Bee Gees-How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

John, here's what I found:

The 78 version has Andy Gibb singing the first verse.
The CD version has Maurice Gibb singing the first verse.

Just kidding! Perhaps you'll want to post that to that "other" forum just for grins. ;)

OK, seriously, here's what I did find: I took the track from the stereo vinyl Trafalgar LP, both sides of the stereo/mono DJ 45 and the mono commercial 45, then pasted the first lines together, one after the other. It sounded like the same vocal to me on all four sources.

To confirm that, I summed the stereo Trafalgar LP dub to mono, muted one channel, then pasted the same line from the mono commercial 45 to match it on the other channel. The vocal is identical. When I summed the channels to mono, the phase cancellation revealed that the vocals were identical.

John, that post on the other forum originally stated:

The single version has Barry Gibb singing the first verse.
The album version has Robin Gibb singing the first verse
The alternate version with the Barry Gibb vocal on the first verse was released in error on early British pressings of the CD The Record

It would appear that the original poster made an erroneous connection between the U.K. goof and the U.S. 45.