Writing and Inspiration
Barry and Robin Gibb wrote the song when they were sitting on a darkened staircase at Polydor Records following a power cut. The echo of the passing lift inspired them to imagine that they were trapped in a mine. The song recounts the story of a miner trapped in a cave-in. He is sharing a photo of his wife with a colleague ("Mr. Jones") while they hopelessly wait to be rescued. According to the liner notes for their box-set Tales from the Brothers Gibb (1990), this song was inspired by the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster in Wales. In the second and third verses, the lyrical lines get slower and slower, as if to indicate that life is about to end for the miners. According to Robin, there actually had also been a mining disaster in 1939, but not in 1941.
Read more about this topic: New York Mining Disaster 1941
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or inspiration:
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b.1927)
“For a painter, the Mecca of the world, for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris. Just look at it, no wonder so many artists have come here and called it home. Brother, if you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’s daughter.”
—Alan Jay Lerner (1918–1986)