I'm Not in Love

Eric Stewart wrote "I'm Not in Love" after his wife, to whom he had been married for eight years, asked why he so rarely told her he loved her. Stewart believed that repeating the words would wear out their meaning, so he set about finding another way to say it and settled on declaring the opposite, while filling the song with reasons he could never let the relationship go. He wrote most of the melody and lyrics on guitar, and Graham Gouldman helped him finish it at Strawberry Studios, suggesting new chords, the intro and the bridge. The pair spent two or three days on it, arriving at a bossa nova arrangement built on guitars.

Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were unimpressed. Godley called it crap and the band erased the tape entirely. Stewart and Gouldman moved on to "Une Nuit a Paris", but when Stewart noticed studio staff still humming the discarded melody, he persuaded the others to reconsider. Godley offered a condition: drop the instruments and build the record entirely from voices. Stewart spent three weeks recording Gouldman, Godley and Creme singing "ahhh" sixteen times for each note of the chromatic scale, creating a choir of 48 voices per note. Creme solved the problem of sustaining notes indefinitely by suggesting tape loops, and Stewart built twelve of them, one per note, each threaded through the tape heads and a capstan roller on a microphone stand.

Played through separate channels of the mixing desk, the loops turned the desk itself into an instrument, with the four members fading channels up in groups to form chords. Released in May 1975 as the second single from The Original Soundtrack, the record topped the UK Singles Chart for two weeks and reached number one in Canada and Ireland.