The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Always well-mannered and polite, Margaret made a courtesy call to Lesley to let someone know the reason why she wouldn’t be coming round to their house any more. When Robin learned of this he was furious and declared that he would forgive her one more time! This was the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Lesley was concerned, and she launched into a furious tirade against her younger brother, pointing out to him in no uncertain terms his need to change his attitude. Pig-headed, moody and insolent were just a few of the accusations levelled at the startled youngster, who was caught completely off guard by his sister’s aggressive reproach.

  If Lesley’s memory is accurate, it was another three months before a smile returned to Robin’s face and, of course, he never uttered Margaret’s name again. Instead, to Lesley’s regret, he became completely withdrawn in all his dealings with the fairer sex. Although he would accompany his sister to dances, he would never once take to the floor. Interested only in the music, he would declare that dancing was stupid. That attitude would change when he met his first real love, but that was some years and several thousand miles away. Before then, Maurice would also discover that making friends with girls was not without its difficulties.

  * * *

  On July 31, a small column in a Sydney newspaper revealed that there were plans for the boys to visit the USA in January, 1965, to coincide with an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sadly, it would be another few years before that particular ambition was realised.

  As they had already done so spectacularly elsewhere in the world, The Beatles had now made a considerable impact on Australian pop culture. “Col was always number one,” Barry explained, “then, all of a sudden, bang! The Beatles started happening. It changed our whole attitude towards show business. Col fell flat as a tack. Nothing happened to him after The Beatles arrived! We were in Tasmania when their record ‘Love Me Do’ was released. It never got a scrap of air play, but we loved it. The flip-side, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, did get lots of plays. We thought ‘The Beatles! What a stupid name!’ Stupid name or not, The Bee Gees were influenced by their Liverpudlian “cousins” as much as any other up-and-coming artists of the time.

  Robin took a pragmatic view. “Then we started our experimental stage because The Beatles were happening and we thought, ‘Let’s get some inspiration from this group that are doing so well overseas. It’s a British group, we’re British – living in Australia, surely we can do something so let’s experiment.’ ”

  Their father Hugh saw things from a different perspective. “When [my sons] started recording, they were singing in their own style. Then The Beatles began to hit, and we had trouble because the recording companies were saying, ‘Oh, they sound too much like The Beatles,’ and I said, ‘They’ve always sung like that.’ Bearing in mind that they come from thirty miles away from The Beatles, it’s a similar type of sound. It is rubbish to say that we copied The Beatles’ sound, it wasn’t their sound, it was an English sound that began with Tommy Steele and skiffle.”

  Barry agreed. “People were playing our records and The Beatles’ and found that we sounded very similar, so we were banned right off the air! If Australia gets someone good from overseas, they’d rather push their own artists out.”

  Whatever the case, the indisputable fact remains – that The Bee Gees were unashamed Beatles fans and still are.

  “The Beatles came to Australia, and that was a very important moment for us being a group,” Barry stated. “When they arrived in Melbourne, there were a million people in the city centre and we thought, ‘We gotta do this, if we got to England we could become like The Beatles.’ I think to this day, people not of our generation do not realise how huge The Beatles really were. Even people like Michael Jackson, I don’t think, have the same aura. Whatever they did to the world, they did it to all ages, they didn’t do it to one age.”

  “When The Beatles came on the scene it was like, that’s us, that’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Maurice enthused. “Our first record, the flip side was called ‘The Three Kisses Of Love’. We were going, ‘Kiss me once, oh yeah, baby.’ This was all pre-Beatles stuff and we were going, ‘Wow, it’s them … She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.’ They’re doing what we’re doing … and they were English to boot. Also, there was a mystery about them. The With The Beatles cover blew me away totally. This is what I would like to be like, the black polo necks, the half-shadowed faces, the moodiness, the mysteriousness, touchable but untouchable and Paul was my mentor. His bass playing was amazing and every single Beatles record, even now, I can play every bass line that Paul played and that’s how I learned bass from The Beatles’ records. We modelled ourselves on them, a lot of kids did, a lot of groups did, in those days.”

