I'm Mandy Fly Me

The idea for this song came from a very suggestive - some would say sexist - advertising campaign in the '70s for National Airlines, an American carrier that was taken over by Pan-Am in 1980. The ads featured real stewardesses and carried headlines like, "I'm Cheryl. Fly me." There were also television spots. 10cc was a British group; members Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman spotted the ads when they came to America and got a kick out of them. Stewart recalled in a BBC Radio Wales interview: "I remember seeing in Manchester this beautiful poster and just below it was this tramp, I mean a serious tramp, quite a raggedy guy, looking up at this girl, and I thought God, do you know, there's a song there. Look at that guy looking up at Cindy-fly-me and I know he's never gonna get on an aeroplane, I don't think, except in his dreams." Kevin Godley ended up re-writing the lyric, which is written from the perspective of a traveler living out the fantasy of the ad campaign until the plane crashes. He's rescued by Mandy, but then she's nowhere to be found. Could it have all been a dream?

Musically, there's a lot going on in this song. After the line, "as my heart began to fall," the rhythm changes completely, going into an instrumental section as we enter the dream sequence. Graham Gouldman's first attempt at the music was deemed "too bland," but they livened up à la Paul McCartney in "Band On The Run." "It just goes on," Eric Stewart said of their first attempt. "On one plane, your verses and your middles and your der-der-der, they're all going on the one plane. What it needs is someone to go bash on the side of your head." So Stewart and Gouldman changed the rhythm completely and "put two whacking great guitar solos in there, in the middle of this quiet, soft, floaty song." The end result was, "this lovely interesting song with the whacking guitar solos in it."

The beginning and the end of this song include airplane sounds like the familiar ding heard on planes to alert passengers.