Sheet Music

The second album by 10cc defined their self-conscious and witty approach to songwriting. They’d cram their glam-prog songs with puns (“The Wall Street Shuffle”), touches of cabaret (“Clockwork Creep”), and knowing references to the rock scene (“The Worst Band In the World”). Then they’d play gleeful games with the sincerity of pop, wry and scathing one minute (“Silly Love”) and heartbreakingly elegiac the next—“Old Wild Men” mourns the passing of a rock era that, in 1974, was still happily going on.