10cc – Rubber Bullets

Radio stations cut one couplet from an American jail-riot song because a British band happened to release it the year the army reached for real rubber bullets

Lol Creme sat opposite Kevin Godley with a battered Spanish guitar and possibly the wrong tuning, and between them they had a chorus and no idea what to do with it. That was the working method at Strawberry Studios in 1973: no demos, no plan, just four musicians who happened to own the building sitting around until something happened. What happened this time was a song set at a riot in an American county jail, sung in deliberate small-town US accents, that would become the first UK No. 1 for a band called 10cc — and then get quietly censored on the radio for a line about anatomy.

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The song is a parody of Jailhouse Rock, and it announces itself as one in the opening line. Where Elvis threw a party at the county jail and everyone had a good time, 10cc threw the same party and had it broken up by armed police. Sergeant Baker turns up with a bullhorn, the National Guard gets called, and the whole thing tips from Cagney-movie pastiche into something closer to Attica. Graham Gouldman wrote most of that middle section, including the couplet he still names as one of his finest: we’ve all got balls and brains, but some’s got balls and chains. It is the best line in the song and the one that caused all the trouble.

The controversy the band didn’t write

June 1973. The record goes to No. 1 in the UK, and radio programmers start getting nervous — not about the balls-and-brains couplet, at first, but about the title. The British Army had recently begun using rubber bullets against rioters in Northern Ireland, and a chart-topping single called Rubber Bullets sounded like a comment on it. The band insisted, repeatedly and correctly, that the song was about an American prison and the James Cagney films they grew up on. Godley, living in Ireland decades later, was still explaining that they had written it before rubber bullets were a thing in the Troubles at all; it simply arrived at the same moment. The protests mostly fell on deaf ears. The BBC never formally banned it — though it did later, for the duration of the 1991 Gulf War — but airplay was cautious, and the version that got played was not the version the band recorded.

American radio went further. The full album cut runs five minutes and fifteen seconds. The US radio edit was hacked down to around three and a half, and one of the casualties was the balls-and-brains couplet, snipped out entirely so the final verse jumps straight from Uncle Sam belonging in the exercise yard to “is it really such a crime.” A listener who knows the song only from that edit has never heard the line the songwriter was proudest of. Which is why a clip billed as the “balls and brains” version is not a curiosity — it is the song as written, with the couplet restored, the way most of America never heard it in 1973.

A studio that let them do anything

None of this would exist without the room. Strawberry Studios in Stockport was part-owned by Eric Stewart, the band’s guitarist and engineer, which meant 10cc could record without a label, a producer, or a clock telling them to stop. They used that freedom to experiment in ways a rented studio would never have allowed. The opening riff is Gouldman playing bass through a wah-wah pedal, done purely to sound like nobody else. The middle and outro solos have a strange high-pitched shimmer because Stewart recorded them at half-speed and let them play back at double — the same trick Mike Oldfield used that same year, in a different English studio, to build Tubular Bells.

The song took the Ivor Novello Award for Best Beat Song and set the pattern for what followed: each of 10cc’s three UK chart-toppers across the decade would be sung by a different member — Creme here, Stewart on I’m Not in Love, Gouldman on Dreadlock Holiday. It is a strange, restless, overstuffed record, packed with more ideas than a three-minute single can comfortably hold, which is exactly what four people with the keys to their own studio and nobody watching will produce. In 2007 it turned up as the theme to the pilot of an American cartoon about a prison. The joke, forty years on, still lands.