Tune of the Week: Godley and Creme

Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were an innovative multimedia duo from the 70s and 80s. After leaving the rock band 10cc they became a production duo. Their first album, “Consequences”, was a three LP box set that promoted their guitar accessory invention, the Gizmotron. On their third album, “Freeze Frame”, they experimented on the above track with what would commonly be referred to as “autotune”, a method of vocal pitch correction popular in the early 21st century.

In an interview for The Idler magazine in 2007, Kevin Godley explained how that song was realized:

Recently, I played I Pity Inanimate Objects from Freeze Frame and I remembered how and why we actually did that. The idea was driven by a new piece of equipment called a harmoniser. It's used in studios all the time these days as a corrective device to get performances in tune, but this early version came with a keyboard. You could put a sound through a harmoniser and if you wanted an instrument or voice to hit a certain note that it hadn't, you could play that note on the keyboard. So we got to thinking, 'Let's forget about singing for the moment. What happens if I vocalize these words in a monotone - do an entire song on one note - and get Lol to play my vocal on the harmoniser keyboard?' That was the experiment. It worked pretty well. Predated Cher's digital gurglings by a few years. I don't know where the lyric came from. Maybe because the harmoniser was inanimate.[3]