10cc - It Doesn't Matter at All - The Promise of Love Version

INCONSEQUENCES. This soft, fluffy ballad was floated as the first single from "Look Hear?", and promptly disappeared from the airwaves. It's not an awful song, in the same vein as "People In Love" and "For You And I", both of which were a blanching of something that used to be so colourful. As I've mentioned elsewhere, 1980 was a turning point where bands were either looking ahead or looking back. "It Doesn't Matter at All" is guilty of being nostalgic at a time when '10cc' could (should?) have embraced 'new wave' like 'Alice Cooper' ("Flush the Fashion") and Paul McCartney ("McCartney II"). There's also a video of the band lip-synching to this, in which you can clearly make out Eric Stewart's "Dracula" teeth, proving that all pop music is made by undead vampires who keep recycling the same melodies every hundred years (and harvest the organs of drummers, but that's another story).

And so to the credits. Written by Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, and engineered by Stewart and Tony Spath, it came out as a single release in 1980 through St Annes Music. However, in the UK it missed the chart completely. As it did when bypassing the Billboard Hot 100 in the USA. And Germany. It came out in Germany too, but couldn't even trouble their 7" listings either. Interestingly, when they toured in support of the album on which this track is featured, they included a giant reel-to-reel tape deck as a background feature on-stage. Which didn't even things out as far as this single was concerned.