10cc – "I'm Not In Love"

This is clearly an astonishing single by one of my favourite acts ever. I can listen to it any amount of times and still feel drawn in and engaged. And yet…

I’m really always responding to it as a record rather than as a song. It’s immensely pleasurable how many overdubs are welded together, and the effect that they achieve. But I don’t actually at any point really believe that the singer is in love, more preoccupied with stating his feelings in an artful manner designed to make you feel sorry for him. There’s no sense of the loved other as being a distinctive woman in her own right, I feel.

And its not a song that I can imagine there ever being a good cover version of, though it would obviously be a great source of samples. As Tom says the “Big boys don’t cry” interpolation comes across as rather heavy handed, and the “nasty stain” verse just sounds a bit stupid, and asking for a rewrite to me.

I’d still give it a 9 though, just for being so astonishing and enticing sonically.

My interpretation of the original is a bit different – because it’s in the second person, it really doesn’t strike me as a meditation on his own feelings. It’s more a manipulative series of weasel words designed to duck out of any emotional commitment to the object (ie the listener): he describes the situation and to all intents and purposes the protagonists are a couple, but this a refusal to acknowledge it – “oh, just because we sleep together and call each other it doesn’t mean we’re going out“. Basically the narrator is 1xtotal bastard, and the kind of man at whom songs like Destiny’s Child’s ‘Say My Name’ are squarely aimed; and while I’m all for bastardry in pop, there’s something a bit too suffocating about the way it’s presented, a bit too obviously aimed at YOU. Which is admirable I guess, but I don’t like being made to feel the victim.

Re: covers – in 2001 Tori Amos reimagined it as a stalkers’ soundtrack, Annie Wilkes armed with whipcrack beats and some really fucking eerie background clanking. It’s all about her vocal though, which is all the more unhinged for its restraint. And the ‘nasty stain’ line is the climax of this version. http://youtube.com/watch?v=8uEImGFRkgY

Sometimes incorrectly lumped in, due to its appearance on numerous “Greatest Love Songs” compilations over the years, with vaguely contemperaneous hits such as “If You Leave Me Now” and “All By Myself” as a precursor to the “power ballad”, “I’m Not in Love”is, in fact, a truly pivotal single, historically sitting perfectly at the mid point of the 70’s, displaying as it does the influence of the pop decade preceeding it while simultaneously pointing toward the innovations of the future. It’s a record that is utterly timeless but also completely of it’s time and clearly could not have been produced in any other point in pop history before or after.

One of the last charttoppers by musicians who, like Bowie, Bolan, Stardust, Glitter etc, were notable for having served a long apprenticeship playing in and (in the case of 10cc) writing for various pop acts in the 1960s before achieving their own success, perhaps the musical innovations of that period are, perhaps unsuprisingly a clear inspiration on the groups sound as a result, in particular the “harmony pop” of the Beach Boys, Turtles and others. This is most obvious on the almost doo-wop stylings of later singles like the “The Things We Do for Love” but the influence is clear on INIL too, the famous “choral” effect covering the track with a translucent gauze containing distinct echoes of “Our Prayer” from the Beach Boys “Smile” and the Beatles “Because” amongst others.

However, INIL’s production has none of the warmth of the tracks mentioned above. Instead, perfectly complimenting its narrator’s nihlistic romantic viewpoint the track has a glacial, almost numb sound, within which can also be heard roots of so-called “sonic cathederals” of the early 80’s such as Japan’s “Ghosts” and Ultravox’s “Vienna” and even Martin Hannett’s work with Joy Division. No doubt a “soft rock” act such as 10cc would have been viewed by post-punk practitioners as the epitome of “old fartdom”. Nonetheless, a great production is a great production no matter what and, to these ears, the influence, albeit symbiotic, is undeniable, the throughline even continuing into the ambient, shoegazing and trip-hop movements of the 90s, not to mention REM’s (acknowledged) rip-off of INIL’s vocal sound on “Fuck Me Kitten” on “Automatic for the People”.

