Feel The Love (Oomachasaooma) (Stewart, Gouldman)
Yes, I am (Stewart, Gouldman)
Americana Panorama (Stewart, Gouldman)
City Lights (Stewart, Gouldman)
Food For Thought (Stewart, Gouldman)
Working Girls (Stewart, Gouldman)
Taxi! Taxi! (Stewart, Gouldman)
CREDITS
Eric Stewart: Lead vocals, Lead guitar, Keyboard, Percussion
Graham Gouldman: Vocals, Bass guitar, Rhythm guitar, Acoustic guitar, Percussion
Steve Gadd: Drums, Percussion
Rick Fenn: Vocals, Percussion, Acoustic guitar
Stuart Tosh: Vocals, Percussion, Marimba, Drums on "Food For Thought"
Vic Emerson: Keyboards
Mike Timoney: Keyboards
Mel Colins: Saxphones
OTHER ISSUES & REISSUES
MERCURY 814 007-1 (AUS LP, w/Insert cardboard)
MERCURY SRM-1-4082 (CAN LP, Misprint on label "Secret Life Of Henry")
STAR 5331 (RSA LP, w/Inner sleeve)
CDs
MERCURY 814 007-2 (GER CD)
MERCURY PHCR-6038 (JAP CD, w/OBI)
Here is story behind the album:
The year is 1983 and at last, after nineteen years at the top or near enough of the pops, Eric Stewart has opened up his heart, put together a cracking collection of songs about what life could and should be about and delivered a stunning album of power and warmth that's virtually a solo work. A car crash that nearly ended his life four years earlier, the desperate need to settle down with a worthy wife and family after way too many lonely years of one-night-stands out on the road and the sudden realization that nobody is listening to 10cc anymore so the band can finally say the things they've been burning to say (but keep being told aren't commercial enough) has lead Eric to a crossroads in his life and he's brave enough to take us every step of the way there. 'Windows In The Jungle' is not the usual collection of funny happy-go-lucky 10cc songs and nor is it the catchiest, wildest ride of your life. But it's sweet (oh so sweet!) as Eric tries to urge us to ignore the pressures and responsibilities of the day and spend time with the one you love, tough (oh so tough!) as Eric faces the fact that love is an impossible enigma that will never be enough and great (oh so great!) as he ignores the obstacles and vows to plough himself into love, heart and soul, anyway. 'Windows' is a concept album of sorts (in as much as any 10cc album was ever a full concept album; this is arguably the closest) about peeling away the unnecessary distractions of our lives and to get down to the nitty gritty of who we are and what we stand for. But, more importantly than that, it's an album that peels away the 'fake' Eric as well and revealing that the confident, clever, popstar-since-his-teens guitarist with the cool shades is as lonely and vulnerable as anyone else, if not actually one hell of a lot more so.
Most 10cc albums come from a combination of the brain and the funny bone, but 'Windows In The Jungle' is an album that comes direct from the heart. It should have been one of the greatest albums of the 1980s. Instead it's an album that picks up grudging two-star reviews from fans who know it isn't rubbish but wonder where the catchy hits went, with a sales figure so poor and a studio atmosphere so low that it killed 10cc off for good (barring two reunion albums a decade later that nobody wanted to make because they'd all hated making this album so much!) Sometimes life just isn't fair but - irony of ironies - that's okay, because that's kind of what the message of this album is too: the windows of clarity that call to us and part our own jungles of befuddlement are so small and unlikely in a modern world full of the need to be seen to doing so many things we don't feel or believe in. They don't come round often; we have to make the most of them. There is no other album in my collection that offers me what 'Windows' does; it might not quite be the best album ever made thanks to a couple of lesser tracks and a flimsy cover that doesn't quite come off, but it's close - at least for a record that nobody else ever puts in a 10cc top ten (and remember, they only made eleven albums). Sometimes my job is hard: finding something new to say about records the world already knows backwards and which most people probably like a little more than me; tonight my job is easy because I can guarantee I know this album at least as well as some people, more than a vast majority and there's a lot that's never been said. The world should have turned this album into a best-seller (it's way more emotionally satisfying than 'Pet Sounds', far more inventive than 'Graceland' and has much more of a theme running through it than 'Sgt Peppers' and 'Band On The Run' for starters). Instead it's an album that only a reviewer like me, apparently, can love and which went until as late as 2014 to secure its first ever legal CD release. Here, then, is our window in the 10cc jungle: this forgotten record might just be their masterpiece as long as you don't come to it looking for it to be a particularly 10cc masterpiece.
