Songfacts®:

• In the vein of Dr. Hook's "The Cover of "Rolling Stone", this song is a sendup of the rock star lifestyle, performed by a group of rock stars who see the humor. 10cc was in a position to be objective, as they stayed away from headline-grabbing debauchery. All four members worked behind the scenes in their pre-10cc days, doing session work, songwriting a production for other artists. This gave them plenty of perspective when they had their star turn.
• The title is a play on something their label boss, Jonathan King, told them when he assigned them the name 10cc. King said he had a dream where he was standing outside of the Hammersmith Odeon in London, and a sign said: "10cc, The Best Band In The World."
  
  The band accepted the name (which was often rumored, falsely, to refer to a volume of male ejaculate) but rejected the grandiose vision. In a Songfacts interview with Graham Gouldman of 10cc, he said: "Really, it's a play on that: the fact that we're the worst band in the world and we don't care, we just do what we want to do."
• This was the only 10cc song Graham Gouldman and Lol Creme wrote together. Gouldman usually wrote with Eric Stewart; Creme with Kevin Godley. Creme sang lead on this one.
• The BBC refused to play this because of the implied profanity in the lines:
  
  We're the worst band in the world
  But we don't give a....
  
  10cc accommodated with an edit just for them, altering this section to:
  
  We're the worst band in the world
  But we don't give up
  
  "They insisted that we put a word in!," Gouldman told Songfacts. "It was so ridiculous because we knew everybody would think of 's--t.' There was no rhyming word, so we put 'but we don't give up.' A special edit for the BBC. Ridiculous really when I think back on it."