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If there is a common thread running through the career of British musicians Kevin Godley and Lol Creme-whether as members of the 1970s art rock quartet 10cc; the musical duo Godley & Creme; or pioneering music video directors -- it's that they always pushed creative boundaries with their idiosyncratic vision rather than following others.

"It's driven by the notion that whatever medium we worked in -- both together and separately -- there's always that sense of, 'Why do something that looks like something other people have done?'" says Godley in a recent interview. "Because the chances of us doing it better are slim. So why not look for something more interesting and original that people haven't quite heard or seen before?" We wanted to create something that we'd be thrilled by first."

That sense of experimentation and adventurism that Godley & Creme employed in their music between 1977 and 1987 is the subject of Parts of the Process, a recently released 11-CD boxed set retrospective that features all of the duo's seven studio albums augmented by single edits, non-album tracks, and alternate versions and remixes.

"It sort of kicks home how much we managed to do over the years," Godley says of the new collection. "Very strange looking back. You could do it and you leave it behind and you move on. But seeing it in a little box brings it home."

At the height of 10cc's popularity following the success of the band's 1975 single, "I'm Not in Love," Godley and Creme -- whose friendship dates back to their youth -- decided to split from the other band members, Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, due to creative reasons and to work on the Gizmo, a device that enables the guitar to create orchestral effects.

"We'd been touring, recording and writing for a while," recalls Godley of his and Creme's time in 10cc. "There was a little space [in our schedules]. And Lol and I invented this thing, but we hadn't used it a great deal within the context of 10cc -- that we should see what else it can do. So we booked three weeks at Strawberry Studios [in Stockport, England] to do just that, and we found that we were getting quite excited by what we were coming up with. The unspoken thing was that maybe we could make an album to showcase the thing.

"The powers that be were saying, 'Well, it's time to start writing again It's time to start thinking about a new album for 10cc and going on the road,'" he continues. "It was starting to become a little predictable what we were doing. And we're getting excited by what we were doing with the Gizmo. It turned into a sort of face-off between the need to keep the machine running and our need to do something a little different. We thought, 'Let's just bail and do it and see what happens.'"

Retaining the avant-garde sound and quirky lyrics of their former group, Godley & Creme's first post-10cc effort was the 3-LP set Consequences (1977), an ambitious and experimental work that showcased the Gizmo and featured contributions from British comedian Peter Cook and American jazz singer. The mixed reception towards the album by critics, however, hurt Godley.

"In hindsight, we spent a long time on this thing, but we were like studio crazy. That craziness was amplified by the way we split from the band. We thought, 'We're going to have to do something really amazing now and show [them].' (laughs) And so the thing grew out of all proportion, probably because the original intention had gone and there was nothing to go back to. We just poured every ounce of energy and creativity into this thing. But unfortunately, we didn't watch our back. We were so engrossed in the process that we missed what was going on in the real world. And everything was shifting."

After their sophomore record L (1978), Godley & Creme's third album Freeze Frame (1979) contained the duo's single "An Englishman in New York." Its eccentric innovative-looking video was storyboarded by Godley and Creme and directed by Derek Burbidge. The experience of making that clip inspired the duo, who were film fans, to become music video directors themselves.

"When that record came out, we thought the only way to promote it was to make a little film," says Godley. "What happened was totally unexpected. We understood the process that we were going through as well as performing. We were keenly watching what was going on and beginning to understand something about making film. We were absorbing it. And we started throwing ideas out: 'Can we do this?' 'Can we do that?' We must have been an absolute nightmare for Derek, particularly when we insisted on attending the edit of the video. We just got our hands dirty."

One of the earliest videos the duo directed for another artist was for the 1980 hit song "Fade to Grey" by the British synthpop band Visage. Afterward, Godley & Creme directed many clips throughout the '80s for the likes of Duran Duran ("Girls on Film," "A View to a Kill"), Elton John ("Kiss the Bride"), Asia ("Heat of the Moment"), Culture Club ("Victims"), Herbie Hanock ("Rockit"), Wang Chung ("Everybody Have Fun Tonight") and the Police (the iconic black-and-white "Every Breath You Take"). Being musicians themselves was an advantage for Godley & Creme in giving direction to other musical acts for their videos.