The adjecive everyone always uses when describing 10cc is “clever” and it’s just as appropriate when discussing this track. However unlike the wonderful but sometimes somewhat smug or shallow (“clever-clever”) pop satire of much of their other work- as exemplarised by the title of their later hit “Art for Art’s Sake”- INIL is a genuinely smart piece of work, utilising the band’s obvious talent and intelligence to create a real avant-pop masterpiece, its musical innovations and lyrical twists breaking new ground. Revealing new depths in both sound and meaning with each passing year and posessing a real melodic and emotional punch, this has to be a 10 out of 10 for me.

The summer of 1975: my parents and me (the whole family) are going back home to Los Angeles to visit my aunt Debbie and relieve our homesickness (my father’s mostly). We are going across the middle of the US, through Kansas…by now the tapes my father usually listens to (jazz only, he hates pop) have all been played at least once, and since we are going through tornado-prone territory, he turns on the radio instead, for the weather updates…because you never know.

So then: a warm day in Kansas. The road is flat, the sky is huge and full of clouds, the land is wide and mostly flat, a few hills here and there…and the radio is on. I have nothing to do but listen and look out the window…

…and this song comes on, though it sounds more like it is emanating from the speakers…like fog or a bank of clouds…it’s not in a hurry, and it seems to just *be there* and then it grows in intensity, surrounding the listener (me, my mom perhaps, I’m sure my father’s tuned out, so to speak)…much as the expansive horizon of farms and fields is suddenly there once you leave town…it dips gently back and forth, in a way that portends something uneasy and permanent…

And then the voice – quiet but defiant, scared and scary. I hadn’t heard anything like the music, nor the voice, and certainly not the lyrics. This was something new – a song where the guy says “I’m not in love”? A song that could be called uneasy listening? Usually love songs were either dramatically happy or sad, but this was in the middle, or maybe I should say it was beyond anything I’d ever heard…

…and of course at age eight I didn’t understand the lyrics at all (same with Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed”). I’m sure I only caught some of what was being said the first time, amazed by the sound of the song – weightless, almost aimless, but there. It didn’t get to #1 in the US (“Sister Golden Hair” by America was ruling the charts at the time) but it was a big enough hit to stay on the radio for some time, out of sheer difference – there was nothing like it or even close to it…

…and he sings about not being in love as if he either once was (but it didn’t get him anywhere) OR as if he knows very well what he feels isn’t love in any sane sense OR as if he wishes he was in love but he can’t love – why I don’t know, he just can’t…I’m sure as an eight-year-old I must have been puzzled at why someone who claims not to be in love is so bossy – he’s telling her to think this, don’t think that – but there were a lot of things I didn’t know then, but would find out about soon enough, about what could best be called inappropriate male attention. Some of it was relatively harmless and some of it was definitely damaging; I’ve never been stalked but it has to be one of the creepiest things a woman can experience, and this is the voice of the stalker…

…and the music surrounds and envelops him as he tells her she’ll wait a long time for him…and her voice echoes back in his mind (for the longest time I couldn’t figure out what she was saying, I thought she was saying ‘be poised and quiet’ which describes the song more than the singer, who has clearly lost it and most certainly isn’t quiet)…

10cc most certainly didn’t make it an easy song for anyone – me anyway – to figure out. I’m not sure if they made the song so icily beautiful on purpose, to distract the listener from what was being said, or whether that chill was put in to go along with the lyrics, lyrics where everything he says to her are really more about himself and his own emotional paralysis…

…the song ends with one more ambiguous but very believable “I’m not in love” and the clouds of aaahs increase, the synths call and response is static and could well go on forever, and the ending sounds like a steadily increasing snowfall, obliterating any distinctions between the sky and ground…

I don’t find the original creepy – perfected and well-rehearsed evasion yes, a smooth abdication of commitment which, wrapped up in gauze as it is, still fools the object into thinking it’s romantic; but the cover was deliberately creepy. I first heard them around the same time and it seems like a dialogue, almost: if the man in the original is going, “whoa, back off needy crazy girl, this is just a fling, we’re not in love, OK?”, the woman in the response is going, “I’m not in love either. But I am crazy and I will hunt you down.”

