Sheet Music

Released by UK Records in May 1974, it was produced by the band and engineered and mixed by Eric Stewart. After a UK tour that began on 26 August 1973, they went back to Strawberry Studios in November to record the rest of it. It includes every possible combination of co-writing duos among Stewart, Gouldman, Godley and Creme, which the band used to explore new ideas. Godley said in a 2006 interview that they had started to explode creatively and did not recognise any boundaries, with lots of excitement and an innocence open to anything. Paul McCartney was using Strawberry in the daytime to produce his brother Mike's album McGear while 10cc worked at night, and Gouldman said they used Paul's drum kit.

The Gizmotron, the guitar device Godley and Creme invented, was first used on Old Wild Men. Clockwork Creep, which ends side one, describes the last minute of the countdown to a bomb on a jumbo jet. Gouldman asked the Guardian who else would write a song about a bomb on an airplane from the position of the bomb. The singles were The Worst Band in the World, which failed to chart, The Wall Street Shuffle, which reached number ten in the UK and number two in the Netherlands, and Silly Love, which reached number 24.

Reception

It reached number nine in the UK and number 81 in the US. Rolling Stone's Charley Walters wrote in 1974 that the band had made standard pop into their own inventive, even sophisticated, art. Billboard found a certain zany feeling and said the songs were far from silly when listened to carefully. The critic George Durbalau called it a piece of well-crafted, highly idiosyncratic pop. Godley, Gouldman and Stewart have all described it as the band's zenith. In 2006 J Dilla sampled The Worst Band in the World on Workinonit, from his album Donuts.