects), he stresses that the song isn’t about drugs, and Mandrax in particular.

Both agree that an air of disappointment had greeted the song’s earliest draft, from Gouldman in a lyrical sense and Stewart in a musical one. That Godley was responsible for saving the day in both regards is, for once, unanimous.

“The bare bones of its words were just okay until Kevin rewrote them,” says Gouldman. Stewart concurs: “The song wasn’t really knocking us out. Then, in his usual subtle way, Kevin said: ‘It’s too safe. It needs a kick up the head.’ And he was right. It was well played and smooth but it didn’t make you sit up and take notice.”

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• Zverejnené: 10.10.2018 17:43
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• Tagy: 10cc, pop music, rock music, 1976, 70s