Songs Of The Day 5/21/2012: 16 Featuring Robin Gibb, 1949-2012
The famous Bee Gees quaver was more Robin's than Barry's. His tremble always evoked the image of a lost man staring heavenwards, pleadingly. You could mock it if you liked, but once you heard it, Robin's voice went straight to your subconscious, where it sinisterly remains to this day.
This playlist of my personal Robin favorites only spans about ten years, between 1966 and 1975. Robin didn't feature on too many Bee Gees songs after they moved to Miami and went disco. (We can debate whether that move compromised their art, but it would be a short debate because it didn't.) I found 28 of my favorite Robin Gibb performances online this evening and managed to whittle it down by 12.
"How Love Was True"
"Glass House"
"Lum-De-Loo"
"New York Mining Disaster 1941"
"Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy of Arts"
"Harry Braff"
"Down To Earth"
"I Started a Joke"
"I've Gotta Get A Message To You"
"Lamplight"
"Mother and Jack"
"2 Years On"
"Never Been Alone"
"I Don't Wanna Be The One"
"Voices"
"Come On Over"
Comments
- Love Hurts 2003 top of the pops performance (not the boyband R&B on solo recording)
- Rings around the moon (featured, sort of)
- Sensuality
- Mother of Love / Don't Cry Alone
- Ellan Vannin
- To Love Somebody Prince's Trust 2006 (also a sad document of broken sibling relations beyond repair: refusal by one of them to do what used to be 2nd nature - harmonize...)
- And you don't add more art than willing to lose your best known identity (quavering, smack front & center) by playing Elizabethan female roles in Shakespeare: All this making love, Living Together (main verses.) Or chick-flick equivalent of (putting female desire before male) Don't Fall in Love with Me, I Still Love You...that's not mentioning the eyebrow-raising ventures into contempo R&B dominated by 20-something black men (less acceptable than white men assuming black female soul sistas in 70s?), or his new wave outcast-Romeo...
But none of these stand up to his magnum opus, which even in the ample canvas of the group, had no place: Sing Slowly Sisters. I believe a Twilight Zone episode mined the same subject, with bigger cast/crew and budget.