Bee Gees – First of May

“First of May” is the Bee Gees pressing a flower between the pages of time—sweet, fragile, and still scented with the ache of first love.

If you want the hard coordinates right up front—because they tell you how quickly this song entered the public bloodstream—“First of May” was released as a single in the UK in January 1969 and in the U.S. in March 1969, drawn from the Bee Gees’ grand, baroque double album Odessa. In Britain, it entered the Official Singles Chart on 25 February 1969 at No. 33, and eventually peaked at No. 6, spending 11 weeks on the chart. In the United States, Billboard’s own chart history shows a Hot 100 debut dated 3/22/69, a peak of No. 37, and a run of 12 weeks, with the peak week dated 4/19/69. These aren’t just numbers—they’re proof that, even in a crowded late-’60s landscape, the Bee Gees could still stop radio listeners mid-thought with a ballad that sounded like memory itself.

And memory is exactly the song’s native language. Recorded in November 1968, “First of May” is credited to Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, with Barry Gibb taking the lead vocal—tender, almost weightless—set against Bill Shepherd’s orchestral arrangement. The melody moves as if it’s afraid to break the spell, and the lyric looks backward with that particular kind of melancholy we only earn later: the realization that youth doesn’t feel precious while you’re living it. It feels ordinary. It’s only afterward—when you’re older, when you’ve lost things without even noticing the exact day they left—that you understand how miraculous “ordinary” was.

The story behind the single is also, quietly, a story about fractures. The B-side was “Lamplight,” and that choice wasn’t neutral: accounts of the period note that choosing “First of May” over “Lamplight” helped intensify internal tensions, and Robin Gibb soon left the group (briefly) after the single’s release. It’s one of those bittersweet ironies the Bee Gees’ history is full of—a song about tenderness and innocence arriving at a moment when the band itself was anything but settled. Even the personnel backdrop shifted: it was the first Bee Gees single released after lead guitarist Vince Melouney departed.

That tension deepens the way the song lands. You can hear “First of May” as a postcard from childhood, but you can also hear it as a portrait of a group trying to hold itself together with harmony—three brothers making beauty while the ground underneath them trembles. There’s something profoundly moving about that: the idea that art sometimes arrives not when life is calm, but when life is most in need of calm.

The meaning of “First of May” is deceptively simple: it mourns lost first love and the passing of youthful certainty. Yet it does so without bitterness. It doesn’t spit at the past; it blesses it. The song’s genius is that it treats nostalgia not as decoration but as a form of truth—an admission that the heart keeps old seasons preserved inside it, and that certain dates become symbols because we need symbols to carry what’s too large to hold barehanded.

And time has repeatedly proven the song’s staying power. It resurfaced notably in 1971, when it was featured in the soundtrack to the British film Melody, letting a new audience discover its gentle ache. Decades later, it would be revived again and again in different contexts—because the feeling it names never really leaves us. We may stop talking about “first love,” but we never stop remembering the version of ourselves who believed in it so completely.

In the end, “First of May” isn’t just an early Bee Gees hit. It’s a small, beautifully made time machine: two minutes and forty-nine seconds of faded light, schoolyard innocence, and the first quiet lesson adulthood teaches—nothing stays, not even the sweetest days, so love them while they’re here.