ALBUM OF THE MONTH

Kevin Godley & Lol Creme. After this album they've made very little music. Their very successful career as video makers also fizzled after they parted ways. Lol has been pursuing his interests in painting while Kevin is chilling somewhere. Oh well...

Album # 52 is Goodbye Blue Sky - Godley & Creme

I felt like a "summer album" this time around. And one album that I return to summer after summer is Godley & Creme's Goodbye Blue Sky from 1988.

I liked the great 70's British band 10 cc were Kevin Godley and Lol Creme created melodic and fun pop together with Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman.
After five successful years Godley & Creme left 10 cc to pursue a career as a duo through the guitar synthesizer they'd invented; The Gizmo.

Eric Stewart & Graham Gouldman's 10 cc soon lost interesting to me. They got a bit too saccharine and the melodies lost the edge they'd had when Godley and Creme were still a part of the band. But they left. And they left with the weirdness.

It's never more apparent than their first album as a duo; Consequences (1977). What followed were a line of so-so albums as far as sales go. Excentric and rarely going for the simple hook, verse and refrain.
Just like 10 cc Godley & Creme continued the studio perfectionist tradition from 10 cc, so it's a bit ironic that their seventh and final album; Goodbye Blue Sky, on the surface looks like a departure from what they'd done before.

First of all it says on the cover that the album has been "recorded and mixed on an old 16 track at home". Apart from Kevin & Lol there's three back-up singers and two harmonica players on the record. And that's it.

The studio pop/rock from before is replaced with a simpler harmonica driven acoustic sound. That in itself contrasts with the subject matter of the album. I guess you could call it a "concept album" about the end of the world. It could come across depressing and/or pompous. But it doesn't.

In the end Godley & Creme sound less detatched and more focused and personal on this album than on any of their previous.

Goodbye Blue Sky makes for great listening all year round. And that's why it's Radio Dupree's Album Of The Month!

N.S..