PROFILE - BEE GEES: More than a song Bee Gees covers and collaborations

From the start of their career, the Bee Gees were more than just hitmakers in their own right, they were songwriters whose compositions were in high demand by their contemporaries.

Back in November 1964, long before they had even left Australia, top US night club act Wayne Newton recorded They'll Never Know, one of the earliest cover versions of a Barry Gibb song.

For Barry, the urge to compose had arrived at a very early age. "When I was about eight or nine years old, I got inspired by a song called Story Of My Life," he recounts, "which I later discovered, with great shock, was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. So, yeah, that kicked me off and I wrote a song called Turtle Dove which, before you ask, I no longer remember."

Not long after they arrived back in England in 1967, Bee Gees songs were being recorded by Status Quo, Billy J. Kramer, Gerry Marsden, P.P. Arnold, Vicky Leandros, The Sands, The Montanas, Tangerine Peel and others and, although none of them were significant hits, their prolific output served notice that the Bee Gees were here to stay.

Come the mid-Seventies, at the peak of their Saturday Night Fever era, the Bee Gees provided hits for Frankie Valli (Grease), Yvonne Elliman (If I Can't Have You), Samantha Sang (Emotion) and, of course, their non-band-member brother Andy Gibb (Shadow Dancing, I Just Want To Be Your Everything).

Asked to describe their songwriting process, producer Arif Mardin explained, "It's not like one brother goes into seclusion and comes out with a song. They write them together. In the beginning, their process is that they have nonsensical syllables to accommodate the melody, and then the lyrics come after that. They do the melody first."

In the Eighties they wrote Woman In Love for Barbra Streisand and followed through with the Streisand-Barry Gibb duet Guilty. Heartbreaker revived Dionne Warwick's career in 1983, the same year in which the Dolly Parton-Kenny Rogers duet, Islands In The Stream, transformed the Brothers Gibb into top country-music composers. Two years later, their Chain Reaction gave Diana Ross her first UK chart- topper since 1971.

"Their catalogue is so rich and diverse that many of their songs are in demand all the time," notes Universal Music Publishing Group executive vice president (international) Andrew Jenkins. "I was especially pleased this year to see Islands In The Stream give them number one singles in each of the last five decades, an amazing achievement for any body of work."

A whole new generation of pop stars discovered the Bee Gees in the Nineties, with Gibb songs providing number ones for Take That (How Deep Is Your Love), Boyzone (Words) and Steps (Tragedy).

"On behalf of the world of music," says PRS for Music chairman Ellis Rich, "we are honoured and delighted to congratulate the Bee Gees on 50 years of superb music making. They have written and composed some of the best songs you have ever heard and have provided inspiration to a generation of musicians."

And now, with the news that Barry and Robin Gibb are back together as the Bee Gees, there is good reason to be optimistic that the future will hold still more classic songs from the only artists ever to have written and produced six consecutive US number one smashes.

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