Not too sure about that, Waldo – this may prove a case study in how the same group could be responsible for both the best and the worst number one single…

But anyway, “I’m Not In Love” and the flipside of my summer of ’75, in Blackpool, long periods of intense internal dialogue, my parents beginning to worry about why I was acting so withdrawn. I didn’t think I was being particularly withdrawn, but usually in those situations you’re the last one to know.

What I did feel was a readiness and impatience to put away childish things – I was now eleven-and-a-half, had just finished primary school and in August was due, with no small foreboding on my part, to start at grammar school. In hindsight – and how easy everything is to figure out in hindsight and more than three decades after the event – I really didn’t have anything to worry about since virtually all of my primary school class were coming along with me, but there were also intakes from other local primaries to take into consideration, new people, and maybe not instantly friendly people, to meet, and a dreadful sense that this was where I had to start taking life seriously. So you see the paradox already – wanting to grow up and fearing it at the same time.

But there were other feelings to take into account, most markedly a wish to be with a partner, wanting to love and be loved, not wanting to hang out with my boyhood peers forever, much as I enjoyed doing so. A couple of girls took some scant interest in my last year at primary school but you never take these things seriously, or at least I didn’t. A continued refusal to take such things seriously would become a major obstacle as my teenage years unfolded – but then such feelings were discouraged at home; I was officially a Child Prodigy (I made the front cover of the Hamilton Advertiser in spring ’74 in a sort of where-are-they-now update and my interest in music and in particular the charts was expressly noted, but the picture showed me at my Smith-Corona typewriter, at the kitchen table, since the main thrust of the piece was my ambition to become a writer) and as such was expected to Excel and Go To Oxbridge at the cost of all other Childish Distractions, including girlfriends.

So I was thinking deep and long about things which strictly speaking I shouldn’t have had the right to be wasting valuable time thinking about. This song in my world acted as a sort of emotional anti-barometer of self-denial; no, I said publicly to my family and my immediate world, I’m not in love, it’s just a childish phase, I’m fully aware of that – but it was total canting falsehood, since that was exactly how I felt; the desire was there, if not yet (or ever?) a partner.

Its sonic worlds felt like another and better world to me, too, a continent of dreaming into which I could mentally flee at will if the actual world became too much for me to tolerate. I was already acutely aware of my “difference”; he writes all the time, listens to music, keeps to himself, doesn’t do sport ergo something wrong with him…

So for me the intent behind the song didn’t matter; I fit into this 10cc dream world easily and instantly and it meant whatever I felt it meant. It wasn’t until many years (or decades) later that I heard Eric Stewart being interviewed on Radio 2 (can’t remember who was interviewing him) and he expressed surprise that so many romantic liaisons could have been inspired by a song which was, as he put it, essentially about a stalker. So there you have it from the horse’s/writer’s mouth – and when interviewed separately, Graham Gouldman confirmed. But then, they were UK Irony Pop Champions 10cc – and how wise is it to trust what they say?

(Then again the couplet “Don’t make a fuss/Don’t tell your friends about the two of us” has always sounded sinister to me…and what about that barely suppressed snarl of gritted teeth mangling the “nasty” of “nasty stain” or the unusually clear emphasis on “lying” a couple of seconds later?)

Then, as I grew up and lived and died multiple times, the world of “I’m Not In Love” seemed increasingly troubled and insular, and maybe even a little threatening; Stewart’s escalating agonistic denials seemed to imply that he was trying to hide a feeling more dangerous than simply being viewed as Not A Proper Man.

The song started life as a fairly straightforward exercise in bossa nova (as can still be traced in Gouldman’s acoustic guitar lines buried deep within the right channel); authors Stewart and Gouldman were keen on the song but Godley and Creme less so. However, it was Kevin Godley’s idea to construct an arrangement of 240 multitracked, looped single note voices in varying states of concordance and discordance and to use a drum machine instead of actual drums – the inspiration appears to have been Ligeti’s dense choral work Atmospheres as heard in the Stargate sequence of 2001.

