Here’s another of those songs that’s perfectly conceived and created – yet also massively irritating due to overexposure for the past 45 years. At least for me.

Listening back through their many hits, the odd thing about 10cc is that they never had a signature style: every single not only sounds different from the last, but is is almost a completely different genre. In this case, a genre all of its own.

I’m Not In Love earned the band a huge record deal for their third album The Original Soundtrack but was thought too long to be a single, so was preceded by the not-nearly-as-good but somehow-equally-annoying Life Is A Minestrone.

It was written by Eric Stewart with a melody by Grham Gouldman, who turned it into a bossa nova arrangement. But after recording it with conventional instruments, the band’s other two members, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme didn’t like the result.

“It’s crap” was Godley’s verdict, adding the advice: “Chuck it.” So they did, getting on with other songs for the album – until they noticed the staff in their Stockport studio singing the melody. At which point Godley suggested trying it with no instruments – just voices. It was a masterstroke.

Stewart spent the next three weeks recording Gouldman, Godley and Creme singing “Ahhh” 16 times for each note of the chromatic scale, building up a “choir” of 48 voices for each note.

Being studio boffins above all, they devised a method of using 12-foot tape loops to keep each note going, and playing them through the mixing desk, fading each channel to create the melody.

Instrumentation was only added later – Stewart playing an electric piano, Gouldman an electric guitar and bass and Godley making the heartbeat-like bass drum sound on a synth programmed by Creme.

There’s also a toy music box in there somewhere and one of the song’s most memorable components – the whispered “Be quiet, big boys don’t cry” – is the contribution of the band’s secretary Kathy Redfern.