"I think that was very instrumental in us being able to do as well as we did because at the time there wasn't really a video industry as such," Godley says. "The people that were working in the industry -- none of them came from a musical background. To talk to people about music and for them to understand each other about what is required from these things about to be called music videos is difficult. But if you are a musician talking to a musician, the chances are you'll come to some understanding quicker than the other people that might be around doing the same thing. We were easier to talk to for musicians than some of the other people directing at the time, and that really did help."

Even as they became much in-demand music video directors by this time, Godley & Creme were still recording their music (they also scored U.K. hits with "Wedding Bells" and "Under Your Thumb"). Then an encounter with British producer Trevor Horn later led to the heartbreaking 1985 song "Cry," the duo's biggest hit in America.

"The song was based on a fragment that we had," recalls Godley. "It was just, 'You don't know how to ease my pain.' For some reason, we never went back to it to take it any further. So it had always kind of laid around. But when we got together with Trevor, our original intention was to do something quite different, but we couldn't make that work. So he said, 'What else have you got?' We dragged this fragment out and played it. He thought, 'That's really good. We can do something with that.' And so we continued to do so, and it turned out to be "Cry.""

"Cry" was accompanied by another memorable groundbreaking video that Godley & Creme directed featuring faces that changed from one another. "What we actually shot was Plan B," Godley adds. "Plan A was to get Torville and Dean, two very popular ice skaters in the U.K. at the time, to skate to the song. We weren't very keen on being in our own videos by then. We worked with so many good-looking people that when we looked in the mirror, we thought, 'Oh, God, no, that's not going to work.'

"What actually came out of it was quite unexpected. Everyone calls it 'morphing,' but it's not. But changing faces, and the creation of new faces, was something that we found and identified how to do during the edit. Had we not found this, it would probably have been a very boring video, indeed."

In 1987, Godley & Creme released Goodbye Blue Sky, which marked a return to traditional instrumentation and a more organic sound; its other distinguishing characteristic was the prominent use of harmonica. But most notably, Goodbye Blue Sky would become Godley & Creme's final album.

"We knew it was time for us to make a record, and we were looking for an approach to making it that would excite us," Godley says. "Prior to it, we've been working with electronics and loops and synthesizers and so on. We were becoming a little bit tired of that sort of virtual sound world. We wanted to make real sounds again and work with other people and play with other people. We were beginning to miss that. We had no idea that it was going to be our last record. It would probably sound very different if we had."

Following the end of his creative partnership with Creme, Godley continued to make videos and music. In the 2000s, he renewed his musical friendship with his former 10cc bandmate Gouldman resulting in the project GG/06. Most recently, Godley has sung as a guest artist with the Gouldman-led version of 10cc and the pair recorded a new song, the blues-sounding "Don't Want to Go to Heaven." That song was recently performed live for BBC's Radio 2 program Piano Room along with the 10cc classic "I'm Not in Love."

"It was unfinished business because even in the context of 10cc, [Graham and I] didn't write and record that many songs together. I think only three in four years. So it was a joy, and this was a joy. The only reason we wrote and recorded "Don't Want to Go to Heaven" was because when you're on the Piano Room, you do three songs: the main song, which in our case was, "I'm Not in Love," because it was the 50th anniversary of the song; a new song, which we didn't have; and a cover version. That's where "Don't Want to Go to Heaven" came from. And again, it was a pleasure to do. I think it turned out pretty well."

Five years ago, Godley released his first-ever solo record Muscle Memory, whose sound continued in that experimental yet melodic frame of 10cc and Godley & Creme's past works. As for whether Godley will continue to make more music with Gouldman or another solo record, he says: "I don't plan that far away. All I know is it was great fun. So who knows? It depends on what else we have going on at the time, what we're both involved with. It'd be nice to do some more, but let's wait and see."

"It's probably more down to instinct than it is planning," he adds. "I enjoyed making [Muscle Memory], but it was a very strange process how I went about it. If I were a normal strategic-thinking person, which I'm not, I might think, 'Well, I've got over 300 pieces of music and I used 12 of them. Maybe I could dip into what's left and make another.' But I don't think like that."

That perspective goes back to what Godley & Creme have always stood for throughout their career with 10cc and on their own, as heard on Parts of the Process: forging ahead without forethought and being unpredictable. "We didn't want to be doing things just for the sake of it, repeating ourselves ad nauseam," says Godley. "So we were always looking for something that would excite us and that led us down all different experimental paths."