With this notion as a catalyst, the four musicians decided to take the song as “out” as could be achievable in 1975, and given that they had to make do and mend with literal cut-and-paste 1975 technology, the results are even more miraculous – what sounds like a very early prototype of the Fairlight is actually a chorus of massed kazoos (the Fairlight not coming into pop use until 1980 with Peter Gabriel 3 and Kate Bush’s Never For Ever).

There is a touch of the Tubular Bells about the weightless “big boys don’t cry” interlude with its shipping forecast piano tinkles and arching buoys of bass, but the “big boys don’t CWY” interspersion is, to misquote Elvis Costello, something that just couldn’t be notated – and nothing like this was being attempted in the rest of that season’s pop. And then the song floats in again, almost reluctantly, before Stewart’s final despairing denial cuts the dummy of the song loose and it magnifies and explodes in slow-motion polytonal chorales – closer than the ear can hear (did they know Escalator Over The Hill?) – before disappearing over the horizon, its fate unseen and never to be known.

There are melodic pointers to two 1974 songs – Hall and Oates’ “She’s Gone” and Ace’s “How Long” – in the structure of “I’m Not In Love” but it sounds a cosmos away from either. Look through the rest of the Top 20 in the weeks when “I’m Not In Love” topped the chart and you will find the gloomy fag-ends of glam rock, cynical by-the-book singles from artists too long in the game to try harder, ghastly MoR offcuts, even ghastlier novelty hits and bizarrely inexplicable reissues. The only other single in those charts which betrayed even a hint of the future was Hamilton Bohannon’s “Disco Stomp.” “I’m Not In Love” sounded as though recorded 200 years after everything else.

But Trevor Horn was certainly listening (Dollar’s “Give Me Back My Heart” is, amongst the million other things that it is, an explicit homage, or epilogue, to “I’m Not In Love”) and maybe the 1975 Scott Walker bored with lacklustre country covers and working men’s club engagements – 1978’s “The Electrician” is, amongst the billion other things that it is, like “I’m Not In Love” microstretched into a timescale of infinity; the Strawberry Studios/Joy Division link has already been mentioned above. And young Kate B can’t be ruled out either. From this distance and perspective “I’m Not In Love” feels like the first number one of the eighties; coldly warm, nostalgically futuristic and cosily frightening.

At the time 10cc were on the point of switching from UK Records to Phonogram, and this was certainly one of two tracks which closed the deal, or were their strongest negotiating tools as artists. However, Phonogram were reluctant to release the second track as a single – a lengthy three-part quasi-operatic epic entitled “Une Nuit A Paris.” This track of course provides the opening to the Original Soundtrack album but Phonogram were extremely dubious about the possibility of a lengthy three-part quasi-operatic epic ever getting to number one as a single. Oh, how they weren’t laughing by year’s end.

throughout this entire discussion the relevant 10cc song has been constantly elbowed out of my mind’s ear by joan armatrading’s “love and affection’ (which begins “i am not in love… but i’m open to persuasion”) — which is in content and intent possibly a polar opposite to ALL the various readings of this song?

I always thought that “When love breaks down” by Prefab Sprout echoes INIL with its fragile arrangement, the ebbing and flowing backing vocals and the occasional bass stabs. Even the lyrics of someone who has to admit that he is not in love anymore (although for other reasons) appear as a more level headed answer to the evasive “just because” of 10cc.

I put ‘Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime’ next to this all too easily. I’ve never thought of ‘I’m Not In Love’ the way Lex does so that was an interesting take. For me any literal meaning is overwhelmed by the sublime choral wash which seems to flux from mournful to hopeful (Mellotron but sounding so close to electric guitar at times), but feeling genuine either way, with glorious aplomb and remains it’s signature or key characteristic.

20 odd years later when Air started releasing vocal songs the influence of that sound felt very heavy and immediate. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was an all time favourite of many of the post-house Parisian popsters (along with the aforementioned Korgis effort) as several of them seem to have nodded to these songs over the years.

