Fact #63366

Eric Stewart (co-writer, 10cc) : I met this gorgeous girl called Gloria at Halifax town hall. I was 18. She was 16. Three years later, we got married. A few years after that, Gloria told me: 'You don't say 'I love you' much anymore.' I told her that, if I said it all the time, it would sound glib. But I started wondering how I could say it without using those actual words. So 'I'm not in love' became a rhetorical conversation with myself – and then a song.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Graham Gouldman (co-writer, 10cc) : I had the opening chords to it and it grew from there. Eric and I had always avoided a love song, but I was always convinced we could do a great one, and once again Eric came up with the title of that song, and it was the perfect title of an anti-love song. But of course, is it an anti-love song? Is it I'm not in love, or is it I am in love?
(Source : interview on Songfacts website)

Eric Stewart : Graham Gouldman and I had never written a ballad before. I had what we thought was a very 10cc-ish idea for a love song which didn't actually say 'I Love you'. Instead, it would say, "I'm not in love with you.' then give all the reasons for being totally in love.
(Source : Inspirations : Michael Gandolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary Books, 2002)

Eric Stewart : I wrote the lyrics in a couple of days. The line, 'I keep your picture up on the wall, it hides a nasty stain' was about the crack in my bedroom wall at my parents' house in Manchester. I'd put a photograph of Gloria over it. When I took the song to the band, they said: 'I'm not in love'? What the f--k is that? You can't say that!' But Graham Gouldman, our bass-player and chord-master, agreed to work on it with me. We both liked The Girl From Ipanema, so we gave it a similar bossa nova style.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Eric Stewart : I had the guitar hook first —a little arpeggio on an open 'A' chord — and the melody kept going through my head, so when I got the idea to write the words 'I'm not in love' it just sort of slotted together," he continues. "Once I'd clicked on the idea to approach it that way, it was actually very easy to write the rest. I made things fit phonetically, and it just sort of rolled out very smoothly in a bossa nova shuffle. You know, Stan Getz, Astrud Gilberto.

So I had the first six chords or so of the verse figured and I had the melody already figured in my head, as well as the first verse lyrics 'I'm not in love, so don't forget it, it's just a silly phase I'm going through...' so I took this to the studio, played it to the other guys and asked 'Would anyone like to finish it with me?' GiGi, the bass guitarist, said he would.

We usually wrote in pairs, and while the major hits came out of Godley and Creme or myself and Graham Gouldman, we were a very incestuous bunch — we used to swap partners all the time. I wrote Life Is A Minestrone and Silly Love with Lol, and we did swap around a lot just to keep the writing freshness going. It worked beautifully for us.

Anyway, at that time Godley and Creme were writing the mini musical 'Une Nuit à Paris' [which would open the album], so they went into one room to finish that, and GiGi and I went into another to work on the 'I'm Not In Love' idea with two guitars. We developed the song pretty quickly.

We started with the chords that I already had and we began bouncing ideas off each other. We were both very good at steering something away from the norm, looking for another way to make the chords move so that it didn't become a 'regular' pop song... or a regular bossa nova, for that matter. We would say 'What about this?' 'Nah, I don't like that.' 'What about this?' 'Nah.' 'What about...' 'Ah! Now that's got something.' It's just tangential thinking, bouncing off each other — it's very productive if you've got two competent musicians working in this way.

I usually wrote on the keyboard, but I'm Not In Love was written on two guitars, and the ironic thing is that there is no featured guitar on the finished product, just a little DI'd Gibson 335 playing a light rhythm pattern. In the end, we must have spent about two or three days writing before completing it.

There's no middle eight or chorus in I'm Not In Love. GiGi came up with this lovely little fill in between verses: an open 'E' string with the chords moving from 'E' to 'A' to 'G', with this 'E' bass string ringing through it - very, very tasty. I eventually played that on the recording with a Fender Rhodes. A beautiful progression with a beautiful sound.

