The year is 1965. The global landscape of pop music is shaking itself free of the early-decade innocence, preparing for the psychedelic explosion just around the corner. But thousands of miles away, in a Sydney studio, three brothers—Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb—are still honing their craft in relative isolation. They are masters in training, already prodigious songwriters, yet their fame remains largely confined to the Australian charts. Their sound is raw, bright, and utterly distinctive.
If you know the Bee Gees, you likely picture the grand orchestral melodrama of the late sixties, or the shimmering, white-suit disco of the seventies. That’s the high-definition narrative. But to understand the true core of their artistry, you must rewind past the soaring falsetto and the string arrangements, back to the lo-fi, two-track world of their Australian recordings. It is here, nestled on the B-side of the single “Wine and Women,” that we find “Follow the Wind”—a short, deceptively simple piece of music that offers a crucial insight into the foundation of the Gibb legacy.
The track was included on their debut album, The Bee Gees Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs, released in Australia in November 1965. Its placement is significant. It stands as a testament to the sheer volume of quality material Barry Gibb was composing at the time. This was before they stormed the UK with “New York Mining Disaster 1941” and signed with Robert Stigwood, back when their primary producer was Bill Shepherd, who, alongside local engineers, helped shape their initial sound at Festival Studio.
The Sound of Promise: Intimacy and Economy
The sonic texture of “Follow the Wind” is an exercise in economy. It runs just over two minutes, yet it feels complete, contained, and infinitely melancholic. The arrangement is sparse, built around the essential rock-and-roll architecture of the era, but filtered through a folk sensibility. There is a tangible warmth to the recording—a slight saturation, a close mic placement that makes the listener feel like a fourth brother in the small studio booth.
The rhythmic backbone is provided by a simple, lightly brushed drum kit and an unfussy, propulsive bassline. Above this sits the primary acoustic guitar—likely played by Barry Gibb himself—laying down a strumming pattern that is both steady and slightly hurried, driving the song’s inherent restlessness. There are reported uncertainties regarding some session roles for these early tracks, but many sources note that a friend, Trevor Gordon, played the lead guitar on the single’s A and B sides, delivering a bright, clean timbre.
It is the dual lead vocal, shared between Barry and Robin, that immediately defines this era. Barry’s voice is clear, slightly husky, navigating the lower register with a sense of grounded narrative. Robin’s higher, more trembling lead cuts through like a premonition of his own dramatic style. The harmonies, of course, are the inimitable, genetically engineered Gibb blend—not yet the dense, multitracked stacks of their later work, but tight, immediate, and perfectly locked. They sing with an earnest clarity that bypasses any need for instrumental clutter.
The Melancholy Mapmaker
Lyrically, “Follow the Wind” is a quintessential early Gibb composition: a metaphor-driven narrative of loss, movement, and emotional submission. The wind acts as the irresistible force of fate or change, sweeping the protagonist along: “The lonely days just follow the wind / And when the storm breaks out / You’ll find me back again.” It’s an elegant, almost fatalistic expression of powerlessness in the face of love’s inevitable currents.
The instrumentation directly services this theme of movement and introspection. Listen closely for the piano: its inclusion is subtle, a momentary flourish or a gently sustaining chord that adds a touch of wistful texture in the background, a soft light in the periphery of the folk-rock structure. This piece of music is a blueprint for the dramatic tension they would perfect later—the way their harmonies suggest both conflict and complete unity, all within the constraints of a simple pop structure.
The song’s dynamics are deliberately restrained. The volume never truly swells to a crescendo; the tension is held primarily in the interplay of the two voices. For a modern listener accustomed to compressed loudness, this recording offers a fascinating study in space and air. Listening to this on quality premium audio equipment reveals the delicate balance—the separation of the voices, the reverb decay on the snare drum, the metallic clarity of the acoustic guitar strings. It’s a humble recording that demands and rewards attentive listening.
“The true measure of a great songwriter is not the scale of their arrangement, but the clarity of their idea at its simplest form.”
It’s easy to dismiss these Australian tracks as mere juvenilia, the quaint beginnings before the ‘real’ career started. Yet, it is within these recordings that we find the emotional honesty that underpinned their greatest hits. The vulnerability here is not manufactured; it is the sound of three young men singing the truth of a brilliant, restless writer. The song contains none of the baroque embellishments of Horizontal or the sleek production of Main Course. It is simply melody, harmony, and a heartfelt lyric, perfectly balanced. This simplicity is its enduring strength, a core quality that survived every genre transformation.
The Enduring Echo
Think of this song not as a footnote, but as a seed. When you stream the glossy perfection of a late-seventies track through your music streaming subscription, remember the dry, immediate sound of “Follow the Wind.” It is a vital chapter in the legend—the moment the brothers learned how to harness a simple melody and inject it with universal drama. It’s a reminder that their decades of pop dominance were built not on studio trickery, but on the raw, undeniable force of their intertwined voices and a young man’s gift for melancholy poetry.
This is the sound of the wind picking up, just before it becomes a gale force. It is the sound of an artist finding his signature, one perfect, two-minute folk-pop gem at a time. Go back and listen to the B-sides; you’ll find the origins of everything.
Listening Recommendations (For Fans of Early Folk-Pop and Melancholic Harmony)
- The Hollies – “Bus Stop” (1966): Similar blend of folk-pop melody, tight harmonies, and a slightly melancholic, narrative lyric.
- The Zombies – “A Rose for Emily” (1968): Shares the wistful, piano-laced ballad mood and a focus on an intimate, poetic story.
- Simon & Garfunkel – “Leaves That Are Green” (1966): A direct parallel in the use of acoustic guitar and layered, earnest vocals to convey existential drift.
- Chad & Jeremy – “A Summer Song” (1964): Exemplifies the gentle, harmony-forward British Invasion sound that influenced the early Bee Gees’ softer material.
- The Easybeats – “She’s So Fine” (1965): Another Australian contemporary that captures the energetic, immediate recording style of Festival Studios in that era.