‘The Dean and I’ was the fourth and third-poorest selling single from the album and such gets short shrift from many 10cc reviewers. However lesser single as it might be compared to ‘Rubber Bullets’ and co let me put that in context – before Wings’ ‘Band On the Run’ broke the mold you almost never had more than two singles released from an album anyway. ‘The Dean and I’ is evidence of a hot talent, a collection of musical hooks and playful lyrics most commercial singles would die for – the fact that there are two even catchier singles on the record simply shows how full of hooks the others are (more hooks than a pair of curtains or a Peter Pan movie, that’s what I say). What ‘The Dean and I’ is missing is any kind of cohesion or any real break in between the long list of jokes and wordplay. The song starts with a catchy but also quite scary chanting chorus of ‘humdrum days and humdrum ways’ which, as far as I can tell, has nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the song (and is cut for the single mix, which is otherwise the same as the album one). When it becomes a song proper, the song finds a parent telling his children how he met their mother at a prom ball. Alas, she was the daughter of a respected college dean who didn’t want his daughter to marry such a lowlife but somehow he worked hard, got a good job and won her over. As if to prove him wrong, this song is full of witty quick-stepping lyrics and lots of intellectual references (such as Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’), although the narrator still lets his humble birth show through, with his daughter ‘doing what she should’na ought to’ and memorably rhyming the word ‘now’ with the pained cry ‘eeeaeeaaaow’ as, spurned in love, the narrator throws himself off a train. Though many fans see the mention of a ‘Dean’ and assume this is a religious song, it’s really one about class, of how the only way to make money when you’re poor is to marry into it and you can only do that out of the hard work the rich won’t do for themselves. It is, in many ways, the most art school Godley-Crème song until the 1980s. There are some great lines in it, such as the student narrator enjoying a ‘gradual graduation’ in his love life alongside his studies, but somehow these characters feel like ciphers compared to other 10cc songs and oddly more lines miss than they hit (elevators? Heart? Awol?) Meanwhile this song’s ginormous crib is the Phil Spector song ‘And Then I Kissed Her’ which is recycled wholesale for the middle eight, immediately undercut by the best passage as Kevin gives us the truth behind this innocence portrayal of love (‘Now the paint is peeling!’ All that hard work to win over a girl from a good home – and it’s taken so long the narrator has forgotten why he ever wanted to date her in the first place. Circumstances have improved by the end, though, as with most 10cc spoofs when an unexpected bucket load of money comes the narrator’s way and the Dean is suddenly pleased to know him, showing again just how artificial we’re meant to think these songs are. Snobbery, lyrics dominating the fine song’s tune and words quite unlike any other song of the day, this is surely where Godley and Creme start their template for weird and wacky songs. Tiring, but fun. Eric didn't like it though (he calls it 'too South Pacific' in a 1981 interview on Multi-Colored Swap Shop!' (not that this prevents him from playing some clever Hawaiian-grunge guitar). There’s only one reason this mess of images and puns and bad rhymes works and that’s Lol’s infectious and colorful vocal, so spot on for the times, the guitarist having such fun it seems churlish to think anything bad about this track.
