It begins with a plea so plain it barely sounds like a song at all: there is a light, and it never shines on the singer, and he spends his life just trying to find someone to love. When the Bee Gees released “To Love Somebody” in the summer of 1967, it was not the sound anyone expected from three brothers who had just arrived from Australia trailing a Beatles comparison. It was slower, heavier, and more grown-up than their first international hit, a ballad built on gospel feeling and a voice that sounded as if it had already been disappointed too many times. And behind it lay one of the strangest stories in pop: a song written for a singer who never got to sing it, inspired by a man who was not the singer at all, that became, against all of that, one of the most covered songs of the century. The story of “To Love Somebody” is the story of a song that kept missing its intended destination and arriving, beautifully, somewhere else.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where the Bee Gees stood in 1967. They were not newcomers, exactly, and they were not yet stars. Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb had been singing together since childhood on the Isle of Man and in Manchester, then spent years in Australia building a career single by single until “Spicks and Specks” gave them their first real Australian hit. In January 1967 they returned to Britain, where producer Robert Stigwood took them on and began promoting them to a worldwide audience with a bold slogan: “The Most Significant New Talent of 1967.” Their first international single, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” was sent to radio DJs with a blank white label carrying only the song title, and many DJs, hearing its harmonies and its mystery, assumed it was a new Beatles record and played it heavily. It climbed into the Top 20 in Britain and America. The comparison was a gift and a trap at once: it got the Bee Gees heard, but it also made them sound like an imitation of someone else. What they needed next was a song that sounded like nobody but themselves. “To Love Somebody” was that song, even though it was not written for them at all.
The song began, by the brothers’ own accounts, in New York, in the spring of 1967, with a meeting arranged by Stigwood. The manager wanted Barry and Robin to write a soulful ballad in the style of Sam & Dave or the Rascals for Otis Redding, the great Stax soul singer, and he set up a meeting between Barry and Redding at the Plaza hotel. Robin later recalled it simply: Redding said he loved the brothers’ material and asked whether Barry would write him a song. Barry, who was visiting New York for the first time and staying at the Waldorf Astoria, has told the story with a songwriter’s sense of drama: after talking with Redding for half an hour, he went downstairs, wrote the song that same night, and brought it back to offer to him. It was, in that telling, an act of instant devotion, a young writer hearing a voice he idolised and answering it on the spot.
There is, however, a second telling, and it is the one that makes the song stranger and more moving. Years later, in a 2001 interview with Mojo magazine, Barry said plainly that the song was, in his heart, written for Stigwood himself. “It was for Robert,” he said. “I say that unabashedly. He asked me to write a song for him, personally. It was written in New York and played to Otis but, personally, it was for Robert. He meant a great deal to me.” Stigwood was the man who had believed in the brothers when the world had not, who had brought them back from Australia and staked his reputation on them, and Barry’s admiration for him — for his abilities, his gifts, his faith — poured into a lyric about loving someone who does not know what it is to be loved by you. The two stories do not cancel each other out. Redding was the voice the song was written toward; Stigwood was the feeling it was written from. A song about unreturned love turned out to have been written, in both directions, out of gratitude.
The recording captured that doubleness perfectly. The Bee Gees cut “To Love Somebody” at IBC Studios in London in April 1967, alongside “Gilbert Green” and “End of My Song,” with Stigwood producing and Ossie Byrne co-producing, and Bill Shepherd arranging the orchestral parts. Barry sang the lead, and his vocal is the record’s centre of gravity: not the falsetto that would later define the disco years, but a lower, rougher, almost pleading voice, pushing against a swelling arrangement of strings and brass that sounds like a soul record trying to break out of a pop song. Robin and Maurice’s harmonies gather around him like a choir behind a preacher. The arrangement honours the soul model Stigwood had asked for — the Sam & Dave grit, the Rascals’ blue-eyed urgency — but it never quite becomes an imitation, because Barry’s voice will not let it. He sounds, from the first line, like a man who has already accepted that his love may never be returned, and is singing anyway. That is why the song works: it is not a performance of heartbreak. It is heartbreak, stated plainly, over three minutes.
