•
Vicki Wickham •
Simon Napier-Bell and number four on the
Billboard Hot 100.
Elvis Presley recorded a cover version in 1970 which was a hit in both the US and the UK. Other covers have charted in the UK, Ireland, Italy and Finland. Springfield, who participated at the 1965 Sanremo Festival, was in the audience when Donaggio and Miller performed "
Io che non vivo (senza te)" and, although she did not know the meaning of the lyrics, the song moved Springfield to tears. She obtained an acetate recording of Donaggio's song but allowed a year to go by before actively pursuing the idea of recording an English version. On 9 March 1966, Springfield had an instrumental track of Donaggio's composition recorded at
Philips Studio in London near
Marble Arch. The session personnel included guitarist
Big Jim Sullivan and drummer
Bobby Graham. Springfield still lacked an English lyric to record, but Springfield's friend
Vicki Wickham, the producer of
Ready Steady Go!, wrote the required English lyric with her own friend
Simon Napier-Bell, manager of
the Yardbirds. Neither Wickham nor Napier-Bell had any discernible experience as songwriters. According to Napier-Bell, he and Wickham were dining out when she mentioned to him that Springfield hoped to get an English lyric for Donaggio's song, and the two light-heartedly took up the challenge of writing the lyric themselves: "We went back to [Wickham]'s flat and started working on it. We wanted to go to a trendy disco so we had about an hour to write it. We wrote the chorus and then we wrote the verse in a taxi to wherever we were going." Neither Wickham nor Napier-Bell understood the original Italian lyrics. According to Wickham, they attempted to write their own lyric for an anti-love song to be called "I Don't Love You", but when that original idea proved unproductive, it was initially adjusted to "You Don't Love Me", then to "You Don't Have to Love Me", and finalised as "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me", a phrasing that fitted the song's melody. Napier-Bell later gave the same title to his first book, an autobiographical account of the British music scene of the 1960s. Springfield recorded her vocal the next day. Unhappy with the acoustics in the recording booth she eventually moved into a stairwell to record. She was only satisfied with her vocals after she had recorded 47 takes. Released on 25 March 1966 in the UK, the
single release of Springfield's recording remains one of the songs most identified with her. The song was her most successful hit in the United Kingdom and United States; it went to number one in the UK charts and number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States. It proved so popular in the US that Springfield's 1965 album ''
Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty was released there with a slightly different track listing, and was retitled with the same name as the hit single (the B-side of the US single, "Little by Little", was issued in the UK as a separate A side and reached number 17 on that chart). The song also topped the charts peaking at number one in The Philippines and peaked at number one in NME top thirty charts, it stayed in the number 1 position for two weeks from the week commencing 14 May 1966 to the week ending 28 May 1966. It also hit number one in Melody Maker'' magazine in May 1966. When Springfield died of breast cancer in March 1999, the song was featured on
Now 42 as a tribute.
Reception Cash Box described the song as a "hauntingly plaintive slow-shufflin' ode about an understanding gal who has no intention of tying her boyfriend down to her". In 2004, the song made the
Rolling Stone list of
The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at No. 491.
Certifications == Charts ==