  The Beatles’ Australian tour followed the release of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ which had flown spectacularly to the top of all the local charts at the beginning of May. Ironically, by the time of their arrival in Melbourne on June 14, 1964, it had slipped in the ratings and the number one in most areas was ‘Poison Ivy’ by Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs. For their lead guitarist in particular, one Vince Melouney, there would be further opportunities to compete against ‘The Fab Four’ but on a bigger stage altogether.

  For The Bee Gees, however, the novelty of the flattering comparisons quickly began to wear off. Desperate for the group to create its own identity, a clearly irked Barry told Australian Cash Box music magazine, “Stop referring to us as ‘The Australian Beatles’, you can quote me on that,” which, of course, they did!

  “Everywhere we went,” Barry reflected some years later, “we saw notices saying we were ‘Australia’s Beatles’! There was only one DJ, called John Laws, who would stick up for us and play our records. He said that although we sounded ‘Beatley’, we had been there before The Beatles. But the public just didn’t want to know. We had a very bad time. Every show we did they shouted, ‘Get off Beatle imitators!’ We couldn’t wait to get back to England again. We thought, ‘If they’re going to slam us in our face, we’d rather get out.’ ”

  His brother “Morrie” was quick to support his remarks. “We have our own sound, and actually recorded our first single in January, 1963, long before The Beatles became famous.”

  The result of their experimentation was their fourth single, again under the supervision of producer Robert Iredale, released on August 17 under “The Bee Gees” banner. Worthy of comparison with ‘Please, Please Me’, ‘Claustrophobia’ has a fuller sound than previous releases due to the presence of The Delawares, a Sydney based band, comprising Bruce Davis (guitar), Leith Ryan (guitar), Bill Swindells (bass) and Laurie Wardman (drums).

  In those days the recording details could be decidedly casual. In this instance, the (uncredited) Delaware’s support came about after the Gibbs had seen the band play at a dance in Wollongong. The band would also support the Bee Gees on television shows like Saturday Date, In Melbourne Tonight, In Brisbane Tonight, Seventeeners and Sunnyside Show promoting the single. The Gibbs would return the favour the following year by providing two songs for the group, fronted by lead vocalist Dennis Williams. Maybe, all these years later, the lyrics sound a little bit corny “I get claustrophobia, ’cos there’s too many boys on your mind”. Bruce Davis recalls that Robin played the brief instrumental solo on “recorder,” actually a reeded instrument that looks like a recorder with a small keyboard. Maurice also makes his first instrumental appearance, playing rhythm guitar. The B-side, also with The Delawares and again with Maurice on rhythm guitar, was called ‘Could It Be’ and was probably the nearest thing to rock’n’roll they had thus far attempted.

  Yet again the record failed to sell in any appreciable numbers but hindsight is a wonderful thing and it is easy now to appreciate the reasons for its failure. Tony Brady confirmed that “selling” their songs to the radio programmers was difficult because their material was too close to The Beatles and so airplay was difficult to get; an attitude he describes as “stupid”.

  Another theory is th
at when on the road, the group was performing to a predominantly adult audience and delivered a polished cabaret act. Meanwhile their record company wanted to promote them as a teenage band while TV shows viewed them as a young Mills Brothers. Bandstand, the last bastion of conservatism in Australian music, did more than anyone to prolong this unwanted image, even requiring their studio audiences to wear coats and ties. The brothers were perhaps slightly guilty of trying to be all things to all people and ended up suffering from the inevitable consequence of failing to completely please any. Barry now accepts the reasons for their lack of chart success despite his immense frustration at the time. “I have to say that there was a lack of interest in the group,” he conceded. “In those days kids did not buy kid’s records, this was definitely pre-Osmonds. We were too young for the teen market … so we had to have an older act and sing older songs.”

