10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”: Well, My High School Self Was, Actually
by Greg Brodsky
The opening lyrics of “I’m Not in Love” from 10cc
There’s something about the music from one’s mid-to-late teens that can instantly bring you back to when you were first consciously thinking about the rest of your life. A song from that era comes on the speakers of a supermarket and you’re transported back to roaming the hallways of your high school, goofing with your friends as you headed to math class. Or when you spotted your crush on the first day of junior year, immediately noticing how different she looked than when you last saw her on your final day as a puny sophomore the previous spring. And now you’re wondering whether you can finally strike up the nerve to [gulp!] talk to her in the lunchroom and not screw that up.
In reality, few of us were the Big Man on Campus with the easy, assured laugh who never seemed to be without a girlfriend. More likely, we were the skinny, complexion-challenged, nice-enough guy who fit in well enough (and who the gods ultimately rewarded a decade later by matching us with just the right gal). But in high school, most of us were Fogell/McLovin from Superbad.
For me, that girl that I watched from afar during most of my last three years of high school was named Jayne. And though I dated a few others in the meantime, it wasn’t until literally the last month of senior year that I finally asked her out. Amazingly, she accepted, and the resulting date was likely the greatest day of my then-18 years. We walked together into my friend Dave’s house where a party had already started and I can still recall the covetous looks that I got from my classmates. What had I waited for?
And because nothing about one’s high school years makes sense, Jayne left a few days later to spend the entire summer at her family’s beach getaway and that was that. I’ve never laid eyes on her again. But for that one night, I was the Big Man on Campus!
Decades later, when I hear 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” released in May 1975, I think back to that spring of my senior year in high school and that magical night with my high school crush.
The song, written by band members Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman, has haunted me ever since. In July 2024, more than five decades after it reached #2 in the U.S. [and #1 in their native U.K.], I finally had the opportunity to speak with Gouldman about it and to rid myself of Jayne’s ghost from that summer of ’75.
“We had avoided writing a love song,” he admitted. “We had done pastiches of love songs but not a sincere love song, and I always thought we’d write one. Eric came up with a perfect title, which sounds like an anti-love song. I had these two very simple chords that open it up, this suspended chord that resolves and Eric had this verse. So Eric was playing his part and then I came in with [hums Duh, duh, duh-duh, duh, duh-duh-duh).
“So there were those parts Eric wrote and those parts I wrote. I give Eric credit for writing a lot of the lyric. The part… “ooh, you wait a long time for me…,” that part I wrote. The whole thing just came into my head, the words and the music. Not that there’s that many words but it means something, when you’re writing something and it comes in as a complete package. You don’t have to touch it. It’s great when that happens. It’s happened to me a few times.
“So we had the song and we recorded it as kind of a bossa nova. It was almost like a Burt Bacharach version of it. We didn’t like it at all and we erased it, which is a shame, looking back now. The song stuck with us all. Kevin [Godley] came up with a different rhythm, this slower beat, this bump, bump, bump, bump… And I think it was Kevin who said, ‘Let’s do it just with voices. Nothing else.’ That’s an interesting idea!
“We knew if we were going to do it just as voices, we’d have to have a rhythm track to sing to. The idea would be to do all the voices and take the rhythm track off. But even the rhythm track was imbued with some magic. When you have a good song, every production idea works. And that’s exactly what happened. I don’t think we even rejected anyone’s idea from what we did. So, we came with this method of creating these voices. There were just the four of us but we needed about two other people. And we came up with a method of doing that, creating loops, recording them onto the multi-track, mixing it down onto a tape loop that was spun back into the multi-track. Each note that we wanted of the choir came up onto the fader. We had to mix those down and the four of us sat at the board, playing it like a musical instrument with all the voices.”
I ask him if he can picture himself doing that.
“I remember everything about the session, yeah. It’s amazing. What was great about it was if you said now, ‘Let’s try to put a choir into it,’ you’d go to your sampler or whatever it is and just play it and there it is immediately. We were building this thing up, so we didn’t know what it was going to be. So writing each voice and hearing this sound and we were like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’
“We finished the record, and we knew it was great. We didn’t know it had any commercial [potential]. None of us thought, ‘Oh, this is a hit’ or anything. We just knew it was great. We used to turn the lights off in the control room and play it back to ourselves. Once we we played it to other people, we knew it could be a massive hit.”
Are we talking hours or the course of several days? I ask.
“Days.”
And what about the haunting female voice, saying “Big boys don’t cry?”
“That was Lol’s idea. Lol said, ‘We need someone to say, “Big boys don’t cry,” but it should be a girl’s voice.’ And Kathy Redfern, who was a secretary, we brought her in.
“She did it really quickly, and then she went back to the front office,” he adds with a laugh.
10cc’s recordings are available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here. Tickets for their 2024 tour are available here.
Related: Our complete July 2024 interview with Gouldman
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2 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationDavid Byrne used to introduce Talking Heads’ song named “I’m Not in Love” by saying “Not the 10cc song.”
This is one of those songs that I’ll always want to hear, I’ve never gotten tired of it or burned out on it. Those stacked vocals are just so beautiful.