In addition to the Amos rendition this song was covered at least four times in the 90s (3 as a single) including by two more acts who enjoyed their own #1 singles. The 00s can only offer Ultrabeat’s ‘scouse house tribute’ but the song’s enduring bankability will surely continue.

I’m dreading (NPI) the impending (well, by the end of the year maybe, tom willing 😉 war over 10cc’s third and final #1 almost! But I’d take it over the song of a similar (on the surface at least) bent coming up a lot sooner.

Goodness, I’ve never heard any of these versions;

Fun Lovin’ Criminals (No. 12, 1997)
Johnny Logan (No. 51, 1987)
Will To Power (No. 29, 1990)

Surely I’m not missing out on anything?

Sorry i dont get any of this “stalker” business at all i’m afraid- surely the song is about what Tom accurately calls “emotional phobia”-the narrator is uncomfortable admitting- to her, to the world at large but most of all to HIMSELF- his feelings of love. To have a go at the poor bloke is a little unsympathetic isn’t it? Plenty people(male and female) have surely had similar romantic prediciments?
At least thats how ive always viewed it and will continue to do so- the “stalker” interpration really is creepy and dwelling on it could seriously marr the enjoyment of the song for me!
Not as much as the thought of a cover by the dreaded Fun Lovin’ Criminals(#23) does, though- thank christ i’ve managed to block that one of my memories..

I wrote a post about the Eldorado sleeve on my blog a while ago. Lovely, lovely image.

Plug over.

I don’t have any evocative personal memories of “I’m Not In Love” at all which is a bummer as it seems perfect for that sort of wistful nostalgia. Something I think Sofia Coppola captured beautifully when she used it for the school dance scene in “The Virgin Suicides”

A fascinating thread, and particularly for me as – OK, deep breath, here goes – I was never all that struck by “I’m Not In Love” at the time, and I’ve never given it much thought since. I suppose that I’d always made the same interpretation as Rosie (#10), which I also think is the most widespread interpetation… but now, listening more closely to the lyrics and picking up on the creepier undertones for the first time, I’m not so sure.

As to why I was never all that struck by the song at the time: I suppose it just sounded too smooth for my proggy 13-year old tastes. Yes, the sonic innovation is remarkable and prescient – I hear that now – but in my self-discovered squddly-widdly world of Yes and Gong and Kevin Ayers and early Soft Machine and The White Album, it failed to make any impact.

And then there was also the almost instant “Classic Track” reverence – the song was voted Best! Single! Ever! in a Capital Radio poll the following year, and my study-mates had the wall chart to prove it – which also put me off, as did any overt displays of pedestal-placing.

But perhaps the truth of the matter was more simple than that: the song deals with complex adult emotions, and I was still too young to grasp them.

By the way, while we’re on the covers: search YouTube, and you’ll find a version from last year by Queen Latifah, whose Soul Passion and Honesty (pace MC) misses all possible points.

As a six year old at the time, I do remember the song very vividly from TOTP and shows like that, because I’d not heard anything similar before. I liked it at the time for its difference to anything else. I remember my father borrowing “The original soundtrack” from a works music club and returning it the next day saying it was unlistenable, except for this song which landed on a compilation tape for the car. Even at six I knew what I liked and there were songs which reached number one from this year which I absolutely hated, and for which I shall reserve my vitriol (you’ll find out in time).

So, at six I liked it but I didn’t understand it lyrically or emotionally, and nothing else really sounded like it then or now – I must add that “Souvenir” by OMD may be indebted to this song as well, seeing as the basis for that song was some choral singers tuning up and singing constant scales and the wash of voices they created. From a distance of another 32 years I can appreciate the lyric, and – um – I can see the stalker mentality behind it. I suppose I’ve been in both positions actually – the narrator and the object of (non)-affection – and it’s not much fun on either side. But that’s grown up talk. At six, it just was something special I didn’t understand – and that’s probably something I still look for in music.