  Sometimes, however, they were their own worst enemy. “It was dreadfully difficult getting them on television for a while because they were considered cheeky young upstarts,” revealed Kevin Jacobsen in a slightly more tactful manner than Nancy Knudsen. “It was almost impossible to get Bandstand to take them. Robin was such an extrovert, he frightened people.”

  Both Bandstand and The Tonight Show, another show that Kevin had to struggle with, were mainstream programmes and as such they portrayed The Bee Gees in a light that was unlikely to impress the audience that Festival targeted for their records. They needed something, or someone, to get them out of a rut. Festival thought they had the answer and sent them back into the studio to record their fifth single.

  The problem, Festival wrongly concluded, was with the songs themselves so, even while Barry’s own work was being successfully marketed to other artists, it was decided that the group should record material written for the American market. The ‘plug’ side was ‘Turn Around Look At Me’, a 1961 Jerry Capehart ballad recorded by Glen Campbell (who was possibly involved in the writing process too) although it was The Vogues who first charted with it in 1967. Capehart has written numerous country-rock hits, perhaps the best known being ‘Summertime Blues’ which he co-wrote with (and for) Eddie Cochran. Festival spared no expense for the Gibb’s return to the studio, hiring not just an orchestra but also a choir. The flip side was the theme tune to an American television show called The Travels Of Jaimie McPheeters (Winn Harline) which had run for only six months between September, 1963 until March, 1964. Kurt Russell starred in the title role and the cast list not only included Charles Bronson, but also Alan, Jay, Merrill and Wayne Osmond, who had sung the original version. The series was based on the novel by Robert Lewis Taylor, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959.

  Again, the group’s lead singer was pushed into the spotlight and the new single by “Barry Gibb & The Bee Gees” found its way into record shops on October 12.

  On this occasion, ‘Theme From The Travels Of Jamie McPheeters’ (note the minor change to the Christian name) appears to have been recorded at a different session from its companion. All three brothers share the same theory about the reason why.

  “We weren’t what you might call priority,” Barry said. “In those days it was Normie Rowe or it was Ray Brown & The Whispers. Normie Rowe was the king of Australian pop and Johnny O’Keefe was the king before him.

  “It was like another world over there. There are big stars in Australia but they remain inside Australian record boundaries. We didn’t get much time in the studio. In fact, being an English group in Australia wasn’t the thing to be which is the weirdest thing. Even when The Beatles came up, still being an English group in Australia didn’t do us any good at all. They tend to think of us as pommies and all that business and you become second down the line as far as favours, or as far as help, or as far as getting a break anywhere [goes].”

  Picking up on the studio theme, Maurice continued, remembering one time in particular. “We’d done the back track and the [engineer] says, ‘Hurry up, the pub opens in six minutes – you’ve got the time to do the vocal in six minutes and that’s it!’ In those days, [the record company] paid for the studios, they paid for the musicians and if you wanted strings on it, they paid for it. And they would say, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Khrushchev?’ and they wouldn’t give you the strings although it’s obviously the opposite in England. We never knew that but, in Australia, when the pub is opening and one’s got to catch a train back to somewhere outside Sydney and he had to leave and six minutes we had. We did the vocal in six minutes and double tracked it!”

  Robin echoed his brothers’ sentiments. “I don’t think there was anybody more frustrated. We were kids and part of it was the fault of the record company. We all blame the record company but part of it was in so much as the studio that we recorded at was at the label.

  “We’d ring up and say, ‘We’d like to make our new record next week – how much time can we have?’ and, if you didn’t have a hit record or anything, then you’d get about an hour. An hour! Believe it or not, we’d cut a record in an hour. It’s atrocious but we did and this was the way things were in Australia and, if we didn’t do so well there, then this was one of the reasons.”

  Barry conceded though that it wasn’t an easy situation for the label either, “Festival was under the same situation we were. We did not appeal to kids because we were kids and it was hard for the people at Festival to sell us.” One solution was to sell themselves, so they embarked on a tour of Adelaide and Brisbane in an attempt to broaden their appeal. This didn’t entirely work either. “The Australians have no great love for the English and that made things even more difficult,” Barry continued. “To a few we were just precocious kids who ought to be playing with toys, but we kept hard at it.” As he told FAB 208 magazine in 1968, “It isn’t money that keeps us going even now, it’s the same drive to be successful.”

