2000 Great Songs #1308: Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You

I have great affection for those late 60s Bee Gees albums, when they were trying to feel their way through Beatles-derived British Invasion pop and gentle psychedelia and more baroque pop experiments. One's enjoyment of them ultimately turns on what you think of the Bee Gees as vocalists--I'm kinda mixed, which is why we're seeing them make their first appearance here in the 1300s--but  the music is often lovely and fascinating (even apart from its curiosity value given the marked contrast from the later disco hits which made them a very different act).

Their most deliberately psychedelic track, and certainly their strangest, was "Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You," off their 1967 debut, Bee Gees' 1st. They pivot back and forth between unexpected Gregorian chants and gentle, trippy jangle, finally breaking out their trademark brotherly harmonies on the earworm chorus. (That chorus has such a distinctive melodic hook I'm pretty confident it was cribbed for the later "Superman" single by the Clique (popularized by R.E.M.)--check it out, see if I'm wrong here.) It's the sort of song that you'd imagine would've fit perfectly on countless compilations of late 60s British psych, presumably omitted because psych freaks are wary of admitting their love of the Bee Gees.

Barry Gibb live 2013:

Alice Donut cover:

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