I'm Not in Love

Stewart's idea came from a conversation with his wife, who asked why he did not say I love you more often. He reasoned that repeating the words would drain them of meaning, so he wrote a song that says the opposite while giving the reasons he could never leave. He and Gouldman wrote it in two or three days as a bossa nova played on guitars. Godley said it was crap, they erased it, and the band might have abandoned the song if Stewart had not heard studio staff still singing the tune. Godley then proposed doing it entirely with voices.

Stewart recorded Gouldman, Godley and Creme singing ahh sixteen times for each note of the chromatic scale, a 48-voice choir for each note, and Creme suggested tape loops. Stewart made twelve loops about twelve feet long, one for each note, and ran them through separate channels of the mixing desk, so the four could fade up three or four at a time to play chords. The instruments were few: Stewart on Fender Rhodes, Gouldman on guitar and bass, and a bass drum sound Godley played on a Moog that Creme had bought. The whispered line Be quiet, big boys don't cry was spoken by the studio secretary Cathy Redfern, after Creme heard her voice when she came to the control room door.

Mercury's executives heard it while the band was leaving UK Records and signed them for five albums. They thought it too long for a single, so Life Is a Minestrone came out first, and industry pressure led to its release as the second single. It spent two weeks at number one in the UK from 28 June 1975 and three weeks at number two in the US, where it was edited to 3:42. The NME's Andrew Tyler wrote that The Original Soundtrack contained just one wonderful track. It won three Ivor Novello Awards in 1976. Godley said that if he had to pick one track from everything they had done, this would be his favourite.

Covers and live

Richie Havens covered it in 1976, the Pretenders recorded it for the film Indecent Proposal in 1993, and Will to Power took it into the US top ten in 1990. Stewart and Gouldman re-recorded it acoustically for Mirror Mirror in 1995, reaching number 29 in the UK. Gouldman and Godley performed it on BBC Radio 2's Piano Room with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2025.