“Cry” might not have enjoyed what we’d consider massive chart success. The Godley & Creme track squeaked into the Top 20 in both the US and the UK at the time of its release in 1985. That was much better than the duo had ever done in America, although they’d delivered bigger hits in their native Great Britain.
Videos by American Songwriter
But if you were to list the most evocative, striking singles of the era, you’d need to include this one somewhere very near the top. Throw in an unforgettable video, and you have an 80s deep cut worth revisiting.
An Old Track Resurfaces
By the time Kevin Godley and Lol Crème delivered “Cry”, they had already established themselves as top music video directors. But the former members of 10cc weren’t ready to give up their day jobs yet. As it turned out, they’d utilize their expertise in both fields to help put across the song.
As the pair assembled with producer Trevor Horn to come up with tracks for their new record, they remembered a song that they’d begun writing nearly 15 years earlier. Godley and Creme had only made it about a verse into the song without going much further than that. But Horn liked the directness of it.
Horn then went to work constructing a track, with Godley’s Synclavier driving the musical bus along with Creme’s stabs of guitar. Looping was used to take this small section of song and draw it out over what would turn out to be more than six minutes for the album track, although a shaved-down version would be released as a single.
Face to Face
The original song that Godley and Creme had started to construct all those years back featured a narrator directly calling out a romantic partner who had let them down. Godley simply followed that lead to construct the rest of the lyrics of the filled-out track. One final recording touch was the use of a harmonizer to raise Godley’s voice a few octaves for the closing notes.
That kind of inventive spirit carried over to the making of the video. Because of the song’s simplicity, Godley & Creme felt like it was something that anybody could sing. Hence, they enlisted a bunch of average folks to lip-sync the song in the video.
They decided that, when cutting from face to face, they’d use a technique called a soft wipe. By doing this, they accidentally happened upon the fact that there were in-between faces, combining the visages of two different individuals, that appeared on screen. In that respect, the pair had done an analog version of the digital “morphing” that would appear in many popular movies in years to come.
Behind the Lyrics of “Cry”
“You don’t know how to ease my pain,” Kevin Godley sings to begin “Cry”. That gives you a pretty good example of the directness of the message. As romance falls by the wayside, one partner doesn’t see the signs. “Don’t you hear any voices crying?” the narrator asks. “That’s the sound of our love dying.”
He suggests that there’s a proper protocol to be observed during a relationship, and she refuses to follow it. “You don’t know how to play the game,” he accuses. More than that, she can’t even end things properly. “You don’t even know how to say goodbye,” Godley bellows.
There’s something both mesmerizing and jarring about Godley & Creme’s “Cry”. Just when it lulls you into a false sense of security, something jarring arrives. In that way, it mimics the doomed relationship at the heart of the song, because it’s clear the poor sap didn’t see the end coming.
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.