Songs I Like

The technically brilliant story behind 10cc’s multi million world wide hit single “I’m Not In Love”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8jjJOJo2_M&pp=ygUVMTBjYyBpJ20gbm90IGluIGxvdmUg. Studio Remastered

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii6pRq0-mhY&pp=ygUVMTBjYyBpJ20gbm90IGluIGxvdmUg 2011 Live in Zurich

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgJckGsR-T0&pp=ygUVMTBjYyBpJ20gbm90IGluIGxvdmUg BBC 1 Live Studio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oxe4mlsQos&pp=ygUVMTBjYyBpJ20gbm90IGluIGxvdmUg Technical description of how it was made.

On this date in 1975, 10cc released their third album 'The original Soundtrack' which featured the world wide, multi-million selling single I'M NOT IN LOVE (Mar 11, 1975)

10cc's third album, The Original Soundtrack, finally scored them a major hit in the United States, and rightly so; the marvelously lush production and breathy vocals allowed the tune to work beautifully either as a sly joke or at face value. The album's opener, "Une Nuit a Paris," was nearly as marvelous; a sly and often hilarious extended parody of both cinematic stereotypes of life and love in France and overblown European pop. And side one's closer, "Blackmail," was a witty tale of sex and extortion gone wrong, with a superb guitar solo embroidering the ride-out. The Original Soundtrack's best moments rank with the finest work 10cc ever released.

From the album, I'M NOT IN LOVE.

Written by band members Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, this song incorporated the backing of a large wordless choir, which in reality was the group's voices. It was painstakingly built up from chord loops and multi tracks: some 256 vocal dubs were required to complete the lush harmonies behind Eric Stewart's vocal.

The idea for the song came from Eric Stewart saying to his wife that if he kept saying "I Love You" over and over, it wouldn't mean anything even though he did love her. He recalled to The Guardian:

"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.

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. Then Kevin Godley, our drummer, said it was crap.

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. Kevin suggested doing it again, but with banks of voices. I thought that meant hiring a choir, but Lol Creme, our keyboard player, said we could do it using tape loops."
"I had the opening chords to it and it grew from there," explained Graham Gouldman. "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?"

The whispered vocals of "Be quiet, big boys don't cry" came from the secretary of Strawberry Studios (the studio the band operated), Kathy Redfern. They were looking for a certain sound when Redfern entered the studio to quietly tell Eric Stewart he had a phone call. When they heard her voice, they knew it was right for the song.

The four members of 10cc had been on the British music scene for a while when they formed. Vocalist/guitarist Graham Gouldman was a former member of the Mockingbirds and had written hits for Jeff Beck, the Yardbirds, the Hollies and Herman's Hermits.

Singer/guitarist Eric Stewart was a former member of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, and vocalists/multi-instrumentalists Lol Creme and Kevin Godley were both highly regarded studio musicians.

Stewart, Creme and Godley grouped in 1970 as a session band known as Hotlegs; they had a surprise hit with "Neanderthal Man" that came about when dallying with equipment. With Gouldman on board, they signed to pop mogul Jonathan King's UK label in 1972 and recorded 11 UK Top 10 hits, including two other #1s: "Rubber Bullets" in 1973 and "Dreadlock Holiday" in 1978. Creme and Godley left the band by the time "Dreadlock Holiday" was recorded to concentrate on video production as well as developing the Gizmo, a guitar modification device they invented. They had one other US Top Ten hit in 1977, "The Things We Do For Love," which reached #5.

Godley says they spent days singing notes into a microphone, which they then turned into tape loops. These loops were loaded onto 16 different tape machines and rolled simultaneously. In the control room, each band member had four faders to bring each loop in and out of the mix on the fly, which they overdubbed onto the basic track they had built with electric piano, guitar and a Moog synthesizer set to simulate a bass drum.

Said 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. 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."