Life is a minestrone - 10CC

In 1975, 10CC made an important step in their career. Eric Stewart comments: 'At that point in time we were still on Jonathan King's label, but struggling. We were absolutely skint, the lot of us, we were really struggling seriously, and Philips Phonogram wanted to do a deal with us. They wanted to buy Jonathan King's contract. I rang them. I said come and have a listen to what we've done, come and have a listen to this track. And they came up and they freaked, and they said 'This is a masterpiece. How much money, what do you want? What sort of a contract do you want? We'll do anything, we'll sign it'. On the strength of that one song, we did a five-year deal with them for five albums and they paid us a serious amount of money.'

The song was 'I'm not in love', one of the tracks on 10CC's 1975 album 'Original Soundtrack', their first to be released on the Mercury label. But the first single from that album was not 'I'm not in love', but 'Life is a minestrone', a track that was more similar to 10CC's earlier work. It reached number 17 in the Dutch Top 40 and number 7 in the UK singles chart.

My collection: 7" single no. 4616
Found: La La Land, Den Haag, March 5, 2010
Cost: 1 euro
Tracks: 'Life is a minestrone' / 'Channel swimmer'