Rubber Bullets

Like the Elvis Presley hit "Jailhouse Rock," this song is about a party that breaks out at the county jail. Elvis' song ends with everyone having a good time, but in 10cc's song, the party is kiboshed by riot police who use rubber bullets to quell the uprising, a more likely outcome.

Band member Eric Stewart recalled: "I was amazed, but pleased that the BBC never banned the track, although they limited its airplay, because they thought it was about the ongoing Northern Ireland conflicts. In fact, it was about an Attica State Prison riot like the ones in the old James Cagney films." Graham Gouldman remembered: "Kevin and Lol had the chorus and part of the verse but then got stuck. We all loved the chorus and realized it was a hit in itself, so we wanted to persist with it. I chipped in the line 'we've all got balls and brains, but some's got balls and chains.' One of my finer couplets." (quotes from 1000 UK #1 Hits by Jon Kutner and Spencer Leigh)

Lol Creme is lead singer on this track; he wrote the song along with Kevin Godley and Graham Gouldman. Godley recalled to Uncut: "Lol may have been working with a strange tuning. I'm not sure, but undoubtedly he was playing this smelly old Spanish guitar, and I'd sat down with a notebook opposite him. I think we started writing it in my parents' house, and it just came out. It was one of those lucky songs that didn't take a fortnight to write. We knew what the feeling of this thing was, which is kind of weird because the lyric is essentially about a fictitious black and white movie from the era of James Cagney. We were big movie buffs in those days, me and Lol, so it was one of those kind of films... you know, with a prison riot, and there's always a padre there, and a tough cop with a megaphone. It was caricaturing those movies. But the chorus talks about rubber bullets, which weren't invented until the 1970s by the British government to quell the troubles in Northern Ireland. So it didn't make any sense at all. But it just worked."