10cc - Dreadlock Holiday - promo video from 1978

Why is denial funny? 10cc tracks, particularly the best known songs, are full of it: I’m Not In Love where the vocal says oh-no-I’m-not and the backing track says oh-yes-you-are, the freedom-denying jailors of Rubber Bullets and charity-denying bankers of Wall Street Shuffle; many 10cc songs derive their humour because of what the song’s narrator doesn’t know and can’t see– and which the audience, hopefully, can. Nowhere is there a better example of that than this album’s first track, [74] Dreadlock Holiday, perhaps the most famous 10cc song of all. A surprise #1 hit after two top-10 less years for the band, this song is gentle mickey-taking reggae pastiche that is actually quite harsh in its portrayal of rough, criminal Jamaicans exploiting the poor white man on holiday. However, nothing is quite what it seems in this song: the narrator’s naiveté in many ways means he deserves as good as he gets – he expects to be ‘safe’ while out alone in a rough part of a neighbourhood he has never explored before in the first verse, he protests far too much about the sentimental value of a watch the criminals are looking to steal from him, thus drawing their attention into it and is positively clueless about the ’come-on’ line of the pretty Jamaican back at the hotel. Completely out of his depth, the narrator’s cultural shock is a theme continued throughout the album, which seeks to ask – in a jovial, informal way – just why one culture is so different from any other. The song has a weird history too: Graham based it on a holiday he took with The Moody Blues' Justin Hayward in which the two men (the politest in rock?) got the urge to be wild and decided to try para-sailing (ie you're strapedd to the back of a motorboat with a parachute on) in the West Indies and felt incredibly out of their depth. Two muggers came to 'ask' for their belongings and threatened the two men, with Graham suddenly wrenched out of the predicament by his para-sail (you can only imagine what song this might have become if the incident had happened to Godley or Creme!) The most famous part of the song is its many choruses, which tells us ‘I don’t like cricket/reggae/Jamaica – I love it/her!’, a re-working of the I’m Not In Love formula by second-guessing the listener’s reaction. 10cc obviously do love reggae on this track (their later mock-reggae songs are a mite embarrassing, but this track’s swinging time signature, calypso drumming and loose patois are all spot on and affectionate rather than sneering) and presumably love Jamaica too, given the sheer amount of these reggae songs that fill up the rest of their work right up until their split. The mention of cricket, though, is confusing as it comes out of nowhere in the song (it’s not in the promo video either) - is this 10cc hedging their bets by talking about something so resolutely English that audiences couldn’t possibly get the wrong end of the stick? Either way, this song’s attractions have been rather killed off as late, thanks to countless re-playings on radio and its presence on every 10cc compilation to date. However, familiarity breeds contempt (another theme throughout this album, incidentally) and listened to fresh this is a clever song, with its witty and much-copied chorus a winning singalong for folks at home. It also – finally – rights the balance that had seen the other three original members of 10cc take lead vocals on big hits, but not Gouldman: surely 10cc are the only group, before or since, who had four lead singers capable of scoring hits? (Crème on the #1 Rubber Bullets, Stewart on the #1 I’m Not In Love, Godley on several other smaller hits).