Maurice Gibb - The Loner (1970)

Towards the end of the 60's, following the release of their three classic pop albums and the experimental 'Odessa', the Bee Gees broke up, after all three brothers decided that they wanted to release solo albums. Robin recorded some songs for his 'Sing Slowly Sisters' album, Barry did the same for his 'The Kids No Good', while Maurice's album was to be called 'The Loner'. The first song to be recorded was 'Railroad' which was also released as a single, and although it didn't fare that well, he carried on recording until he had enough material for an album. In the end none of the three albums were ever released, after Maurice and Barry reunited as The Bee Gees for the 'Cucumber Castle' album, with Robin also re-joining them later, but songs from each proposed record have leaked onto the net, and so it's just possible to piece together what the albums might have sounded like. For Maurice's album, the songs were scattered over a number of sites, and while some were easy to find, I'd almost given up ever tracking down the opening instrumental 'Journey To The Misty Mountains' until I stumbled upon it on one of the very last sites I tried, and discovered that it actually segues into the title track, which I hadn't realised from the other recordings of it that I'd found up to then. We have a rough track listing, and so I've managed to find nearly all the songs, apart from one instrumental, and by substituting two other songs from the same period, and adding one that he wrote for a 1970 stage musical starring Barbara Windsor, I've pieced together a 40 minute reconstruction of what the album could have sounded like. The cover doing the rounds on the bootleg version (no longer available) was awful, making his nose look massive, and showing way too many teeth, so I've used the sleeve of the single version of the title track, which is still not great, but much better than the other one. 

Track listing

01 Journey To The Misty Mountains (Instrumental) >
02 The Loner 
03 Please Lock Me Away 
04 I've Come Back
05 Soldier Johnny
06 She's The One You Love
07 Ping Pong
08 Railroad 
09 Laughin' Child
10 Something's Blowing 
11 Silly Little Girl
12 Insight
13 Danny
14 Till I Try
15 Touch And Understand Love
16 This Time

This is an upgraded version of the original post, with a slightly different track listing and better sound quality on some songs. 

Maurice Gibb - The Loner (1970) UPGRADE

I've been sent a rip of this complete album including bonus tracks, courtesy of TheLazenby, and so I now have the two missing instrumentals that I couldn't find earlier, and also some additional bonus tracks to flesh out the running time. 'Danny' and 'Till I Try' were both recorded in 1971 after Maurice announced that he'd been offered the chance to score the Richard Harris film 'Bloomfield'. However, the film's musical director Johnny Harris denied this, and said Maurice could submit one song, so he chose instead to re-record 'The Loner' as his contribution, and these two songs remained unreleased. I've now realised that I had the wrong version of 'Silly Little Girl', being the one which had been amalgamated with parts of 'Danny' by producer Stephen Morgan, and I've removed the track from the 'Sing A Rude Song' musical, as I've since discovered that even though Maurice sang on it, he didn't write it, so it didn't really belong here. Lastly, I've boosted the bass on a couple of the thinner sounding songs so that they better match the rest of the album, so all in all this is a major upgrade on my original post, and even if you've already grabbed it then it's worth upgrading to this version.

Track listing

01 Journey To The Misty Mountains (Instrumental) >

02 The Loner 

03 Please Lock Me Away 

04 I've Come Back

05 Soldier Johnny

06 She's The One You Love

07 Ping Pong

08 Railroad 

09 Laughin' Child

10 Something's Blowing 

11 Silly Little Girl

12 Insight
13 Danny
14 Till I Try

15 Touch And Understand Love

16 This Time