Background
"Io che non vivo (senza te)" - "I, who can't live (without you)" - was introduced at the 1965 Sanremo Festival by Pino Donaggio - who'd co-written the song with Vito Pallavicini - and his team partner Jody Miller: the song took seventh place at Sanremo and as recorded by Donaggio reached #1 in Italy in March 1965. "Io che non vivo (senza te)" would also be prominently featured on the soundtrack of the Luchino Visconti film "Vaghe stelle dell'Orsa" (aka "Sandra") starring Claudia Cardinale which was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that September.
Dusty Springfield, who participated at the 1965 Sanremo Festival, was in the audience when Donaggio and Miller performed "Io che non vivo (senza te)" and despite having no awareness of the lyrics' meaning the song moved Springfield to tears. Springfield 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 Marble Arch: the session personnel included guitarist Big Jim Sullivan and drummer Bobby Graham. Springfield still lacked an English lyric to record: eventually Springfield's friend Vicki Wickham, the producer of Ready Steady Go!, would write the required English lyric with her own friend Simon Napier-Bell who was the 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 lightheartedly took up the challenge of writing the lyric themselves: "We went back to '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 or Napier-Bell had any understanding of the Italian lyrics of the original song: according to Wickham they attempted to write their own lyric for an anti-love song to be called "I Don't Love You"; when that original idea proved unproductive it was adjusted first to "You Don't Love Me" and then "You Don't Have to Love Me" which was finalized as "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" to fit the song's melody. Napier-Bell was later to title his first book (an autobiographical account of the British music scene of the 1960s) You Don't Haver to Say You Love Me after the song.
Springfield recorded her vocal the next day: unhappy with the acoustics in the recording booth she eventually moved into a stairwell to record. Springfield was not satisfied with her vocal until she'd recorded forty-seven takes.
Released 31 March 1966, the single release of Springfield's recording became a huge hit and remains one of the songs most identified with her. When Dusty died the song was featured on Now 42 as a tribute to her.
The song hit #1 in the UK,and #4 in the USA. The song proved so popular in the USA that Springfield's 1965 album Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty was released there with a slightly different track listing, and titled after 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 #17 there). In 2004, the song made the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at #491.
Read more about this topic: You Don't Have To Say You Love Me
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