The first song on the album is one of the strangest. [17] ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’ doesn’t make much sense nowadays, but if you treat it as part of the early 1970s nostalgia for the 1950s and a time when rock and roll was ‘simple’ then it makes a lot more sense (the 1950s come into vogue again and again across this site, usually every time music seems to be getting too pompous – this is the second, following the ‘return to grass roots’ fashion of 1968 and it’ll be around again in the 1980s of ‘Grease’ and early 1990s). 10cc, though, aren’t playing things straight and decide to spoof not the obvious rock and roll records of the day but the doo-wop pool from where most of the early rockabilly classics came. The lyrics are sung straight throughout, but the oh so predictable death at the end, the weeping angelic choir and the bad boy main character with the very 1950s name of Johnny Kewalski aka Johnny Angel and his penchant for wearing black fits every cliché we think about records from this era. Lol takes the lead, singing in his falsetto as on ‘Donna’ and the result is equally tongue-in-cheek, sounding not unlike The Four Seasons as they labor a dodgy moral in high pure voices. For hang on a minute, what is the moral of this record that ends in a crash and death? Don’t steal transport awaiting repairs I guess, but that doesn’t seem enough somehow. Always check your brake-pads before you drive? Don’t put a railway siding at the bottom of a hill? Always make sure your girl is home in bed before the late train rolls down the tracks? Johnny, you see, isn’t going fast even though that’s naturally assume that’s what he’s doing when he crashes ‘with a girl in the front seat’ (and what even happens to his companion? We never hear). Everyone acts as if there’s a moral though because that’s what happens on songs like these, but this is no ‘leader of the pack’ about a boy done wrong but an accident that can happen to anyone (well, anyone who doesn’t get a regular MOT on their car and lives near a railway). The highlight of the record, though, is when the band suddenly give us something we aren’t expecting – the minute the train hits the song gets quiet and fades to Godley’s tapping drums, not the squealing noise we’re expecting. The song is a microcosm of 10cc’s strengths and weaknesses in this period: ‘Johnny’ is undeniably clever and is sown together with great panache, starting out as twee ballad and ending up as intense rocker, and yet there’s something mildly irritating about the sheer amount of jokes in the song and the way the bass and drums are following the doo-wop pattern so precisely you know exactly how they will go. It is, after all, insincere and with a joke aimed not so much at the characters as the audience for not ‘getting’ that this is a dumb story with a failed moral; somehow that’s less satisfying than laughing at the world on our behalf. ‘Johnny Don’t Do It’ is an easy song to like but a hard song to love and that’s the problem 10cc will have across most of this record, with only Gouldman’s rocky middle eight using his deep voice for the first time on a 10cc related record really catching the ear.