The ‘subject matter’ of these two albums really boils down to – ‘what’s the point? We struggle all of our working loves to earn our five minutes of relaxation and freedom, only to start all over again – and with death seemingly lurking over our shoulder at every turn, surely our priorities are muddled? We should be living to give us the space to be able to work, not work to give us the tiny space to truly live'. We start with a day that begins like every other on '24 Hours', a song that begins with the newspaper boy delivery waking up the world to a 'race everyone's wanting to run'. Across eight golden minutes Eric tries to ignore the rushing commuters, deadlines and horrors of the world and pay attention to the 'music of life' he knows to be our true calling - a tune that he finally thinks he's found before it marches off, exiting stage right, to an icy riff and a sense of gloomy frustration. He wonders why people only celebrate their birthdays once a year too, when everyday should be a day to celebrate and do something special (remember, this album is through the eyes of someone who ever so nearly died and went through a complete life-changing experience). He'll do the same again tomorrow, the realization of what life is really about tantalizingly out of reach. 'Feel The Love' is like a complete mis-reading of everything 10cc always stood for: the comedy vocals, the silly chorus ('Oomachasooma', as in the name of a cupid figure the narrator pleads to for love), the warm lyrics about love and the 'Dreadlock Holiday' reggae backing ought to add up to the catchiest 10cc-hit-by-numbers in years. Instead it's a gloriously sly, sarcastic song where Eric jumps into love knowing full well the odds of finding a compatible partner are a 'million to one' and he's going to get burned - but he can't stop himself and 'ignore this feeling'. Nothing matters more than the one you love - it's the working out who you love that's the heart breaker. 'Yes I Am!' is the more usual Eric Stewart ballad, full of hope and longing as he slowly turns from mushy insecure needy wannabe lover whose oh so tired of being hurt over and over into someone whose as sure as he's ever been about anything in his life before. And all that even though none of the textbook things happened: the earth didn't move, he didn't see any fireworks and his world didn't stop - but he did catch his breath, risked his heart being broken and at last found someone he could trust with his fragile heart, with 'nothing to prove'. Even in a career of pitch-perfect love songs, this may well be the best (well, along with 'I'm Not In Love' and 'The Things We Do For Love' perhaps). Next up comes 'Americana Panorama', a song about other people getting it 'wrong' - namely the politicians who have power for the sake of wielding it rather than to do any good and with a killer attack on Ronald Reagan ('a right banana'). They're missing the point too, lost in a jungle of their own making.
Over on side two 'City Lights' juxtaposes how alive the narrator feels when it's the weekend and he's out on the town and with money to burn, while the rest of the time he feels so fragile and ill and overworked. Once again the 'real' life we should be living comes across as a rhythm so faint we can't usually hear it except at moments of great intensity. 'Food For Thought' has Eric talking about how his body knows the 'real' things in life when he sees it, relating all the changes in his body when he thinks of his lover (no not in that way, that's a whole different album, but in a metaphorical 10cc way). Eric realizes that he's been starved of love like this for far too long and that he needs this food to 'survive', not a life of paying the bills and monotony. 'Working Girls' sounds as if it was added at the last minute as a more '10cc style' track to pad out the album, but even here this tale of secretaries being seduced by 'office romeos' is a kind of 10cc feminist statement about how girls deserve better than the first smooth-talking man they comes across. This cat and mouse game is so ugly though, so unreal, so unromantic compared to the very real love the narrator felt over on side one - surely then it isn't really love at all? Finally we end up back at 'Taxi! Taxi!', another song that at seven minutes is almost completely a repeat of the eight minute '24 Hours'. But why not? The day is over with still none of the true life lessons learnt: the narrator's daydreamed, fallen in love, even enjoyed a lovely romantic dinner that was over in what seemed like seconds (compared to the torture of watching the clock ticking down at work) and the couple don't want to part - but they have to, they've got work in the morning. So here he is again, back in the rain waiting for a taxi to take him home, all his promises of a better life unfulfilled and waiting for the day to start again. Taxi's are dangerous though, especially when running late and taking you to somewhere you really don't want to go (and especially after you've nearly died in a car crash). Is this a warning? Is the taxi a symbol of everything that takes us away from our dreams and back to the life we really don't want to lead? Will we ever escape the vicious cycle of the taxi denying us our destiny? It’s no co-incidence that this last track of 10cc’s initial career ends with the narrator poised in the doorway, peering back over his shoulder, willing himself to say ‘to heck with it’ and run back in to the arms of his girlfriend, responsibility free, but worried about the repercussions and nagged at by his conscience. The album hangs in the balance but it ends ultimately with the sad sound of the jungle all over again, blinding the narrator to the clarity of the day and which runs back into the opening song like a loop; just another unfulfilled daydream with all those chances for a better life blown once again that once more wakes with a honking car horn as we're back in that sodding taxi on our way to work.