He also came up with the opening chords of the song, an 'A' chord with a 'B' bass, moving to a full 'B' chord, all very 'expectant' of what is to follow. Then we wrote a second verse and, because we thought this was going to be something different, we also wrote what could be termed as a middle eight quite early on in the song. We got the melody for that very, very quickly, but the words just sounded naff: 'Don't feel let down, don't get hung up, we do what we can, we do what we must.' We looked at each other and went 'Oh Christ, that sounds crap, doesn't it?'"

GiGi contributed quite a lot on some of the chord changes to take them away from what I'd originally figured. He'd take them in a different direction. There were, as I said, these little fills in between the verses, and he also pulled that chord progression for the 'Ooh, you'll wait a long time' bridge out of the bag; a nice arpeggio run-down. When you've been writing with somebody for quite a long time these things just sort of happen naturally, and you instinctively know whether or not someone's getting off on it. They don't necessarily have to come up with something new, just that look that says 'Hmmm... no!' and you find yourselves searching for something that will turn you both on. That's the chemistry. Godley and Creme, however, wrote in a very different way.

We were always very blunt with each other. We recorded everything we came up with, but we were very brutal at the end of it, saying things like, 'Is this working?' or 'Do we like this? Is this gonna fit? Yes or no?' Out of four people we needed a majority of three votes to say, 'Yeah, we carry on,' or 'Yeah, it's going on the album' or 'No, it's out.' Well, we recorded I'm Not In Love as a bossa nova and Godley and Creme didn't really like it!

Kevin was especially blunt. He said, 'It's crap,' and I said, 'Oh right, OK, have you got anything constructive to add to that? Can you suggest anything?' He said, 'No. It's not working, man. It's just crap, right? Chuck it.' And we did. We threw it away and we even erased it, so there's no tape of that bossa nova version. It pissed me off no end at the time, but it was also very democratic, as I've said, and so we turned our attention to the recording of One Night In Paris.
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)

Eric Stewart : We were about to scrap it and wipe the tape but, as I walked around the studio, I heard the secretary singing it and the window-cleaner whistling it. I knew we had a tune: we just hadn't captured it properly.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Eric Stewart : At the studio we had various staff, including a secretary, Kathy Redfern, and another engineer, Pete Tattersall, who used to spell for me when I was singing or playing in the studio itself. He was my partner when we built the first four-track studio, and the poor bugger used to have to do all the Granada TV sessions - you know, Coronation Street and Muriel Young's Five O'Clock Club; all these weird things that used to come in with proper MU orchestra musicians. I didn't get along with all that, so Peter got lumbered with it while I got to do the interesting tasty bits.

Anyway, walking around Strawberry each day, I kept hearing people singing the melody: 'I'm not in love...' And I kept going back to the band and saying 'There's something more with this song. We've not got it yet, but I don't want to lose this song, because it's got people hooked.'

Then the secretary, Kathy, said, 'Why didn't you finish that song? I really love it. It's the nicest thing you've ever done.' This didn't really impress Kevin, of course, but we discussed it again and, believe me, it was Kevin who suddenly came up with the brainwave. He said, 'I tell you what, the only way that song is gonna work is if we totally fuck it up and we do it like nobody has ever recorded a thing before. Let's not use instruments. Let's try to do it all with voices.' I said, 'Yeah. OK. That sounds... different.' A cappella, vocal instrumentation is what he was talking about.

I said 'Well, we're gonna need something instrumental in there to sing the whole backing track to,' and he said, 'Yeah, we'll keep a rhythm going with something simple; a bass drum, whatever. We can have a guitar just giving us chords, but otherwise it could be all voices.' I said, 'Right, there's just four of us to do the whole thing with voices. How are we going to do it?'
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)

Eric Stewart : I thought that meant hiring a choir, but Lol Creme, our keyboard player, said we could do it using tape loops.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Lol Creme (co-writer, 10cc) : I’d become obsessed with tape loops after listening to the Beatles’ Revolution 9. Our studio used to do recordings for the Mellotron, a keyboard that played prerecorded notes. Session musicians would come in and do these painstaking recordings for every instrument of an orchestra, one note at a time, so that when they were all played together on a Mellotron it sounded like an orchestra. I was fascinated by this, and wanted to try it with banks and banks of voices.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Kevin Godley (10cc, co-writer) : It was possibly out of desperation of not knowing what to do that we tried all the washy voices. Forget instruments, forget guitars, forget drums. Just voices, like a heavenly choir, like a tsunami of voices.
(Source : interview on Songfacts website)

