The Secretary Who Whispered Four Words — And Became Part of Pop History
The Secretary Who Whispered Four Words — And Became Part of Pop History
A band spent three weeks recording nothing but "ahhh," built a choir out of tape loops, and then borrowed the receptionist's voice to finish the job.
In 1975, four musicians from Manchester built one of the most sampled vocal sounds in pop music.
They did it with no synthesizers.
No choir.
Just their own voices, sung one note at a time, for three weeks straight.
The song became "I'm Not in Love." And the strangest part of the story isn't the technique.
It's who ended up on the finished record.
A love song that almost never got written
Eric Stewart of 10cc had been married to his wife Gloria for eight years when she made an offhand complaint.
He wasn't saying "I love you" enough anymore.
Stewart's answer was blunt: if he said it every day, it would stop meaning anything.
That thought stuck with him.
He started wondering how to say it without using those words at all.
Within a couple of days, working with bandmate Graham Gouldman, he had a song.
10cc — the band behind "I'm Not in Love," pictured in the 1970s.
The first version was scrapped
The original demo was a bossa nova number, guitars and all, in the style of "The Girl from Ipanema."
Drummer Kevin Godley hated it.
He told Stewart it was crap and that they should wipe the tape.
But as Stewart walked through Strawberry Studios afterward, he heard the studio secretary humming the tune, and the window cleaner whistling it.
That told him the song itself was good. They just hadn't found the right way to record it.
Godley's idea: throw out every instrument
Godley proposed something radical.
No guitars. No drums. No bass, beyond the bare minimum to hold a rhythm.
Just voices. A "wall of sound" made entirely from the human voice.
Guitarist Lol Creme, who'd been struck by the Beatles' tape experiments on "Revolution 9," suggested how to actually pull it off: tape loops.
Three weeks of singing "ahhh"
Eric Stewart spent three weeks recording Gouldman, Godley, and Creme singing a single held note, "ahhh," for each pitch of the chromatic scale.
Sixteen times, per note.
Twelve notes.
That's 48 separate vocal takes stacked into one "choir," built one note at a time with no digital tools of any kind.
To keep each note sustaining indefinitely, Stewart spliced the tape into loops roughly twelve feet long, threading them from the tape deck, out through a capstan roller mounted on a microphone stand, and back again.
Twelve loops, one for each note, each one fed through its own channel on the mixing desk.
The band then played the loops like an instrument, fading channels in and out by hand to build chords out of a choir of their own voices.
Strawberry Studios, Stockport
All of it happened at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, Greater Manchester, a studio Stewart himself co-owned.
It was a modest facility by the standards of the big London studios, but it would go on to record albums for Neil Sedaka and, later, Paul McCartney.
Strawberry Studios in Stockport, where "I'm Not in Love" was built almost entirely out of tape loops.
The missing piece: a voice on the phone
Even with the choir finished, the band felt the track wasn't done.
During the session, Lol Creme had murmured a stray line into a live microphone: "Be quiet, big boys don't cry."
Nobody knew why. But when Stewart soloed the phrase back, the band agreed it needed to be in the song — spoken by the right voice.
Just then, the control room door opened.
It was Cathy Redfern, the studio's 19-year-old secretary and receptionist, leaning in to whisper an ordinary message: "Eric, sorry to bother you. There's a telephone call for you."
Creme jumped up. "That's the voice. Her voice is perfect."
▶ Watch: 10cc — "I'm Not In Love" (official lyric video)
Listen for the whispered "big boys don't cry" line, roughly two minutes in — that's Redfern.
The reluctant star of the record
Redfern wanted nothing to do with it.
"No way, I can't sing," she said.
Lol Creme reportedly carried her back into the studio over his shoulder. Kevin Godley stood beside her, tapping her on the shoulder to cue each line, coaxing the same hushed tone she'd used at the door.
It took her three or four takes to get it.
That whisper became one of the most recognizable seconds in 1970s pop music — and decades later would even lend its phrase to the name of a 1980s band, Boys Don't Cry.
Released to reluctance, and then everywhere
Even finished, the band wasn't convinced "I'm Not in Love" should be a single at all — it ran over six minutes, with almost no beat to speak of, nothing that sounded like 1975 radio.
Mercury released it anyway, in May 1975, as the second single from the album The Original Soundtrack.
It became 10cc's second UK number one, holding the top spot for two weeks.
In the United States, it climbed to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, held off the top only by three different songs across three separate weeks — "The Hustle," "One of These Nights," and "Jive Talkin'."
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It topped the charts in Canada and Ireland too, and reached the top ten across Australia, West Germany, New Zealand, and Norway.
Fifty years on, the song is still one of the most recognized vocal productions of its era — a love song built from nothing you'd normally call an instrument, finished by a 19-year-old who never meant to be on the record at all.
