Strange how much you can tell about someone from just one look at their face, isn’t it? You see Cristiano Ronaldo and think vainglorious tosser; Joe Swash and it’s gormless buffoon; Rodney Dangerfield’s fizzgog positively screamed a desperate funniness. There’s something about a particular combination of features that creates a kind of emotional aura that clings to the nose, the ears, the philtrum. The man with the saddest face in the history of faces was Robin Hugh Gibb.
As one third of pop music’s most loved fraternal trio, the Bee Gees, Gibb was responsible for some of the most utterly joyful records ever made, and some of the most devastating too. His face, with those hollowed cheeks, that long nose, and those tragic little eyes, was one built for a life of regret. A man long known to be ‘over-sensitive’ Gibb’s voice—reedy, thin, vaguely unpleasant, and in many ways the diametric opposite of what most of us would think of as a ‘good’ singing voice—was the perfect accompaniment to both his kitchen sink drama expression, and the bleak, troubling, lonely songs he made his own.
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Early Bee Gees hits, before the brothers discovered the thrills of tight trousers and even tighter disco arrangements, like “I Started a Joke” and “Massachusetts” are downtrodden, broken, perversely depressing lamentations that still drip with emotion 40 years after Robin stepped up to the microphone and cried his eyes out for our entertainment. Even on a barnstormer like “Nights on Broadway” Robin comes across like a man destined to live life on the perimeters of something. This is a man who marked the day of his first no.1 single by getting involved in a train crash that killed 49 people. That was Robin Gibb, the saddest man of all. The man who sung “Like a Fool’, which for my money is one of the most tearjerking things ever committed to record.
We’ve written before about the essential quality of Italo being an open-heartedness that verges on the nearly embarrassing. Records like “Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side)” by Firefly, or Valerie Dore’s bigger-than-Jesus “It’s So Easy” are played so straight that you can’t help but squirm slightly. Listening to them is like watching someone crying on a petrol station forecourt in the middle of the afternoon—your natural inclination is to sort of turn away but carry on peeking from behind the safety of a Ginster’s wrapper. The same goes for Robin’s 1985 sadlad classic.
Gibbs’ attempts at blending his creamy songwriter smoothness with the rigid plasticity of Italo were, for a bloke from Manchester, incredibly credible. Songs like “Another Lonely Night in New York”, “Don’t Stop the Night” and “You Don’t Say Us Anymore” are tacky masterpieces of campy pomposity that hide a truly beaten and devastatingly distant heart of darkness. And none is darker than “Like a Fool”. And the reason that “Like a Fool” is worth considering at length is that “Like a Fool” is a record that does a very certain, very special kind of thing: it’s a genuine heartbreaker made for an environment in which many of us experience our highest highs and lowest lows.
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Because that’s the thing about nightclubs—they amplify and exacerbate every feeling. Because nightclubs, as we’ve written about time and time again, aren’t the real world, they’re like life but not quite. By that I mean that our experience of clubbing is a way of opting out of the quotodian for a night, and in doing so we both abandon ourselves and become someone else. That someone else is a temporary illusion and most of us have a moment on a night out when we become painfully aware of just how artificial all of this—this experience, this room, this crowd—is. Like a fool.
But that foolishness is perhaps why we have a perverse longing to subsume ourself in songs that pull on the heartstrings while we’re trying to dance the night away. It’s as if we feel guilty about the drink and the drugs and the smoking and the awful conversations and the eventual hangover and comedown and the return to the grinding fucking reality of it all, and so we decide to sabotage things. Play us the saddest records you can, for that’s all we’re really worth.
In an interview reported on the Guardian after his death, Gibb said “I sing how I feel. I know I haven’t got a great voice but I manage to touch something inside other people that they understand. It is an accident but the best kind of accident—one with no blood involved.” And that’s what makes “Like a Fool” so painfully potent.
This is a song about watching love crash against the rocks of selfishness. It’s a lonely man’s lament, self-flagellation that somehow avoids sliding into straight up petty self-pity. Gibb’s a believable narrator, and his voices cracks in all the right places. Just look at that chorus:
Like a fool/I was waiting
Like a fool/for you to come back.
Like a fooI/I was standing alone in the rain.
Like a fool/I was dreamin’
Like a fool/to lose you this way.
And now I’m just foolin’ myself
Even here on the endless white of the page where lyrics usually shrivel and die and are shown up to be nothing more than the GCSE standard doggerel they usually are, Gibbs’ pain is perceptible. His almost childish self-reproach becomes almost unbearable to listen to. He’s not just like a fool—he is one. He’s utterly foolish, a man lost in his own delusions, delusions that have lost him the love he so clearly needs to keep on living. He’s the lost, confused bloke on the perimeter of the dancefloor, constantly looking out for someone who he knows isn’t there, who’s never going to be there. Someone who, really, was never there in the first place.
When I played it to a friend for the first time his reaction was thus: “It’s suffocating me. One can only imagine the tears that have been cried to this song and the reasons behind them.” These are tears spilt in silent taxis in the early hours, tears spilt on otherwise empty dancefloors, tears spilt on the barstools of those bars inhabited only by the the drunk and the disconsolate. And coming out of the toilets, red-faced, wet cheeked, blotchy and alert, is Robin himself. He’s a fool and always will be. He lost you. You’re never coming back.
He’s not even fooling himself. Not really.
None of this would matter if it wasn’t a fucking stone cold banger. It’s like every slow-motion club classic you’ve never dared play out because who wants to listen to sub-100BPM bumpers after six pints and a line or three? No one. Except the Robin Gibbs of this world.
These are the people who understand that music’s an attempt to convey the otherwise unsayable, and sometimes the best way to convey thoughts previously so private that the thought of bringing them into the world cripple you, is to do it with a rain-soaked sadlad Italo disco record for people who don’t like discos.