Eric Stewart : I think they'd been at the wacky baccy at this time, and it took me a couple of hours to get my head around the idea. But then I figured how we could physically make the loops and set up the studio to do that. I rigged up a rotary capstan on a mic stand, and the tape loop had to be quite long because the splice edit point on the loop would go through the heads and there'd be a little blip each time it did. So, I had to make the loop as long as I could for it to take a long, long time to get around to the splice again. That way you wouldn't really hear the splice/blip. We're talking about a loop of about 12 feet in length going around the tape heads, around the tape-machine capstans, coming out away from the Studer stereo recorder to a little capstan on a mic stand that had to be dead in line vertically with the heads of the Studer. It was like one of those continuous belts that you see in old factories, running loads of machines, and we had to keep it rigid by putting some blocks on the mic stand legs to keep it dead, dead steady.

It worked, but the loop itself - and this is where it gets interesting - had to be made up from multiple voices we'd done on the 16-track machine. Each note of a chromatic scale was sung 16 times, so we got 16 tracks of three people singing for each note. That was Kevin, Lol and GiGi standing around a valve Neumann U67 in the studio, singing 'Aahhh' for around three weeks. I'm telling you; three bloody weeks. We eventually had 48 voices for each note of the chromatic scale, and since there are 13 notes in the chromatic scale, this made a total of 624 voices. My next problem was how to get all that into the track.

I mixed down 48 voices of each note of the chromatic scale from the 16-track to the Studer stereo machine to make a loop of each separate note, and then I bounced back these loops one at a time to a new piece of 16-track tape, and just kept them running for about seven minutes. Because we had people singing 'Aahhh' for a long time, there were slight tuning discrepancies that added a lovely flavour, like you get with a whole string section, with a lot of people playing. Some are not quite in time, some have slightly different tuning, but musically a lovely thing happens to that. It's a gorgeous sound. A very human sound, very warm and moving all the time. Anyway, after putting the 13 chromatic scale notes back onto the 16-track, it meant there were only three open tracks left!

On one mono track we put a bass drum and me playing the Fender Rhodes piano as well as bumbling a guide vocal very, very crudely, just to keep the song's timing. Kevin actually did the bass drum using a Moog bass note; a funky sound with a little edge on it, a little click almost. The timing had to be perfect, with no metronome!

Then, all four of us manned the control desk, and each of us had three or four faders to work with. We moved the faders up and down and changed the chords of the 13 chromatic scale notes as the chords of the song changed - 13 tracks on a 16-track tape, fed through the control desk faders, back out of the master fader and onto that stereo pair of open tracks that was left free on the 16-track machine. It took a long time before we thought we'd got something really interesting but, blow me down, if we hadn't got it right we would have been buggered, because at the point in time when we had that stereo pair of the whole backing track mixed down, I would have to erase those 13 continuous voice notes in order to give me 'clean' tracks to start doing the real vocal, the answer backing vocals, the bass solo, the grand piano solo and the rhythm guitar, which was just a DI'd Gibson 335.
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)

Kevin Godley : We used Eric's original guide vocal in the end because it just worked, and from that point onwards, everything we added or took away or changed from that point worked. There were no head-scratching moments, no arguing, no disagreements, no problems. It was like we were in a magic bubble and everything fell into place.
(Source : interview on Songfacts website)

Lol Creme : The whole process took about a week. It was incredibly tedious. Three or four of us had to sing every note about 14 times, then put echo on it, which gave it that luxurious, velvety harmonic sound. It was beautiful, but Eric’s vocal was what really made the song.
(Source : interview in The Guardian newspaper, Feb 2018)

Eric Stewart : Luckily we got it. We got it just right. We very, very quickly got the lead vocal down and then we sat there, I tell you seriously, for about three days, just listening to this thing. I was looking at Kevin and the other two guys saying, 'What the fuck have we created? This is brilliant.' We knew we had something very, very special, very different. I'd never heard anything like it in my life. I mean, the Beach Boys were seriously good at harmonies, but they hadn't, as far as I knew, done anything this way. It was a very, very unusual sound.

