Certain Songs #2688: 10cc – “I’m Not in Love”

Album: The Original Soundtrack
Year: 1975

. . .

Let me start off by saying that I’m flying a little bit blind here, because if I’ve heard a half-dozen 10cc songs in my life, I’d be surprised. The only thing I really know about them is that they were named after the same thing that The Lovin’ Spoonful and Pearl Jam were named after. But a little bit of my patented half-assed research turns up that they were one of those bands who made post-1967 sophisto art-pop that were much bigger in the U.K. than they ever were in the U.S. Way bigger: from 1972-1977, they had 11 top ten singles in the U.K., including three number ones. Said number ones of which got some airplay on FM radio here in the U.S., so people of a certain age might remember “Rubber Bullets” or “Dreadlock Holiday” from KFIG or Rock 96FM or KKDJ or whatever your local FM stations were in the 1970s.

And I would guess that everybody remembers today’s song, their first — but not last! — massive hit here in the U.S., the floating keyboard and vocals wash of “I’m Not in Love,” as Nineteen-Seventies of a song that the Nineteen-Seventies ever Ninteen-Seventied.

Written by lead singer & pianist Eric Stewart and guitar guy Graham Gouldman, “I’m Not in Love” was apparently inspired by Stewart’s thought that saying “I love you” too much to his wife would degrade the meaning of the phrase, leading to a lyric that is one of the all-time great “doth protest too much” lyrics ever recorded.

I’m not in love, so don’t forget it
It’s just a silly phase I’m going through
And just because I call you up
Don’t get me wrong, don’t think you’ve got it made

I like to see you, but then again
That doesn’t mean you mean that much to me
So if I call you, don’t make a fuss
Don’t tell your friends about the two of us

This is all sung over a floating whirlpool of electric piano and massive tape loops of Gouldman, plus Kevin Godley & Lol Creme all singing “ahhh” in different notes. It apparently took three weeks just to record the vocals. And since it’s all so involved, if you’re really curious, there’s a bunch of sources out there that will explain it. Let’s just say it was an incredibly intense process to produce the music. WHich is why it’s so ironic that the most memorable part of the entire song was basically an accident, as they had an idea to have a breakdown where someone said “be quiet, big boys don’t cry,” but nobody to do it until their secretary, Kathy Redfern, came in during recording and whispered that there was a phone call for Stewart. Cue giant lightbulb going off over everybody’s heads.

They convinced Redfern to do it, and thus:

Be quiet, big boys don’t cry
Big boys don’t cry
Big boys don’t cry
Big boys don’t cry
Big boys don’t cry
Big boys don’t cry…

I was 12 when “I’m Not in Love” came out, and as such, I was just embarking on the series of seemingly never-ending (and mostly unrequited) crushes that would dominate my next two decades, and I found this part both incredibly disturbing and incredibly sexy in its unvarnished intimacy. I hated it and loved it in equal measure. Hated it because it embarrassed me when it came on the radio; loved it because it was powerful enough to embarrass me when it came on the radio.

And it came on the radio all the time. Like “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and “Blinded By The Light,” I’m Not in Love” is one of those mid-1970s songs that got massive airplay in both its AM-friendly single version and its longer FM-oriented album version.

And so “I’m Not In Love” became a gynormous hit single here in the U.S., topping out at #2, kept out of the #1 spot in three consecutive weeks by Van McCoy’s “The Hustle,” The Eagles “One of These Nights” and the Bee Gees “Jive Talkin'” for those of you keeping score at home. In the U.K, of course, there was no such trouble, and it was a solid #1.

Because it simultaneously sounded like nothing else ever and also exactly like the mid-1970s, “I’m Not in Love” was one of those songs that people remembered, and in 1991, the group Will to Power — who never met a 1970s song they couldn’t make worse — took a cover of it to #7, and of course Mike Mills used it as the inspiration for Automatic For The People’s “Star Me Kitten.”

As far as 10cc goes, Kevin Godley & Lol Creme left after 1976, but Goldman & Stewart kept the name, and they even had another top ten U.S. hit, the perfectly serviceable “The Things We Do For Love,” and a few more hits in the U.K. until punk killed them after “Dreadlock Holiday,” breaking up in 1983 before putting out a pair of reunion albums — one with Godley & Creme and one without — in the first half of the 1990s. Meanwhile Godley & Creme went out on their own, and despite a couple of U.K. hit singles, really found their groove as video directors, most notably for The Police and Duran Duran.

“I’m Not in Love”

“I’m Not in Love” Video

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