That's a big call for a concept album and especially one that only runs to eight songs - even more so when you realize just how comparatively few lyrics there are on an album that tends to go for long massive unresolved fades (pining away for all the things that almost but never quite were). However Eric is up to the task: he's almost always good (at least with 10cc, his solo albums lack a little something) but here he's exceptional. Many reviewers have wondered if his heart was really in the material and claim he sounds bored across this record. No sunshine, that's as wrong as thinking that The Spice Girls really stood for 'girl power' and feminism; I tell you Eric is note-perfect across this album: incurably romantic, hopelessly idealistic and desperately lonely as he tries so hard to be as tough as the world makes him to be while remaining soft in the middle all the way through. There's less guitar than normal, but what there is sounds astonishing: Eric's angry urgent snarls of 'come on, put the world to right' on '24 Hours' is exceptional; the slow sad groove that ends 'Taxi!' between guitar and keyboard even more emotional. Though only 'Feel The Love' really 'feels' like a 10cc song (as opposed to session-musicians-backing-Eric), that's as good a way to bow out as a band as any, with an intricate ensemble piece that bids farewell to Paul Burgess in great style, all of the usual 10cc trademarks turned inwards to sound melancholy and eerie. Eric's double-tracked guitar solo here (performed in the music video by a bunch of fans with tennis rackets - don't ask) is also pretty darn perfect too.
Note that only Eric's name has been mentioned so far: this album's Achilles heel is that it is, in effect, a solo album in all but name. Co-partner Graham Gouldman might get his name in all the writing credits (and may have written the ultimate its-not-on-here-but-it-should-be song with The Hollies' 1965 hit 'Look Through Any Window') but this record reveals nothing of his usual deadpan touch or warmhearted eccentricity and only one lead vocal across the whole album, tossed away during a brief sixteen words on the middle eight of the stunning opening track and a brief co-lead on 'City Lights'. Paul Burgess and Rick Fenn have by now been given their marching orders, fed up of hanging around with a low-selling band who don't want to tour and getting fed-up of the bad blood between the remaining 10cc brothers (nothing specific, it's just that after so many years of working together undiluted Eric and Graham no longer see eye to eye over every detail and when you spend as long concentrating on the details as these two there's a lot of chances to rub the other up the long way). That leaves 'Windows' (plus 'Meanwhile...' the mean-spirited polar opposite reunion album that follows) as the only un-democractic album by perhaps rock's most evenly distributed talented band (maybe CSNY). Stewart out-solos pretty much every other solo album ever made by playing everything bar the occasional rhythm section himself (all those years with 10cc being the ‘in-house-band’ at their group-owned Strawberry Studios in Stockport must have helped At times Eric's seriousness becomes a little cloying if you're not in the right mood, with no wacky humor or even another 'voice' to dilute the power. But then that's the whole point once again: for twenty years now the world has been trying to dilute Eric Stewart, a writer who was always much more three dimensional than the hit single conveyor belt ever allowed him to be (he's since claimed that his one big regret about this record was allowing Warner Brothers to bully him into writing 'Feel The Love' as a potential hit single, though actually its clumsy dourness fits rather well here). And if funny hijinks with Graham is what you want then the 'Animalympics' soundtrack album of 1980 made with all of the six-piece 10cc except Eric (though funnily enough it gets a 'Gouldman' credit even while this much more solo album doesn't) is this album's close cousin, with its slightly softer, gentler handling of the same subject matters of working hard, achieving your goals and concentrating on the 'right' goals in life (even if that story is told through the eyes of a pair of marathon lovers who fall in love and realize that's more important than a gold medal - they also happen to be a tigress and a goat!) The two albums even use the same 'jungle' sound effect (heard at the very start of 'Windows' and during the instrumental 'Kit mambo' on 'Animalympics') as if the one is breaking free into the other...
