American straightforward soul singer and backing vocalist Dennis Englewood said, "When I heard 10cc's original, 'I'm Not In Love', I noticed that there were too many synthetic distorted choir voices, made from technical mach…
American straightforward soul singer and backing vocalist Dennis Englewood said, "When I heard 10cc's original, 'I'm Not In Love', I noticed that there were too many synthetic distorted choir voices, made from technical machines that made part of the real music disenchanted and I call their production horrible, sucked in and disembodied. I don't like how synthesized they were. Those weren't man-made for me. For my creamy vanilla soul ballad version of that song, I wanted to do the whole backing track with a lot of real instruments playing that are man-made for me and the real backing voices of myself, Laurie Maitland, Joyce Berry and Sue Fleming, created in a family style.
If you're interested in his man-made soul ballad remake of the 10cc, buy his soulful version at:
https://dennisenglewood.bandcamp.com/track/im-not-in-love
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/dennisenglewood2
As the original once said:
The ethereal sound was created by laboriously building up multiple overdubs of the voices of Stewart, Graham Gouldman, Godley and Creme singing a single note in unison. This multi-track was then mixed down and dubbed down onto 16-track tape. This process was repeated across all sixteen tracks to create a lush 256-voice "virtual" choir that could "sing" chromatic chords. A number of these prepared multi-tracks were then cut into several endless loops, each of which contained the basic notes of the main chords used in the song. The chorus loops could then be played by using the mixing desk rather like a keyboard -- each chord could be sounded by bringing up the fader for that loop.
The instrumental break featured the repeated spoken phrase: "Be quiet, big boys don't cry...", which was spoken by Kathy Warren, the receptionist of the Strawberry Studios where the band recorded the track...
In this pre-sampler period, the group was able to simulate a large polyphonic choir, creating a dramatic tonal effect similar to that produced by the well-known choir setting on the Mellotron, but with a far richer sound, and in full stereo.
I commented about Kathy Redfern and said:
When Kathy Redfern said the irrelevant line, "Be quiet. Big boys don't cry." and then echoes of her last line happened overhead, the audience would boo her out, because she wasn't making any sense in that song about neglect, so I would give her thumbs down.
