10cc

A tag-team of pop songwriters with a sardonic sense of humour, 10cc were hard to pin down in 1973. Unhindered by the false confines of good taste, their debut album opens with a ’50s-style death song (“Johnny Don’t Do It”), a queasy, glam ode to muscle-building (“Sand In My Face”) and a helium-voiced Beatles parody (“Donna”). Later, Sly Stone funk is given a vaudeville makeover in “The Hospital Song”, and in “Rubber Bullets” they gleefully rewrote “Jailhouse Rock” with extra cartoon violence.