Woman in Love
Babs and the Bee Gees craft a hit
This song has been in my head on and off for weeks now and I don’t know why. So let’s talk about it.
I wasn’t aware of this collaboration until I watched the Bee Gees documentary How Can You Mend A Broken Heart and Barry Gibb talked about this period. The disco backlash had begun and they were the primary target. The end of the tour for their album Spirits Having Flown featured bomb threats after the famous Disco Demolition Night. Radio stations were now refusing to play them. The Bee Gees train just stopped and they were at a loss.
Then Barbra Streisand called him and asked him to write some songs for her. The idea terrified him, so he called his brothers. With Bee Gees no longer being viable, they decided to reinvent themselves as songwriters and in Barry Gibb’s case, producer. This collaboration became Streisand’s biggest album, Guilty. This song was its biggest hit, travelling around the world, and her last #1.
The lead guitar is famed Muscle Shoals1 player Pete Carr. The drum loop was the same as for the Bee Gees hit Stayin' Alive, “just slowed way down and EQ'd radically”.2 It’s credited to Bernard Lupe, the same “person” who got credit on Stayin' Alive. Yes, he doesn’t exist. You can hear the brothers Gibb doing backup. It was the first single off the album and was for 2 Grammys at the 1981 Grammy Awards but didn’t win.3
The Gibb brothers wrote a bunch of tracks for Babs and recorded demos of them, with Barry singing them in falsetto so she could hear where her voice would be. And thanks to the passage of time, the demos were released, so enjoy hearing his distinctive voice doing the song. It’s scary how high he gets.
As for the official video, it’s made up of clips from A Star is Born, which she did with Kris Kristofferson, and apparently some of her other 70s films which I couldn’t identify. The video director’s name in IMDB is listed as Frank Pierson, who directed that film but whether or not he was actively involved in the video is pretty unclear. I’m guessing an editor just went to town on every sexy scene she had filmed to that point.
Enjoy your song of the day!
Highly recommend the namesake documentary. If you can’t find a legit copy, there’s a bootleg on YouTube.
According to Albhy Galuten, a member of the production team in this 2020 interview.
Christopher Cross' Sailing won Record of the Year and Bette Midler's The Rose won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. What a change the next year would bring.
Great selection! I've always been impressed how, after the backlash, Barry Gibb transitioned into writing and producing for other people with such ease. People might've been rebelling against "disco," but they clearly still loved the Bee Gees sound. And if Gibb's only successes had been the hits he wrote in the 80s, he still would've had an impressive career.
Great song! I'd never heard that demo before! Glad it's never been "officially" released... Yes, that Bee Gees documentary is a must see.