From its cover down - a scene of sunshine entering through a slit in a dull grey monolithic world - Windows is an album about priorities and why humans so often get them wrong. A rare ‘window’ on what might have been really going on in the mind of its chief creator Eric Stewart, what this album loses in wacky commercialism it more than makes up for with passion and delivery. A forgotten gem that even the band seems to have wanted to bury at the time, Windows is the perfect rebuttal to every sneering 10cc critic who moaned about the cleverness of it all getting in the way of feeling (these people can’t have been listening to the same records I’ve been listening to, as they all have genuine feelings aplenty – just not usually this much per record) and a bright shining beacon which offers a fine reward for those of us old fans who’ve spent years trying to track the thing down. Remember, this is a brave album: 10cc are on their uppers and they desperately needed a hit yesterday or sooner: they could have done the easy thing and recorded eight different re-writes of 'I'm Not In Love' along with two of 'Dreadlock Holiday' (actually that's not a million miles away from the failed attempt on 'Look Hear'). For a start, this just doesn’t sound like a 10cc album. Its serious, to the point of being morose at times, reflecting about the pointlessness of human existence and the often unending search to find a soul-mate which single-handedly puts the mockers on every love song on this list. Yes, bits of this album are catchy, just as in the days of old, but given their context sandwiched in between the more serious soul-searching tracks here even these songs sound more ironic than confident. Bits of this album are laugh-out-loud funny too, just like the days of old when 10cc records were always the funniest and most biting ones you could find in the top 40, but here the humor is wry and strained, full of an edgy defensiveness and desperation even though the wordplay is actually every bit as clever and hilarious as before. This is a group in its dying breaths, riding out the dying embers of a contract and looking for another one after a record company had already lost so much faith in the band that they a) did as little promotion as they could get away with and b) let through one of the most horrible and dull covers in the history of rock (although here again that's kind of the point too: there are three cuts in the sleeve so that the grey drab outside gives way to the colorful inside, which would work better if the inner sleeve was actually, you know, colorful inside of off-colour white).
So what's the catch? Just the album cover? Well, I'd love to tell you there isn't really one, but sadly there is and there's nothing 10cc can really do about it. This album sold so poorly and suffers from such a poor reputation that this album is near-impossible to find on CD. In fact the only release I’ve even vaguely heard of is some guy on Ebay flogging an imported issue for the ridiculous price of £36 (there aren’t even any bonus tracks). And the worst of it is, the price will probably go up now I’ve written this great review for this website and someone else will put a higher bid in than me when they’ve read it and I’ll never own a decent copy of it…don’t you just hate it when then happens?! The original vinyl edition might be a better bet if you still have a good second-hand shop nearby (editor's note: it took another six years of pleading, but finally we got this album on CD for the first time in 2014 with a handful of interesting bonus tracks too, yay! That currently leaves The Hollies' 'Out On The Road' as the only AAA main album in search of a first UK/US CD release and even then we have a French import around nowadays). In a funny way it's fitting that an album about missed opportunities and ignoring the status quo should be so unknown and under-appreciated though and goes to show that you can 'fool the people all the time'...
