10cc classic I'm Not In Love is being given a special 50th anniversary re-release today on limited edition seven inch vinyl by Universal Music.
The group's second UK number one single, originally released in May 1975, also topped the charts in Ireland and Canada, and peaked at number 2 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart. Not bad for a song that, as co-writer Graham Gouldman recalls in a new interview with The Telegraph, was described by one music critic at the time as “like a turd floating down a river of shit”.
To be fair, some of the band members had a similarly dismissive attitude to the song when it was first presented to the group by Gouldman and co-writer Eric Stewart.
“We did the song acoustically first,” Stewart recalled to Rolling Stone writer, BBC Radio 1 DJ and self-appointed 'Professor of Pop' Paul Gambaccini in 1975. “We listened to it and said, 'No, that's crap,' and put it aside.”
In a 2005 interview with Sound On Sound, Stewart recalled that his bandmate Kevin Godley was particularly scathing about the original version of the song, which initially was built around a bossa nova rhythm.
“He said, 'It's crap', and I said, Oh right, OK, have you got anything constructive to add to that? Can you suggest anything?” Stewart remembered. “He said, 'No. It's not working, man. It's just crap, right? Chuck it.' And we did. We threw it away and we even erased it, so there's no tape of that bossa nova version.”
The band were two-thirds of the way through recording their third album, The Original Soundtrack, when Lol Creme suggested working on I'm Not In Love again, this time using the band's voices as a “voice piano”.
“We recorded every voice you hear, 256 of them, and then brought them up whenever we needed them," Stewart recalled to Rolling Stone. The new version of the track duly became the album's second single, and easily 10cc's best known song.
“I can’t get away from it,” Kevin Godley tells The Telegraph. “People come up to you and you know what they’re going to say, that it reminds them of their first relationship or the love of their life. Although I met this guy who said it broke up his marriage. Someone told me that Bryan Ferry was driving when he heard it on the radio and pulled over to listen to it. He thought it was the most extraordinary thing he’d heard for ages.”
“I just wish I’d written it,” he admits.