And sound degradation caused by all the bouncing didn't matter at all because, when each of us were using control desk faders to mix the voices, there was a piece of gaffer tape across the bottom of the fader paths to stop them ever going to the bottom. That meant we had a chromatic scale sizzling underneath the track all the time, a hiss just like the hum you sometimes hear at a football match when nobody's shouting. If you listen to the opening of the song, where the bass drum beats us in, you will hear a sizzling hum there that continues all the way through the track. We actually created 'hiss' on the track, when we would normally have been fighting to get rid of hiss!

Some of the low voices on there sound like 'cellos. If you slow the loop down to 7.5ips, a human voice sounds amazingly just like a 'cello. It's got the rasp from the throat that sounds like the rosin on a bow swiping across the strings. Unbelievable. We used the sound on that album quite a lot. There's a track called Blackmail where you hear 'cellos chugging very, very fast in rhythm all the way through, and that's the voice loops slowed down to 7.5 fed through two faders, which were pushed up and down rhythmically. It was wonderful the way it worked.
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)

Kevin Godley : Then we mixed it, and it was six-and-a-half minutes long - something crazy - and we realized we had done something special. We didn't know it was a hit record or anything, but we knew it was special.
(Source : interview on Songfacts website)

Eric Stewart : There's a very different vibe to somebody singing from start to finish. You get the whole feeling of the song together. I can spot comping a mile off. So we didn't comp it. It's not a difficult song to sing. I got it down in one and then dropped in to correct a few mistakes. The little high answers at the end of the verses where it goes 'It's because...' - Lol and Kevin could do that. They had great high voices, those two, so I multitracked them about four times on those lines.

At this point there was no bass on the track whatsoever. The left-hand side of my Fender Rhodes was providing the bass notes - I played them in octaves with my left hand, which is how I normally play keyboards, and that was enough. It didn't need a bass guitar. But again, there was another unusual idea suggested: why don't we try a bass solo? A bass solo in a ballad? Bloody stupid you'd think. However, it did fit beautifully. It's all about searching for something that hasn't been done before, and believe me, we sometimes spent days, sometimes weeks searching for sounds that we thought were different.

Kevin and Lol were pretty much the ones who would always say, 'I want to do something different here!' They would, for instance, look for a bass drum sound and we'd go around the studio, banging everything from the floor to the wall, and even if we later returned to a straightforward bass drum, at least we'd tried. And more often than not we'd get something that was quite unusual. Now, if you've got the luck to convince the public that it's unusual and good as well, you've cracked it, and I'm Not In Love did just that.
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)

Eric Stewart : When we'd finished the backing track, we thought it might need something a bit more human on it. So Graham played a very simple acoustic guitar, and I laid down a Fender Rhodes acoustic piano, somewhat cack-handedly because I'm not really a pianist. Sat among those vocals, it took on an incredible feeling. West for hours just listening to the backing track, we were so impressed with it ourselves. We didn't hear it as a hit, but it was a wonderful experience just listening to this wall of sound.
(Source : Inspirations : Michael Gandolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary Books, 2002)

Eric Stewart : For the bass solo, GiGi came into the control room. I DI'd his Rickenbacker through one of those lovely Dbx 160 compressors to keep its gorgeous, round, thumping sound tight and smooth, and he played the solo. We sat there and he played bits, and we said, 'Like that,' 'Don't like that,' 'Do that again,' and it developed. When we got that down, the song was, to all intents and purposes, finished, but again we sat there listening to it, wondering what else we could do to 'screw' this song up. That's the way it was beginning to look to me.

I'd been reading a book about the philosophy of getting your point across in an argument. So, we each had a sign that we crayoned on a piece of cardboard, and if we didn't like something happening in the studio we'd hold the sign up to the window, saying 'Stop' or 'Next'. Then, when the person came back in, he'd hold up the sign that said 'How dare you!'"

