Tune Tag #138 with Ian Paul Sharp of LP, Pt. 3: 10cc, Kaye Ballard, Aztec Camera, Kate Bush, Scritti Politti, Rupert Holmes, Spandau Ballet
Happy to re-Tag with Ian, our 3rd such meeting, Tag-side! He's cool, clever, and he's from the UK! 'Nuff said, 'cept to say you're gonna wanna watch for the words; they play a big part in this Tag!😁
Welcome Ian Paul Sharp of LP: Inside the Album for his 3rd Tune Tag!
Ian: As well as writing LP Prog Rock here on Substack, I review albums for TheProgressiveAspect.net. A book, Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse, is due for publication later in 2026, and I am researching and writing for a collaborative Genesis book project. The LP podcast launches this year. I live in Olney, Buckinghamshire, UK, with my partner, Jane, and two monochrome animals - a border collie and a cat.
Last May, Ian and I played his 2nd Tune Tag:
Last week, we enjoyed the debut Tune Tag of Bob Tooker of Music & Muffins:
Next week, mark your calendars for April’s first Tune Tag with Stephen Huppert of Daily Groove!
Ian’s song #1 sent to Brad: 10cc, “I’m Mandy Fly Me,” 1976
Ian’s rationale: An unusual and brilliant hit by the extraordinary 10cc. It tells a story within a progressive song structure. There’s a comment below the video on YouTube to the effect that you don’t get this kind of music anymore. Well, we do, but it doesn’t bother the charts very often, now. The fast guitar section was my wake-up call when I was at college in the seventies.
In a radio interview, songwriter (and lead singer) Eric Stewart recalled the origins of the song:
National Airlines used to have this beautiful poster that they displayed of this gorgeous stewardess inviting you onto the plane. Now her name wasn’t Mandy actually, it was something like, er, oh gosh knows, “I’m Cindy”, a very American name. “I’m Cindy, fly me” which was a quite sexual connotation as well, but 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.
He continued:
So I brought it back, the idea, back to the studio, where we were writing for the How Dare You! album, and put it to the guys: “Anybody interested in this ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’?” I’d switched it to Mandy. And Graham said “yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I’ve got some ideas, I’ve got some chords. Let’s slot those things in, try it, mess it around.”
We wrote it, and we didn’t like it. We…we scrapped it. It just wasn’t going anywhere. But, enter from stage left, ha ha, the “wicked villain,” Kevin Godley, twiddling his moustache, says “I know what’s wrong with it. Let’s sit down again.”
He said “I think it just gets too bland, it just goes on, 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 we changed the rhythm completely, and we put two whacking great guitar solos in there, in the middle of this quiet, soft, floaty song. Once we’d got that idea in, it, it just gelled into something else!
Again, impossible to dance to, as a lot of 10cc tracks were, but once Kevin had put that in, he became the third writer in the song so we were quite democratic in that way.
Record World said that it has “shifting harmonies and twisting time signatures.”
Brad’s song #1 sent to Ian: Bunny Walters, “Brandy,” 1971
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