  They could always rely on their mother for reassurance, as Barbara never doubted her sons’ ability or determination for a minute. “I always knew, given the opportunity, that they would be world stars. I always knew that without hesitation.”

  Now relocated to Middle Cove, just to the north of Lane Cove, Hugh and Barbara became grandparents for the first time when, on September 29, 1964, Lesley (19) gave birth to Bernice Barbara Gibb. Only six years younger than her uncle Andy, the two became inseparable, and it was therefore hardly surprising that people often assumed that Beri was Andy’s sister, especially when he referred to her as such. Indeed, Hugh and Barbara adopted her and raised her as if she were their own daughter, a sensible and practical decision under the circumstances. It relieved Lesley of the pressures of motherhood at a time when she was least equipped to handle them, while simultaneously offering her daughter a loving family environment. In time, Lesley would go on to raise more children than her parents or any of her brothers, an achievement in itself.

  As the year drew to a close, Barry issued a statement on behalf of Robin, Maurice and himself. “I’d like to wish you all a very happy Christmas and New Year. We’ve had a gas year, and we certainly hope you have too. We hope the year ahead is going to be marvellous and want to thank the fans for having made this one such an exciting time for us. Christmas cheer to everyone.”

  The message expressed a mood of optimism and rightly so. They had achieved a great deal in the six years that had elapsed since they first set foot on Australian soil, and the future looked rosy.

  5

  BIG CHANCE

  THE NOMADIC GIBB family began 1965 at yet another new address, this time in Castlecrag, a suburb just north of Sydney. The three brothers also the released their sixth single. For this they had teamed up with Trevor Gordon Grunnill, a friend from their early days in Brisbane.

  “I first met The Bee Gees [a couple of years] after I emigrated to Australia with my parents in 1961,” says Trevor. “They’d just made their first record … and the main thing that struck me was how small they were! They were about 14 and I was 13, but Maurice and Robin were even tinier than me! We were both sort of
novelty acts as we were so young and used to meet on the Johnny O’Keefe Show, Australia’s Top of the Pops. I got very friendly with them and used to visit their house. Maurice was a fanatic for home-made magic and spent hours showing me all his new tricks.

  “Also, we were all mad keen on making home-movies in which we all starred with a tiny girl singer called Little Pattie.”

  The home-movies in which Pattie appeared were actually more than a hobby … the brothers even went so far as to form an 8 mm film company with Trevor, though nothing would come of this particular venture.

  Even at such a tender age, Trevor had demonstrated his precociousness by landing a job as a childrens’ TV show host in Brisbane and The Bee Gees had appeared on his show when they were resident there. When making their own special guest appearances on the programme and others like it, the brothers formed friendships with other budding young performers such as Colin Stead, April Byron, Jon Blanchfield and Bryan Davies, all of whom would have further involvement with the Gibbs in years to come.

  Released under the guise of “Trevor Gordon and The Bee Gees,” ‘House Without Windows’ was of a slightly different style than previous Bee Gees releases. While the famous Gibb harmonies are present, they certainly weren’t being used to their full advantage. Gordon had a nice, if not terribly distinctive, voice and carried the song well.

  The B-side ‘And I’ll Be Happy’, was one of those curious but interesting Barry Gibb songs which has no big commercial hook with it but throws in the title almost as an ongoing summary of his (the singer’s) feelings. It sounds very much like a Cliff Richard type ballad of the late Fifties. It’s a very pretty song that is only dated somewhat by lyrics such as “happy boy” and “lovely girl”.

  Both sides featured four vocals instead of the usual three and this was the only occasion during the Australian portion of their career that the group would share performing credits with someone else on record, despite there being many other instances of collaboration during this period.