The theory was, 'How dare you put me down before you've even spoken to me about why I'm doing this. You've got to let me try my thing before dismissing it. We cracked up employing this idea, it lasted on the one album. Kevin kept doing that, though. He was off on a tangent somewhere, but he had some great ideas because of it, so you couldn't stop him. He might just come up with that little bit of gold dust that you sometimes needed on a track if it wasn't going anywhere.

Well, when we listened to I'm Not In Love, he kept saying, 'It's not finished, it's not finished,' and I remember saying, 'What do you want to try next? A fucking tambourine solo in the middle of it? What do you want?' We kept thinking and kept thinking, and Lol remembered he had said something into the grand piano mics when he was laying down the solos. He'd said, 'Be quiet, big boys don't cry' - heaven knows why, but I soloed it and we all agreed that the idea sounded very interesting if we could just find the right voice to speak the words. Just at that point the door to the control room opened and our secretary Kathy looked in and whispered, 'Eric, sorry to bother you. There's a telephone call for you.' Lol jumped up and said, 'That's the voice, her voice is perfect!'

We got Kathy in the studio just to whisper those words, and there it was, slotted in just before that bass guitar solo. And it fitted beautifully. Again, another little twist of fate, an accident that wasn't on anybody else's songs. We'd never heard that before. It just clinched it and made the song even more original. Poor Kathy was bemused. She didn't want to go in the studio, we had to drag her in, but she was very, very sweet and we eventually persuaded her: 'You've just got to whisper. Just whisper, don't worry. You're not singing, just talking. Use your best telephone voice.' She had a gorgeous voice, and there it is; it's on the record... and she got a gold record for it, too.

The last thing recorded on I'm Not In Love was a child's music box over the fade out. We sent the secretary out to buy a simple plastic one, attached it to a piece of string, and Lol sat at the drum kit and whirled it slowly over his head while I recorded it on the overhead drum mics.

Eric Stewart : When the album was released, we started getting phone calls. Richard Williams at Island (not our label) rang me and said, 'Eric, you've got a song on your album called I'm Not In Love - why isn't it a single? Every girl in this office has got your album on, and is playing that song. I'm from another record company, and I shouldn't be telling you this, but that's a hit - release it.'

We'd avoided going with it initially because it was a love ballad, which wasn't what we thought 10cc was all about; we wanted to do quirky, strange songs. But due to massive pressure from everybody, we released it.

We were at the Reading Festival the weekend it was released, and woke up on the Sunday morning to hear Dave Lee Travis play it on his Radio One show over every transistor on the site. The feeling to wake up to that was incredible. Everybody sat up and looked at each other: 'Jesus, that's it - exactly that feeling we got in the studio. This is going to be very big!' And it was.
(Source : Inspirations : Michael Gandolfi, Mike Read and David Stark, Sanctuary Books, 2002)

Eric Stewart : The BBC asked me to edit it (for single release), and I said, 'No, I can't. What am I going to take out?' As far as I was concerned, it was like taking half of a masterpiece portrait painting out. What bit do you want to cut off? The head? Eventually, however, they persuaded us to take the piano and bass guitar solo out of the middle and cut the song down from 6:06 to 4:10. The solo must have been about one and a half minutes, and then we cut the fade-out, which is quite long as well, by 30 seconds or more. Well, the record charted, and by the time it got to number 28 and after pressure from the public and the media, the Beeb started to play the whole thing. And then it went to number one. Justice. It's a good song. I'm very proud of it, as well as the way we all got it together.

Years ago, I remember Kevin being asked, 'Why did you split? Why did you leave 10cc?' And he said, 'Because I didn't want to do any more crap like I'm Not In Love.' Blow me down. I was stunned. However, I heard recently - because we were awarded all these lovely Ivor Novello Awards last year for the block success of our work in the '70s - somebody asked him again and he said, 'Yeah, yeah, I didn't like the song at the time, but I wished I'd written the fucking thing.' Because, you know, it's been the most successful track we've ever had released.
(Source : https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-10cc-not-love)