“With Odessa our intentions were honorable. “Our music became so speckled because we had all these insane influences from growing up in Australia,” said Barry Gibb in 2009. They had absorbed lots of influences listening to the radio, from The Everly Brothers and Lonnie Donegan to The Goons. The British-born Gibb brothers, who had been encouraged to be child stars by their bandleader father, had grown up in an isolated Australian town. He later became the arranger for Elton John.Īt the time Bee Gees recorded the album – in New York and at London’s Trident and IBC Studios – twins Robin and Maurice were still teenagers and struggling to cope with the demands of fame following the success of hit songs such as “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “Massachusetts,” and “I’ve Just Got To Get A Message To You” in the previous two years.
The band had worked with Buckmaster on a tour of Germany the previous year and thought he would be ideal for the track. The track featured the unusual mix of Maurice Gibb on flamenco guitar and Grammy-winning composer Paul Buckmaster on cello. “Barry has an incredible and wonderful imagination,” Stigwood said at the time of the album’s release on Polydor, “and this is shown in the lyrics of his composition, ‘Odessa,’ which is one of the finest pop songs ever written.” Robert Stigwood, the man who helped Bee Gees become such a cultural phenomenon in the 70s, was the producer on the album and maintained that the opening track “Odessa (City On The Black Sea)” – which had been written by the three brothers in 1968 and tells the story of the survivor of a fictitious British ship called Veronica, floating on an iceberg in the Baltic Sea – was one of his favorite Bee Gees tracks. “An incredible and wonderful imagination” Barry Gibb said the trio envisaged this amazing mix of musical genres as a “rock opera” (the album was originally intended to be called An American Opera) and it was released two months before The Who’s album Tommy. Though the 17-song concept album, which featured a rich mixture of styles, initially bemused some fans, Odessa has since been hailed for its bold blend of rock, pop, country, Baroque, opera, and classical music.