Sex and rock ‘n’ roll going hand in hand is nothing new. From the sexual implications of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” to blatantly promiscuous songs like “Walk This Way” or “Cherry Pie”, sex is to rock music what drinking booze is to country music. It’s not the whole genre. But it’s certainly a large part of it.
Still, some sex-related stories of the rock ‘n’ roll world are more surprising than others. Take, for example, the legend that the British art rock band 10cc named their band after. As is often the case when it comes to band lore, the exact details about how they got their name vary depending on the band member.
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When Pulse! asked Lol Creme in 1988, his explanation fell in line with the most popular story. “We were wracking our brains for a suitable name, one that really captured our style and image,” Creme explained, “and Jonathan King, who’d signed us to his U.K. label, said, ‘10cc—because it’s the average amount of semen ejaculated by a healthy male!’ Well, naturally, we thought it was perfect.”
According to Jonathan King, 10cc Had a Different Origin Story
10cc naming themselves as 1cc more than the average amount of male ejaculate is…honestly, even as a woman attracted to men, pretty gross in a weirdly sterile and medical way. But I’m willing to give Lol Creme’s explanation points for being a pretty cleverly disguised sexual innuendo. If that’s what it was. According to Jonathan King, the man whom Creme said came up with the explicit idea, that’s not why he decided on the name 10cc at all.
“I had to give them a name,” King later said, per Snopes. “I’d signed the record. And I went to sleep that night and had this dream that a band of mine on my label made No. 1 on the album and singles charts simultaneously in America. And the band was 10cc. So, I gave them that name the next morning. Everybody then decided that this was apparently meant to be the amount of an average male ejaculation. Which is absolutely far from the truth.”
“There’s a lot of apocryphal stories about names. And unfortunately, most of them are much more amusing than the ugly reality, which, in this case, is that the name came to me in a dream,” King continued.
So, sure, the idea for 10cc might not have come from statistical information pertaining to men’s sexual health. But hey, at least it came somehow.
Alright, I’m done.
Photo by Erica Echenberg/Redferns
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