No band is going to agree unanimously on everything all the time, and such was the case for a now-iconic 10cc song, “I’m Not In Love,” that the drummer once said, “was crap.” While the British rock group might’ve been at odds about the tune in the beginning, its legacy would eventually prove the drummer wrong.
In terms of critical success and its innovative recording techniques, this 10cc song has become one of the band’s most enduring hits, no matter what Kevin Godley had to say about it.
The 10cc Song Didn’t Woo The Drummer, But It Won Over The Staff
A conversation between Eric Stewart and his wife, Gloria, about him not saying “I love you” very often ultimately inspired the 10cc frontman to write “I’m Not In Love.” In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Stewart recalled bringing the song to his band. “They said, ‘I’m not in love?’ What the f*** is that? You can’t say that!” The drummer, Kevin Godley, was even more blunt, saying that the song “was crap.”
“We were about to scrap it and wipe the tape, but as I walked around the studio, I heard the secretary signing it and the window cleaner whistling it,” Stewart continued. “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.” Indeed, they could, and so they did.
The Painstaking Recording Process Behind “I’m Not In Love”
Rather than hiring a 40+ person choir, 10cc decided to make a choir out of their own voices—a process that might seem pretty straightforward in today’s digital age but was entirely novel in the mid-1970s. To create a choir, the band painstakingly recorded each member singing an “ah” vowel on each note of the chromatic scale 16 times. That meant Stewart recorded 12 notes sung by himself, Graham Gouldman, Kevin Godley, and Lol Creme 16 times for a total of 768 takes.
However, the band didn’t just want a choir. They wanted an infinite choir that sang throughout the entire track. To accomplish this technical feat, Stewart used Creme’s idea of creating tape loops. Using a stereo recorder and a capstan roller on top of a mic stand, Stewart created 12-foot tape loops, each of which he sent to its own channel on the mixing board. By the end of the process, the mixing board had become a pseudo-instrument that allowed the band to control their “ahs”s in real time.
From Flop To Fan Favorite In A Matter Of Months
All that studio experimentation worked. Stewart recalled calling Mercury Records, which had already been trying to get 10cc to hop on their label, to hear “I’m Not In Love.” “I rang them,” Stewart said (via Last.FM). “I said come and have a listen to what we’ve done, come and have a listen to this track. And they came up, and they freaked. They said, ‘This is a masterpiece. How much money, what do you want? What sort of contract do you want? We’ll do anything.’”
One year after its May 1975 release, “I’m Not In Love” earned three Ivor Novello Awards for Best Pop Song, International Hit of the Year, and Most Performed British Work. Across the pond, USA’s Record World described the track as “one of the most technically perfect productions of this or any year,” calling it “a cross between ‘2001’ and the golden era Lennon-McCartney ballad days.” Not too shabby for a song that the band almost wiped from tape forever.
Photo of 10 CC Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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