Profile - Bee Gees: Brothers in Arms

By Johnny Black

The list of the Bee Gees' musical achievements, not just as performers but as composers too, is almost as long as their rich career as the reunited Barry and Robin Gibb make a welcome return in their 50th anniversary year

By Johnny Black

On December 28, 1957, Manchester skiffle combo The Rattlesnakes first earned money from their ability to sing in harmony with a 10- minute slot at the Gaumont Cinema, Chorlton, singing covers of Everly Brothers' hits.

Fifty years on, they sing their own songs, their harmony vocal sound is arguably the most famous in the world and they are called the Bee Gees.

Their list of remarkable achievements seems endless, ranging from sales of more than 200m records, seven Grammy awards and 15 US number ones, to the fact that 6,000 cover versions of their songs have been recorded, and that they have been inducted to virtually every music-related hall of fame in existence.

Indeed it often seems that even the Bee Gees still have not quite come to grips with the magnitude of their own success. I was fortunate to be able to interview Maurice Gibb not long before his tragic death in 2003, and asked how he had felt when the band played to 56,000 people in Wembley Stadium in 1998. "That was one of the greatest moments of our lives," he recalled. "We were stood in this little room overlooking the back of Wembley Stadium. Barry looked at me and said, 'We've done it again. We've fooled them.' We really do feel like we've got away with it."

The recent release of the two-CD compilation The Ultimate Bee Gees marked the start of an ongoing celebration of the Gibbs' half century in music. The set includes Spicks And Specks (their first number one hit, Australia, January 1967), alongside major international hits from the Sixties (Massachusetts, To Love Somebody), the Seventies (Stayin' Alive, How Deep Is Your Love), and beyond.

As Tim Rice, an internationally-acclaimed songwriter himself, points out, it is a collection which "very few practitioners of popular music could match for quality, originality and emotion. It's the singing, the harmonies, the arrangements, the sound, the rivalry, the love, the intelligence, the determination but, above all, it's the songs".

Barry Gibb and his younger twin brothers Robin and Maurice grew up on the Isle Of Man and later in Manchester in a household where music was as vital as food and drink. Their mother, Barbara, was a singer, and their father, Hughie, ran a dance band. "All we heard around the house was 78s of the Glenn Miller Orchestra and The Mills Brothers," explained Maurice. "Dad loved their close-harmony singing, and made sure we learned it."

There was so little spare cash in the Gibb household that the boys, notably Barry and Robin, augmented their incomes with petty crime to such an extent that the local police suggested the family might consider emigrating to Australia, as an alternative to seeing their boys in jail.

After arriving in the land down under in September 1958, the boys shaped up and concentrated on music. They made swift progress from lounge and bar gigs to a support slot with Chubby Checker at Sydney Stadium and, in January 1963, a contract with Festival Records.

A string of singles made little impact but the Bee Gees remained ambitious. "We knew The Easybeats," recalls Barry Gibb. "They went to England and had a hit and we thought, 'Well, if they can have a hit so can we.'"

The entire family set sail for the homeland in January 1967. Just as they docked in Southampton, by a happy coincidence, their latest single, Spicks And Specks, reached number one in Australia. Within two weeks, they had attracted the attention of Robert Stigwood, then a managing director at NEMS, the company owned by The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein.

"Brian was on holiday," remembers Stigwood, "so I listened to a package of singles and demos their father had sent and was absolutely bowled over, not only by their voices and their harmonies, but by the quality of the songs they'd written."

Inviting them to his office, Stigwood signed them immediately and guided them through the Sixties and Seventies. "I don't ever remember Robert making a bad decision for us," says Barry. "Everything Robert's ever done is from instinct for what a hit single is."

Rather than being some distant money man, Stigwood was very much hands-on with the band. "One night we'd been to dinner at Roland Rennie's house, the president of Polydor," remembers Barry. "While we were there we wrote a song called Harry Brown. On our way home at 3.00am we stopped at Robert's, woke him up and sat him in his dressing gown in the lounge to hear the song. We respected what he was going to say and, to us, he was one of the band."

Their initial British success in 1967 with New York Mining Disaster 1941 led to international smashes including To Love Somebody, Massachusetts, Words and I've Gotta Get A Message To You. Disastrously, though, the quibbling siblings did not cope well with the pressures of fame. "It was like three different little worlds," Barry explains. "Robin and I were always competing to get the most attention as lead singers, and Maurice was in trouble with drinking problems."

Stigwood still vividly recalls how Barry Gibb phoned him at the Royal Albert Hall during the farewell performance of another of his bands, Cream. "He said, 'I thought I'd better let you know, that we're breaking up as well.'"

Blood being thicker than water, however, the brothers gradually overcame their differences, and scored their first American number one in 1971 with How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, only to lurch straight into another dry period that did not end until 1975, with the song Jive Talkin'. Making prominent use of synthesizers, the track was based on a percussive rhythm the band heard every night as their car wheels rattled the slats on an old wooden bridge in Miami, where they were recording.

When Atlantic Records managing director Ahmet Ertegun visited the studio with Stigwood, both men immediately recognised it as a great dance record, perfect for America's emerging disco culture. With renewed enthusiasm, the Bee Gees continued to experiment with synthesizers, and made another unexpected breakthrough when Barry encountered problems hitting the lowest notes in the melody of another new song, Nights On Broadway.

Producer Arif Mardin came up with the solution. "I said to Barry, 'Why don't you take it up an octave? I think we need more energy.'"

The result was Barry's first attempt at a falsetto vocal, and the creation of a brand new vocal blend for the Bee Gees which produced an astonishing seven US number one hits in the Seventies alone.

Stigwood played his part in this evolution, too, by placing their songs into a low-budget movie he was producing - Saturday Night Fever - about the fast-developing disco scene. The film's soundtrack went on to sell 15m copies, catapulting the Bee Gees to mega- stardom but also causing them some heart-searching.

"It became our albatross," Maurice told me. "Before the film, we were called blue-eyed soul but, after, we were the kings of disco. How Deep Is Your Love was an R&B ballad but when the film came out it was a disco ballad."

Irrespective of their reservations about being so closely identified with the disco craze, the Bee Gees never faltered creatively. The late Seventies saw them uniting with their younger brother Andy Gibb, to produce a run of solo successes that included another three consecutive US number ones. They also continued to deliver huge hits in their own right, including You Win Again and One in the Eighties, followed by For Whom The Bell Tolls and Alone in the Nineties.

The death in 1988 of Andy Gibb had devastated the trio, so it seemed a cruel twist of fate when Barry and Robin had to face the shocking and unexpected loss of Maurice from a heart attack in 2003. That tragedy halted their onward momentum in the new millennium, causing Barry to announce, when he and Robin were awarded their CBEs at Buckingham Palace, "We are not the Bee Gees now, in respect for Mo."

Time being the great healer, Barry and Robin have gradually come round to the realisation that Maurice would have wanted them to continue, so on February 18, 2006, the two remaining Brothers Gibb performed together again at a private fund-raising concert for the Diabetes Research Institute in Florida.

The pair have since been recording together at Middle Ear Studios, their Miami base, and live shows have not been ruled out. Now, in full ownership of their back catalogue, Barry and Robin are overseeing the digitally re-mastered reissue of their material, starting with Ultimate Bee Gees - The 50th Anniversary Collection, and following through next March with the four-CD set Mythology. Curated and produced by Barry and Robin, Mythology will also include material by Andy Gibb.

"This is now the Bee Gees' 50th anniversary," explains Barry. "And by the Bee Gees I mean all four brothers."

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