Graham Gouldham on the hazards of writing for hire
One of the strangest moments of Graham Gouldham’s career was during a regular warm-up spot on Top of the Pops. While best known for co-founding 10cc, he was part of The Mockingbirds years before, who dutifully readied the crowd on the BBC show. Gouldham watched on as the Yardbirds took to the stage to perform ‘For Your Love’, and fans fawned over them as he languished in the shadows. It was odd to witness, given he’d written the song.
That brief moment on Top of the Pops best illustrates how underappreciated Gouldham is as a songwriting force. His back catalogue of hits speaks for itself, as does the ease at which he doled them out. He was only 19 when he wrote ‘For Your Love’, the Yardbirds classic that hit number one on the UK charts and six in the US, and he was working in a men’s outfitters shop at the time.
He wrote a string of hits while moonlighting as a hitmaker and musician. He’d go on to write another two songs on Having a Rave Up with the Yardbirds, ‘Look Through Any Window’ for The Hollies and ‘No Milk Today’ for Herman’s Hermits. By this point, industry big-wigs started noticing, and Super K Productions promptly hired him to write songs for other artists.
It was a milestone he later called a creative low. In The 10cc Story, he said it felt like he was “grasping, sort of prostituting myself” in taking the job. “I felt awful. I just didn’t seem to be keeping up with what other people were doing. It was very depressing.” The pressure to recreate past successes sucked the joy out of writing, and he dreaded going into the New York office.
“After I had finished one song in a day, which was very high output for me, they’d come up to me and say: ‘Give us another song!’ And I’d say ‘OK’ – because I’m like that,” he recalled. “They’d keep up the pressure so that I kept on writing.” But he stuck it out for eight weeks and then flew home to Manchester, where a doctor declared him chronically overworked. He was so anxious about how the songs would perform that he couldn’t eat. The worst knock-on effect was Gouldham, who was writing top-ten hits in his teens, lost confidence in his abilities.
Luckily, he rebounded in style, forming 10cc alongside Lol Creme, Eric Stewart, and Kevin Godley in 1973. All of them had been working on other artists’ projects, and when they banded together, Gouldham was behind many of their greatest hits. He remains arguably one of the most prolific contributors to popular music, whether performing the songs or writing them for others.
His collaborators read like a catalogue of the most influential artists through each decade, and his creative trace can be felt across many of Britain’s most beloved tracks. While the New York year of songwriting for hire dampened his spirit, in more recent times, he’s celebrated his creative freedom. “I can’t do anything else, so I’m lucky, really,” he told The Ocelot. “I never had any interest in doing anything else! It’s the best job in the world – if it is a proper job.”
