“You Win Again,” a world hit that sparked a Bee Gees revival within the late Eighties, contained one of many band’s catchiest melodies – one which supposedly got here to Barry Gibb in a dream. “Some of my best grooves usually come in the night, in a dream, so I keep a little recorder nearby,” he instructed the BBC in 2016. “The chorus of ‘You Win Again’ came that way, but I didn’t have the recorder, so I had to run around the house and find something, because like a dream those things will disappear. You have to catch them.”
When Barry instructed his brothers Maurice and Robin about his refrain, they instantly received collectively to write down lyrics to accompany the tune, a couple of man shedding “a battle of love.” “We had no idea how it might turn out as a song. It ended up as a big demo in my garage,” Maurice recalled in 2001. Ultimately, they selected the title “You Win Again,” despite the fact that it was the identical because the Hank Williams traditional from 1952. (Robin claimed he had not heard that tune and was extra apprehensive that the title was too near the Sizzling Chocolate hit “So You Win Again” from 1977.)
The recording
For the tune, the Bee Gees reunited with producer Arif Mardin – a person who engineered and produced an unimaginable array of traditional information from artists akin to Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Diana Ross, and Barbra Streisand – who mentioned that he was “inspired” by working once more with such “incredible singers.”
When the band labored on a demo of the tune in Maurice’s storage, they went for what Maurice known as the distinctive “stomps” initially. The group retained the regular, pounding opening beat for the ultimate recording of the observe on the Center Ear studio in Miami Seashore, with a brand new drum program devised by Maurice and celebrated producer Rhett Lawrence. “As soon as you hear that ‘jabba-doomba, jabba-doomba’ on the radio, you know it’s us. It’s a signal. So, that’s one little secret – give people an automatic identification of who it is,” defined Maurice.
All three brothers sang on “You Win Again” (Barry additionally performed guitar and Maurice was on keyboards) and Robbie Kondor was featured on keyboards and synthesizer bass. Robin recalled that the brothers have been so satisfied that this was going to be an enormous hit that they spent a month recording it and re-mixing it (together with at Standards Studios in Miami) to attempt to get it as excellent as potential, regardless of issues with the expertise of the time. They used a 32-track recorder that Mardin described as “very, very brittle” and, within the remaining model, the tune was sped up, elevating it a couple of quarter tone, to enhance the sound.
The reception
“You Win Again” was launched on September 7, 1987, because the lead single from their studio album E.S.P., and it rapidly climbed to the highest of the UK charts, making the Bee Gees the primary band to attain a No.1 hit in every of the three a long time, the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties.
It was the band’s first hit single in eight years. Though it did properly all through Europe, the dearth of radio play in America impacted gross sales and the only by no means went larger than No. 75 on the Billboard Sizzling 100 chart. However, the emotive lyrics (“you win again, so little time, we do nothing but compete”) struck a chord with the general public and helped the Gibb brothers win the distinguished 1987 British Academy Ivor Novello award for Finest Tune Musically and Lyrically.
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