Released as the second single from the group’s international debut album, Bee Gees’ 1st, in mid-June 1967, the single behaved in a way that told its own story about where the song belonged. In America it reached number 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, with number 24 on the Cash Box chart and number 18 in Record World, and it went higher still elsewhere: number 6 in Australia, number 8 in Belgium, number 9 in Canada, number 10 in South Africa, number 13 in the Netherlands and number 19 in West Germany. In Britain, though, it stalled at number 41, failing to make the Top 40 at all. Barry later offered his own explanation, saying that the song was a soul number, that Americans loved it, but that it was not right for Britain at the time. The parent album, Bee Gees’ 1st, released in July 1967, did better on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching number 7 in America and number 8 in Britain, and it confirmed the brothers as far more than a Beatles echo. But the single’s uneven fortunes were a hint of what would follow: “To Love Somebody” would not live or die by its own chart peak. It would live by other people’s voices.
The saddest part of the story came first. Otis Redding never recorded the song. He died in a plane crash on December 10, 1967, on his way to a show in Madison, Wisconsin, before he had a chance to cut the ballad the Gibb brothers had written with his voice in mind. The song he never sang therefore became, by default, the Bee Gees’ own — and then, over the following years, everybody else’s. It became one of the most covered songs of its era, a standard in the truest sense: a song sturdy enough that almost any singer could find themselves inside it. The Animals cut a version that became a signature for them. The Flying Burrito Brothers, Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart, Bonnie Tyler, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, Jimmy Somerville and Michael Bolton all recorded it, and each found something different in the same three minutes: a country lament, a rock shout, a pop ballad, a soul confession.
No cover mattered more than Nina Simone’s. She recorded “To Love Somebody” for her 1969 album of the same name, and her version became her second British hit single after “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life,” reaching number 5 in the United Kingdom in 1969, with a Top 10 placing in the Netherlands as well. Simone slowed the song down and made it heavier, turning Barry’s plea into something darker and more regal: where the Bee Gees had sounded like young men begging to be noticed, Simone sounded like a woman who had already decided what her love was worth and was daring the world to meet it. Her version proved what the song had always contained — that its lyric, written for a man who admired another man and a singer who never lived to sing it, could hold almost any kind of love, returned or not, and still sound true. It is fitting, in a way, that the song’s greatest second life came from a singer as uncompromising as Simone. She heard, in a ballad written by three brothers from Manchester via Australia, a feeling she recognised as her own.
The song has never really left the repertoire since. In 1977 Narvel Felts took it onto the American country chart; in 1979 Hank Williams Jr. did the same. Jimmy Somerville’s 1990 synth-pop version became a global hit, reaching the Top 10 in several countries, and Michael Bolton’s 1992 version reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Each generation has found a new way to sing a song about the simplest and hardest of human wishes: to be loved back. That is the measure of what Barry and Robin wrote in New York in 1967. They set out to write a soul song for Otis Redding and ended up writing a song that belonged to no one singer and therefore to everyone — a ballad so plainly built, its melody so direct and its lyric so free of fashion, that it could survive disco, punk, synth-pop and every other change in taste and still sound, on first hearing, like it was written yesterday.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to Barry Gibb himself. Asked late in life to name the one song he would choose out of all the songs he had written — a catalogue that includes some of the biggest hits in pop history — he chose “To Love Somebody.” It is an understandable choice. The song contains, in miniature, everything that made the Bee Gees great: the harmonies, the melody, the willingness to be vulnerable in public, and the strange, generous accident at its heart, that a song written out of admiration for a manager and aimed at a soul legend became, instead, a gift to every singer who has ever felt unseen. Redding never sang it, and in a sense that is the point. The song was never really about the singer it was written for. It was about the feeling that made someone want to write it in the first place: the knowledge that there are people in this world who do not know what it is to be loved by you, and the hope, sung anyway, that one day they might.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment Barry’s voice rises over the strings. It is the sound of a song that missed its first singer and found, instead, a thousand others.