Godley & Creme - "Cry"

(Debuted July 20, 1985, Peaked #16, 17 Weeks on the Chart)

Yesterday, I mentioned how a gift alarm clock helped me look into more-offbeat material around the dial. Perhaps I was more disposed to that than I'll admit, as the song "Cry" led me to seek out material from 10cc, the band that Godley and Creme once belonged to. As a fan of Monty Python (since I was 10...there's another hint that I was an offbeat person), I had an appreciation for sly British humor...and I definitely found a twinge of that in 10cc's material. Yes, they were first-rate pop composers, but there was also a sense that they sometimes had a tongue in their collective cheeks when they did songs like "I'm Not in Love" and "Rubber Bullets."

Kevin Godley and Lol Creme left the band during the mid-1970s after branching out in their own artistic direction. As they beat on the drums that they then followed, the duo began experimenting on music video direction just as the format was exploding in popularity. During the 1980s, the videos directed by the pair could make up a lengthy block of MTV programming...you know, when the channel was still playing videos. The Police's "Every Breath You Take," "Synchronicity II" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" were directed by the duo, as were Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," Asia's "Heat of the Moment," Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes," "Duran Dauran's "Girls on Film" and "A View to a Kill," Sting's "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free" and Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." These weren't simple performances; they all had concepts to them.

And what people remember about "Cry" is the music video. It used an early analog technology to "morph" the faces on several people together...young and old, male and female, from several races and religions. It showed that basically we're all the same, and that we all feel certain emotions even if we don't show it outwardly. Not bad for a duo whose earliest recordings made some listeners wondering if they were just being smartasses.