More on the “stalker” question, though on a tangent: it’s interesting that one of the writers said later that the song is — I can’t remember the exact quote from above, but — more or less about a stalker, in that, as I rememeber it, the term “stalker” as we use it these days — for someone obsessed with following or surveilling or hounding a particular love- or hate- object, usually to the point of violence or the threat of it — hadn’t been coined, or at least wasn’t widely used, in the mid-70s. I have a feeling that it came into being either around the time of “Fatal Attraction” or perhaps 7-8 years earlier when John Hinkley shot Ronald Reagan as part of his stalking of Jodie Foster (or Chapman/Lennon). And not only wasn’t the term in general use (unless I’m mistaken), I’m not sure the concept of the stalker persona had really been established in popular culture before then. At least I can’t think of any examples from movies. Serial killers abounded, but they were more fixated on the act than the victim; there was “Cape Fear” and “Strangers on a Train,” but the first was based on revenge, and the latter — well, that’s pretty close actually, but the twist of trading murders somewhat outweighs the Robert Walker’s fixation on Farley Granger himself… This is all off the top of my head: am I way off the mark and missing some obvious, pre-Hinckley examples of stalkers in reality or popular-culture? (oh and of course Hinckley’s obsession grew out of Taxi Driver, which is a good proto-stalker movie example). I guess my point would be that the “I’m Not in Love” writer may have been reading backwards and exaggerating an aspect of the song’s storyline based on later cultural ideas.

“play misty for me” (1971): clint eastwood is a DJ pestered by an obsessed fan <— so the idea was around (acc.wiki california was the first place to enact anti-stalker laws, after a series of cases in the 90s, all involving minor celebrities; and my guess is that the idea — and indeed the behaviour — went back some way before this within and around the hollywood community…)

also just in terms of popfan behaviour — off the map of fictional retelling but ON the map of stories pop-industry workers would be well aware of — i find it hard to believe that the 60s rock explosion didn’t bring a TON of obsessive and deluded fans out of the woodwork to dog their idols: certainly i remember reading about the beatlemaniacs who hung around abbey road the whole time in the late 60s; the beatles had to run this gauntlet, and it was often truculent and semi-hostile (esp.when new beatle GFs had just hit the news)

10cc wd be perfectly well aware of such tales

true though that the word “stalker” in its current sense probably didn’t emerge till the 80s or so

It always amazes me how all the contributors, who were only “bairns” at the time, can come up with so many interesting insights into these songs !

Just for the record – I can’t see the stalker thing all. I hear a guy shuting down all the emotions because he has been overwhelmed by what ? Her Beauty ? His Committment ? A previuos Rejection ? A lost Mommy ?

But it is classic stuff and I am so glad it’s appreciated , to some degree by everyone….

Re: #37. I seem to remember seeing some film around the time of “Imagine” where John Lennon is being accosted by a fan who demands to know what “You can syndicate every boat you row” means, and the guy’s really well meaning but persistent, but in the end John says “It’s just words, you know, it doesn’t MEAN anything”. So said stalkerish pop fans did exist even then. AJ Weberman as well, come to think of it.

Oh, and on the new ” Eagles ” LP – a very weird, obssesive number is ” Waiting in The Weeds “. Scary, in fact. Perfectly rendered.

As you know, I’m not really au fait with more recent developments in the singles chart as I’ve been too busy regressing into stuff that was before even my, but would that be Cry Me A River as in Julie London’s Cry Me A River? Because I adore that song in that version and if it had been a number one it would have been a ten right down the middle, and Mr Timberlake surely had a cheek thinking he could come close.

But then again, maybe it was a different song…

This was part of a quiz question I used a couple of years back – along with tATu’s “All The Things She Said” and Oasis’s “Songbird” it was the first UK top three to comprise entirely recycled titles (Simple Minds and Kenny G having used the other titles).

I’m with Mike and Brian above on the stalker angle and preference for 10cc’s other, sparkier, singles (particularly I’m Mandy), and for me the subtle bass line under the “Big boys don’t cry” section is the best thing about this one. But that’s the joy of Popular, in that people who care deeply about a song can express just why it moves them so, and the analysis and discussion open up entire new vistas on the songs and the music. More power to its elbow.