"The Dean & I"

Sometimes you run into a band that's just fizzing with ideas, with creativity and with the sheer ability to do just about anything. That's 10cc. These guys could do anything, absolutely anything. The wonder of it all is that they actually managed to make coherent records at all. Listen to this song: there are about fifteen different, brilliant ideas all fighting for space within three and a half minutes of song. They've thrown in a bagful of fantastic hooks and some clever and amusing lyrics: "In the eyes of the Dean his daughter/Was doing what she shouldn't oughta/But a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do/The consequence should be/Church bells, three swells, the Dean, his daughter and me." The styles shift at a dizzying pace, drifting from one pop orthodoxy to another in the blink of an eye, so that by the end you feel as if you've just got up from a twelve-course banquet. Very filling, very satisfying.