Some albums in your collection are just lucky, talismans that offer you something they don't appear to have offered anybody else (at least judging by the reviews and with the possible exception of the people - or person, really, in this case - who made it) and which repay the love faith and hope you put into buying them, scorched reputation and all, a million fold across your life (you'll know that too if you're enough of a collector to read through to here about an album that nobody loves; even if you don't happen to agree with me about this album I know you'll have your own lucky talisman of an album you weren't expecting to be much cop and fell in love with completely and absolutely - we all do; this one is mine). 'Windows' is a grower of an album too, opening up more subtlety and ideas with every listen if you can get past the first slightly off-putting listen thanks to the similarly bland 1980s production values (though even these aren't anything as like as bad as most AAA albums released in the tuneless 1980s; indeed this album suffers from less synths and drum machines than most; you may notice too, if you're an 'old' reader, that the first draft of this review in 2008 was pleased with this album while the 2016 model waxes lyrical about it - this album has gone up in my estimation a lot in the intervening eight years and was already pretty high to start with). We love brave records with big hearts here at the AAA that deliver something a little bit different: flawed as this masterpiece is (side two isn't up to side one, while a bit more drama in the backing tracks would have been welcome), 'Windows In The Jungle' ticks all the right boxes. It sounds like no other album made before or since, including every 10cc album made before and since, brings me sunshine on a cloudy day when all I can see is the sodding jungle and reminds me that the world is what you have the guts to make of it, even with the world and it's taxis waiting to bring you back to earth every day of the week.
The Songs:
24 Hours, with its rumbling sound effects mixing jungle rhythms and urban city noises, starts off like many a jolly 10CC song, one of those classic scene-setters that set much of the tone for the album. But the piece’s mournful tune, which keeps trying to rise higher and higher only to fall short of its target and round off with a wry sigh at the end of each line, tells the observant listener that something is wrong as early as the first verse. Indeed, even these typically 10cc sound effects sound rather ominous here, as if the cannibalistic tribal rhythms of our ancient way of life really aren’t so different from our modern days filled with traffic jams and roadworks, as if we’ve just swapped one claustrophobic jungle we casn’t escape for another. The use of comedy on this track is also interesting, as in nearly any other 10cc song this would be an all-out sitcom comedy, full of sleepy paper boys and ambitious but doomed workers that we’re meant to laugh at for not seeing past the ends of their noses. But the mood is different this time, as if Eric has just realized how much really has been going on that he hasn’t noticed and on this track its as if 10cc are trying to puncture a great conspiracy about our priorities in life. This time, the song is a tragedy, with all of our little sacrifices and efforts ultimately in vain because everyone else is doing the same thing and ultimately we all come out equal, with none of us any further on in our lives for all of our hard work. The lyrics of this even song deal with tired humans going about their daily business, ‘the start of a race all of us wanting to win’ as Stewart eloquently puts it and which the author himself had temporarily escaped (the whole of this song is in the third person, as if Stewart is calmly looking at the world around him for the first time). The song tries its best to sound busy and bustles along with several rhythms and counter-rhythms from drummer Paul Burgess on a particularly good day. But ultimately, it’s hollow: the song is actually a leisurely walking pace beneath all of this activity going on over the top and for all of its seeming drive and verve the track takes an age to get anywhere at all – but for once this sort of languid, muted scene-setting is perfectly judged, finally bursting into electric fire at the 4:30 mark. Eric makes it clear with the song’s mournful melody that mankind isn’t really getting anywhere except deeper and deeper into a technological cul-de-sac. Like the hilarious 10cc anti-capitalist diatribe Wall Street Shuffle, the last laugh isn’t on the people with money in the bank because of anything they’ve done at the expense of others – its because of all the things they didn’t do, all the important bits of being human that have just been forgotten and neglected through the protagonist’s tunnel vision, with the people with full bank balances actually losing out on life in some way. Stewart makes it clear that, in the grand scheme of things, something somewhere has got lost and that we are concentrating on getting richer instead of spreading love in the world. This isn’t the way the human race was meant to behave, with nothing to look forward to except for fleeting moments like holidays and birthdays and Christmas alluded to in the song – but just as in real life that long, slow build-up has taken up much of the time and there’s no space left for the characters to reflect on their happiness.
