There’s an iconic moment near the beginning of British pop group 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” when the song seems to float into another dimension. Eric Stewart’s voice is surrounded by a hypnotic, dreamy wash of “ahh” vocals, making it feel like an entire choir came down from the heavens to duet with him.
Except…there was no choir. The effect came from the band members’ voices, a 16-track machine, a pile of tape loops, and a mixing console that essentially turned it all into a singular musical instrument.
The more you learn about how this song was made, the more impressive it becomes.
As it is with so many great songs, “I’m Not in Love” nearly ended up in the trash
“I’m Not in Love” didn’t initially have that ethereal-sounding piece. Stewart, along with 10cc co-singer and bassist Gary Gouldman, originally wrote it as a more rhythmic, bossa nova-style piece. Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the other half of 10cc, famously thought the song was “crap,” so the project was abandoned altogether.
That is, until Kathy Redfern, secretary of Strawberry Studios, stepped in.
Stewart recalled he kept hearing multiple people around their recording studio singing the melody, which made him think the tune had promise after all. Then Redfern came up to him directly and said, “Why didn’t you finish that song? I really love it. It’s the nicest thing you’ve ever done.” He knew then the group needed to take a second look.
Godley and Creme agreed, on the condition that they try again using only their voices. That experiment would change everything.
A choir built one note at a time
The band members gathered around a microphone and sang individual notes together. They recorded each note repeatedly, layering their voices. Godley later estimated that the finished effect held around 250 of these loops.
The recordings were then mixed down into “super notes” and cut into tape loops (we, of course, do this all digitally today, but in the ’70s, they did it by hand). Stewart told Sound on Sound that they created 12 loops, each containing a sustained vocal note.
Those loops were then fed back into the multitrack recording and routed to individual faders on the mixing console. The notes were arranged so the band could create chords by raising and lowering different faders.
Stewart, Godley, Gouldman, and Creme were, essentially, playing the mixing desk and an enormous keyboard. Godley later compared what they had created to “an enormous high-end Mellotron,” except that instead of pressing keys, the band would move faders to bring vocal notes in and out.
Because the individual vocal loops were completely isolated, traces of them remained beneath the main chords. Rather than remove them, 10cc kept them in, giving the final recording a hazy, electronic quality despite being made up entirely of human voices. This sound somehow perfectly filled the spaces where the instruments weren’t playing. Or, as Godley described it, filled the song’s “air.”
After the recording was fully done, Stewart looked around at his bandmates and said, “What have we created? This is brilliant.” They agreed that they had stumbled onto something magical.
They only needed one more thing to fully bring it to life
It’s also worth noting that Redfern not only saved the song from being left unfinished; she also sang on it. During the dramatic break near the end, the music drops away, and a woman whispers, “Big boys don’t cry.” The woman is Redfern.
Creme came up with this idea, thinking the song would benefit from a woman’s voice. Redfern wasn’t particularly eager to perform, but the band convinced her that her “gorgeous” speaking voice was the last important piece of the puzzle. After only a couple of takes, she nailed it, and “clinched” the track. She rightfully received a gold record for her contribution to a song that stayed on the U.K. Singles Chart for two weeks and peaked at number two on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
The song’s cinematic sound gave it not only a long radio life, but a long life onscreen, too. “I’m Not in Love” has appeared in movies including The Virgin Suicides, Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, He’s Just Not That Into You, and Stuber. It also appears in Guardians of the Galaxy, where a young Peter Quill listens to it through his headphones while floating in space.
Nowadays, we can probably create this kind of sound with a few taps in some highfalutin app. But the original’s experimental, hands-on approach is what makes it so one-of-a-kind. It goes to show that the best songs often don’t just tell a great story; they have a great story behind them, too.
