GREATEST HITS 1972- 1978

I purchased this album on vinyl back in high school when “The Things we do for Love” and “Dreadlock Holiday” were in pretty regular rotation on AM radio, and being familiar with the very popular teenage breakup soundtrack “I’m not in Love” (yes, I was one of the many fourteen year-old boys who presented the single to a girlfriend to inform her that she could prepend “ex-“ to her title). I don’t recall having ever heard any of the rest of the songs unless they happened to have been a b-side to one of the three mentioned above, and none of them were more than minor hits in my country.

I remember being a little annoyed that the liner notes were pretty sparse, particularly since the band wasn’t particularly well-known in the States. Each track had the composer and player credits and nothing more other than the meaningless monochrome and cartoon-like sketches on either side of the inner sleeve.

This is probably a good representation of the band’s early work, and in looking up the British chart positions of all the songs recently I would say it qualifies as a ‘Greatest Hits’ for that period. But I fail to see what makes this prog-related music. Lol Creme, Kevin Godley, Eric Stewart and especially Graham Gouldman had established themselves as jingle and bubble-gum pop ghost writers and session musicians long before the band started cranking out hits as 10cc. They four of them had recorded teeny-bopper music for a number of years under a whole slew of band names for entrepreneurs Jerry Kasenetz and Jeff Katz. Pretty much all the tracks here reinforce their position as preeminent pop music composers.

For British fans all these tracks are familiar ones, and all of them except “Silly Love” were Top-10 singles there. But only The "Things we do for Love" and “I’m Not in Love” rose to that level in the States, and half the rest either never charted or weren’t even released here.

This is a tough album to rate, as are a lot of ‘Greatest Hits’ packages. There’s nothing new (hence the album title), so one either rates the album on the strength of the individual songs, or rates the collection on the strength of how accurately it represents the band’s actual best work. On the second point I’d say the label picked the right songs; on the first part I find most of them to be little more than well- produced pop. "The Things we do for Love" and “I’m Not in Love” have sentimental value for me and a lot of other people who went through puberty at that time and have fond memories of roller-skate parties where we listened to them while fantasizing about some comely young lass who didn’t know we existed. So in the end I’m going to mark this one down for three stars for the simple appeal of the songs and the memories they evoke, but if I were rating it as anything resembling or related to progressive music it would get a much lower mark.

peace