Eric builds up the controlled emotion of his characters well, finally letting this simmering song explode into boiling point with an absolute volcano-like burst of erupting guitar, set alongside a tack piano riff that sums up all of the rigid routine going on around it. He also turns in one of his best guitar solos when the track gets properly going, a nice hybrid of being noisy and being melodic which more bands should copy, later multi-tracking his reprise solo near the end of the song so that he seems to be answering himself, as if he’s the only person listening in this wasteland of missed opportunities. Gouldman’s belated middle eight tries to break through the song’s tense atmosphere with its tale of a night out on the town, but it’s only the briefest of interludes – all too soon the night is over and we’re back in the bewildering rush of modern life all over again and even this interlude is ugly, modern, brash, in-your-face and exactly the sort of ‘rest’ period that isn’t relaxing at all. Interestingly, this is one of the few 10cc songs that doesn’t end on a full finish but fades out gradually only to reappear in only slightly altered form on the last track 35 minutes later, perhaps implying the course of our meandering way of life carrying on in-between the other songs. A fine beginning, this is Eric Stewart at his best, balancing comedy and tragedy in the best 10cc manner but arguably with more ‘heart’ than usual. Listen out for Eric's squeaky shows over the opening as he slowly makes his way to work, drowned out by the head-hanging riff before he hears the window in the jungle for the first time that day.
Oomachasooma (Feel The Love) seems to be back on familiar territory with its strange title, daft backing vocals, ear-catching opening drum lick and – if you can track it down because it’s rather rare these days – a hilarious promo video set at a tennis match which sends up Eric’s earnest why-am-I-the-only-one-taking-this-song-seriously? vocal tremendously well. But unlike most 10CC songs, where you can usually tell the band are only one drumbeat away from laughter, the vocal is sung by Eric at his most committed and gritty. He really does mean the sentiment of this song and its not some hilarious anecdote put on for our benefit, it’s just the clothes this song is dressed up in that happen to be silly. The lyrics are a rare love song, with a typically 10cc twist in the tale. In a reiteration of the last track’s none-of-this-really-matter’s shoulder-shrugging, the narrator finds himself in love but instead of being pleased is confused as to why he hasn’t felt like this before in his life. Indeed, the narrator is downright angry that he’s been spending so much time concentrating on things that don’t really matter – as he realizes now, all that does matter is ‘the one you love’ and everything else is filler in our lives, a chance to do something before the great day arrives. Yet he’s also confused—does this mean the ‘love’ he’s felt for others in the past wasn’t real? Was he so desperate for love in his life that he imagined it? Or does love feel differently every time depending on the couple? But hold it right there: even this supposedly optimistic message about finally finding true love, which closely mirrors The Things We Do For Love at the start, gets garbled thanks to the truly depressing middle eight. Here Stewart tells us that even love isn’t worth worrying about because - if each of us have only one soul-mate out there and there’s several billion of us in the world – it’s a waste of time us looking for them and the chances of our meeting the ‘right’ person first time out are doomed to failure. This is a terribly gloomy message for a band who usually do their level best to cheer you up, but somehow the silly backing and the catchy, offbeat hook doesn’t jar – it just makes the whole subject of love sound downright absurd instead. Even a playful plea to the ‘oomachasooma man’ (a modern-day Cupid) to sort things out on the narrator’s behalf can’t quite make this song the belly-aching chuckle it tries hard to be and the presence of another fantastically edgy, deeply furious guitar solo seems to be another ‘window’ into the desperation going on in its creator’s mind, however much he tries to hide it on this album.
Yes I Am! starts off as one of those languid slow-burning ballads Eric always writes so well, complete with a bluesy sax solo, but as the song goes on it becomes clear that this is another cry of doubt and second thoughts about life despite the confidence asserted in the title. In fact, this seems to be deep down a song about how being ‘unsure’ of things is a natural and welcome state for human beings to be in and that the narrator was always slightly edgy when life seemed to be secure and easily compartmentalized. For the most part, though, this is another love song – and a genuine one too, unlike the confused messages of the last track. Thankfully, Eric does at least contradict the last song’s message with a burning middle-eight, telling us how sure he is that he’s found the love of his life now and urging the listener not to worry about who their heart chooses for them, saying that 'there's not really any reason why you really fall in love - because you can't stop it...hold on tight and never let it go!' But this hopeful moment is only a glimpse of light surrounded by shadows – this song is also about the narrator’s lonely past, ‘desperate for love’ with ‘so many dreams shattered’ before this moment. He also seems to regret his years searching for some Utopian ideal he was never going to find – as he puts it in the second verse, there were no fireworks and the earth never moved, but the narrator still knows that this is ‘real’ love all the same. Another poignant middle eight also returns to this album’s themes about why we worry about the little things so much when love is in the end the only thing that matters (or, if you like, that love is all you need). Although this song sounds far more traditional than what we’ve had on the album so far, this song is still a far cry from Stewart’s usually effortless romantic work and the ominous closing riff, which sounds like its marching off to war, destroys much of the romantic mood built up over the past four minutes. Even a pretty melody, an ‘up’ message and what is for this album rare block 10CC harmonies can’t make this song sound anything but scary.
