Odessa

Odessa was the sixth Bee Gees studio album and their only double album of original music. It was meant to be a concept album about the loss of a fictional ship in 1899, and its working titles were An American Opera and then Masterpeace. The first song recorded was I Laugh in Your Face, on 12 July 1968. After eight songs Vince Melouney left the group amicably, wanting to play more blues. The band spent a week at Atlantic Studios in New York, and Robin missed those sessions. Bill Shepherd arranged and conducted the orchestral tracks, and First of May was the last Bee Gees band session for the album. Shepherd then recorded the instrumentals Seven Seas Symphony, With All Nations and The British Opera.

The record came out in a red flocked cover with gold lettering and a gatefold showing people leaving a ship in a lifeboat. There were no photographs of the group, and every song was credited to B, R and M Gibb. The design was dropped because of its high cost and because workers had allergic reactions to the flocking during assembly. The single that split the brothers was chosen from the album: Robin's Lamplight lost out to Barry's First of May, and Robin left in early 1969. Barry said later that they never really finished the album and that the recording took three or four months, against one month for Bee Gees' 1st.

Reception and reissues

The album was not well received on release, though it reached the UK top ten and the US top 20. Maurice said that a lot of people regard it as "our Sgt. Pepper" but that, to the group, it was not the best album they made. Reviewing the 2009 reissue for Pitchfork, Bob Stanley called it "a feast that's hard to fault for ambition but too rich and occasionally too stodgy to take in one sitting". He described the title track as nearly eight minutes long, in the form of a letter from a shipwrecked sailor to his sweetheart, about the sinking of the fictitious ship Veronica on Valentine's Day, 1899.

A single-disc edition appeared on RSO in 1976. On 13 January 2009 Reprise and Rhino released a three-disc deluxe edition, with the album in stereo and mono and a third disc, Sketches for Odessa, of demos and unreleased tracks including Nobody's Someone and Pity. The album is included in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.