"Life Is a Minestrone" is a 1975 song by 10cc released as a lead single from their third album, The Original Soundtrack.
Background
The track was written after Lol Creme and Eric Stewart were driving home from Strawberry Studios and a BBC Radio presenter said something that they only partly heard, but which Creme interpreted as "life is a minestrone". Stewart and Creme believed the phrase to be a good title for a song on the grounds that life is, according to Stewart in a BBC Radio Wales interview, "a mixture of everything we pile in there". They had the song written in a day.
Personnel
Adapted from the liner notes of The Original Soundtrack.
- Lol Creme – vocals, piano, percussion, electric guitar
- Kevin Godley – drums, timbales, percussion, backing vocals
- Eric Stewart – electric guitar, backing vocals
- Graham Gouldman – bass, guitars, backing vocals
Release
The song was released as the lead single from The Original Soundtrack as the band had reservations regarding the 6:00 ballad "I'm Not in Love" being the lead single. In the United States, "Life Is a Minestrone" was not released until after the release of "I'm Not in Love", so the band re-released the record over there in 1976 with "Lazy Ways" from the next album, How Dare You!, as its B-side.
The B-side "Channel Swimmer" appears as a bonus track on the later CD release of The Original Soundtrack.
Reception
Commercial
The song charted at no. 7 on the UK Singles Chart, no. 12 on the Netherlands Singles Chart, and no. 7 on the Irish Singles Chart in 1975; in 1976, it charted at no. 104 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Critical
In his review for AllMusic, Dave Thompson calls the song "utterly daft, wholly compulsive", and a "deadly accurate barrage of disconnected theories, thoughts and ghastly geographical puns, all tied together by that bizarre nomenclatural observation and a fadeout which is pure Paul McCartney". He notes that "reducing the human condition to the contents of a well-stacked pantry, composers Lol Creme and Eric Stewart combine for a truly joyous slice of pop nonsense, and one of 10cc's most effervescent hit singles".
References
