Songfacts®:

• This disco classic is quite economical in the lyric. The chorus simply repeats "fly, robin, fly" three times, with an ending of "up, up to the sky!" The song was written with very few lyrics because The Silver Convention were a German group and couldn't speak English. They couldn't memorize a page of lyrics in a language unfamiliar to them, so they limited this one to just a few words.
• "Fly, Robin, Fly" was written by the Hungarian composer Sylvester Levay and the song's producer, Michael Kunze, who is German (Kunze used the American-sounding pseudonym Stephan Prager). At first, the song was called "Run, Rabbit, Run." It started with a riff Levay had in his head one morning when walking. Kunze remembered it and suggested they use it for the Silver Convention album they were recording.
  
  Levay confessed: "I didn't know if it should go on the album. But Kunze was convinced it would be a hit. He said, 'I'm going to call this song 'Run, Rabbit, Run.' I wasn't so happy about it because of the Volkswagen Rabbit, but I didn't want to criticize him. The next morning, somebody up there must have heard my plea. I heard on Armed Forces Network a song, 'Run, Rabbit.' It was just a half-hour before the girls were to come in and sing. I was very happy. I said to Michael that I had just heard a song called 'Run, Rabbit' and in 30 seconds he said, 'O.K., let's do 'Fly, Robin, Fly.'"
• This song won the 1975 Grammy Award for Best R&B Instrumental Performance.
• Silver Convention had another hit the next year with "Get Up And Boogie (That's Right)," which went to #2 in the US. They represented Germany in the 1977 Eurovision Song Contest, where they finished eighth with the song "Telegram."
• This was the first #1 US hit with a species of bird in the title. "Rockin' Robin" - both the Bobby Day original and Michael Jackson cover - stalled at #2. The next bird song to reach the top was "When Doves Cry" by Prince in 1984. We're not counting "Disco Duck" because "duck" is not a species.
• There are only six unique words in this song (fly, robin, up, to, the sky), but among non-instrumental Hot 100 chart toppers in the disco era, there is one that's shorter: "The Hustle," a #1 hit for Van McCoy in 1975 (oh, do, it, the, hustle).