Just as we think the song has died out, suddenly out of the silence comes the jagged riff of the last track again, kicking off the album’s most outwardly looking song. Americana Panorama is a rather world-weary protest number, recalling the tune of Wall Street Shuffle but played at a funeral pace, with lots of odd but strangely funny jabs at 80s American politics (‘Americana Panorama! Reagan was a right banana!) sung to a tune that sounds on the verge of tears throughout. Despite the jibes, Eric’s message is clear - condemning a country that promoted peace and prosperity while providing fast food for the rich and nothing for the poor and needy and already home to a number of assassins of leading ‘peace’ figures: J F Kennedy, Martin Luther King and John Lennon. Stewart is also not the first musician on this list to point our that Reagan’s Hollywood past before his term of office in the 1980s seemed at the time as if the rubber-necked one was only ‘acting’ out the cold war (perhaps Eric should have got together with Lindisfarne’s Alan Hull and started a support group for irate musicians?) Sporting one of Eric’s better vocals, with a quietly burning anger that’s kept in check until the middle eight, this song’s brooding menace and uncharacteristically uncharitable sentiments make it one of the most unique and impressive song in the 10cc canon, even if the sentiments seem a bit strange to modern ears (we know now, many years after the fall of the Berlin wall that the cold war never happened of course – but try telling that to somebody who lived 20 years ago when WW3 seemed imminent, if indeed it hadn’t already started). At first this song seems to sit outside this album (it is, after all, the only song not directly connected to the story-telling narrator), but in actual fact it makes perfect sense: why are we squabbling over such small matters (ie foreign policy that makes other nations look ‘bad’ and us ‘good’) when they come at such a high a price? (ie our lives). That sentiment, at least, makes more and more sense every day. Best line? 'Americana Panorama, Reagan was a right banana!'
Side two arrives and pumps a bit of 10cc’s effervescent energy back into the album courtesy of the sprightly City Lights. A bright-and-breezy out-on-the-town song that offers a huge contrast from the harshnesses of life we’ve heard so far, its as if side one never happened. Gouldman at last gets a decent vocal cameo on this album as the gad-about-town (although it is a shame that he’s singing multi-tracked rather than with Stewart as on most of the last album) and the slimmed down band seem to be having fun with this song’s simple beat. As for the theme, its an expansion of that brief joyous middle eight we heard on 24 Hours, with the narrator ‘coming back to life’ now that the day is over and the night has fallen. By the third straight chorus-repeat, however, you’re beginning to understand just how sick the band are of playing songs this commercial, how empty this sort of song feels compared to the tracks surrounding it and – useful as this song is in context by breaking up the gloom of the record - you probably wouldn’t want to play it outside of its parent album.
That upbeat mood is rather short-lived, too, with Food For Thought offering, well, food for thought. Based around yet another of Eric’s slow-burning ominous riffs, the song is at its basic level really just a list of a girlfriend’s physicals and mental attributes, but the pessimistic mood of the song (she obviously doesn’t feel the same way about the narrator) and the downward sloping harmonies make it sound more of a funeral than a party, as Eric compares his growing obsession with his muse’s offhand nonchalance. The two are contrasted not in lyrics but in music, where Eric’s powerful rock riff – the best aural evidence of obsession since Lennon’s I Want You (She’s So Heavy) – is interrupted by the choruses’ relaxed calypso. In the context of the rest of Windows In The Jungle this is another song about the narrator’s sudden confusion after a dilemma, trying to work out what his priorities are in life again – does he waste his time chasing after someone who blatantly isn’t interested? Or give up in the hope that someone more compatible will come along? The decision is a hard one because, as the middle eight’s spiraling harmonies tell us, ‘I’m starved without your love’, along with several other cooking references which sound more forced than hilarious, as if Stewart was trying to tidy his thoughts up into ‘10cc’ mode before this album’s release. The core of the song., however, is impressive all the same.
Working Girls continues this balancing act, with a daft-but-lovable riff and punchy harmonies sandwiched between this tale’s lyrics about another lost-soul character trying to better herself and break out of the ‘cat-and-mouse game’. Apparently re-thinking his earlier stance, this is Stewart representing work as an ‘escape route’, a way out that will level out any social or monetary differences (I’m sure that went down well in Thatcherite Britain, where unfair class systems suddenly came into play again, a situation that hasn’t quite recovered itself even now despite what you may read in the press about ‘working class heroes’). This isn’t some big political statement though, just the excuse for a jolly romp and a chance to hear what is quite possibly the last ‘band’ performance on a 10cc record (like this album, the two reunion albums seem to have been recorded by Stewart and Gouldman largely separately). The Stewart-Gouldman interplay in the block harmonies - at last - is classic 10CC, with the two splitting off in different directions every other line yet somehow complementing the song well and Eric’s rockabilly guitar solo is one of his best too. You’d never include this song in a 10CC best-of - and there’s a shocking edit about 3:30 into the track that rather spoils the mood - but it’s a sweet little tune nonetheless and a welcome chance for the band to come down to earth and look at the realities of life rather than their more usual fantasies.
Closing track Taxi! Taxi! takes us back to the start, its characters still trapped even though it’s now the end of the day and they can all go home and get some light relief before things start all over again. A tale of a trapped worker, watching time slow down to the sort of crawl it only ever seems to manage half an hour before going home time, the bulk of this song is suitably claustrophobic with Stewart stretching his words out for aeons at a time. His sudden cry for a ‘taxi!’ to take him home out of this madness sounds like a life-changing episode, giving the narrator a chance to go anywhere at all and be who he really wants to be now that the working day is over. This verse’s poignant imagery and fleeting fast-moving pace tells us about all of the great things the character has ever dreamed of becoming and the delightful time he’s planning out that evening with his girlfriend. But it’s all in the narrator’s head, as if he’s slumped over his desk and daydreaming about the evening instead of being there. The ‘taxi’ riff (with the singers calling for one in exactly the same way they would in real life) is a classy and very 10cc-ish hook, taking the everyday and turning it into the absurd (which, arguably, real life is anyway). Gouldman’s harmonies make a welcome return here, sugar-coating Stewart’s increasingly desperate wail of a lead vocal which finally falls over at the 4:30 mark into an exclamation of ‘Its been a hell of day in the city but its time to get away!” All too soon the delights are over, the character is saying goodbye to his new friend and preparing to go home, and that seems to be that for another day. The song then ends on a long slow fade, with clink-clank drums, an acoustic and electric guitar plus a keyboard all chiming in with their own rhythms and melodies sounding not unlike Brian Wilson’s Smile (high praise on this list, as you’ll be seeing later). In a nutshell, this whole instrumental passage is in counterpoint, with the four or five individual parts making up a complete new one even better than its parts, just as if the hopes and dreams of the people in the song are spreading through the population by word-of-mouth, growing up into a rising coda of love that not even a nine o’clock start the next day can shatter. A worthy close to a worthy album, Taxi! Taxi! is a sweet little sojourn offering a ‘window in the jungle’ that often overpowers us but should never get in the way of what we feel we ought to be doing.
Even though the concept is a little half-baked and undeveloped, Windows is never less than moving and often delightfully transcendental in its balance of the mundanity and freedom of life. A fine goodbye to a fine career, this is 10cc at their moving best. Not hilarious best maybe, not inventive and original best, not even best played and arranged, but in terms of songs the band rarely came up with a better selection and, as poorly used as Graham and the others are, Eric is on superb form all the way through and never puts a foot wrong throughout. This is a very special album by a very special band about trying to lead what should always be a very special life.
Here are those 2 music videos from their 1983 album:
Food for Thought
Feel the Love
