The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  As impressed as Roland Rennie had been by Barry Gibb’s presence, it was clear to him that the young Gibb was very inexperienced when it came to business acumen. He had his own thoughts on how best to promote the interests of not only his company, but also The Bee Gees.

  Alan Bates provided the details. “Well, what happened is that Roland decided to give The Bee Gees to Robert Stigwood. Roland knew Stigwood from his EMI days, and Stigwood had actually gone bankrupt either once or twice, and there was a certain amount of eyebrow-raising when it was suggested that Stigwood, who at that time was down and out, should be brought into the picture. But Roland was insistent because he thought that Stigwood was the right guy to break them, and so that is what happened. Roland actually gave The Bee Gees to Stigwood.”

  “[The group] needed some management,” Roland Rennie resumed, “so then I got hold of Robert, who I’d worked with in my EMI days. He had already heard about them and said, ‘I know something about this,’ so I left him to take things on.”

  * * *

  “So at about half ten in the morning, the phone rang again,” Hugh told Record World, “and the boys were sitting on the stairs saying, ‘Who is it, Dad?’ So I get on the phone and he says, ‘Good morning’ – you know the way Stiggy speaks – he said, ‘I’m Robert Stigwood, Brian Epstein’s partner.’ The boys were saying, ‘Who is it, who is it?’ and I told them, and they started grinning all over their faces.

  “He said, ‘I’m very interested, could you come up and see me?’ I said, ‘Sure, okay, would you like to see the boys?’ and he said, ‘Bring them along by all means’ and that’s how it started …”

  It was an auspicious start to their life in London. While Brian Epstein had his Beatles, Robert Stigwood was still searching for a group he could mould in the same way when the parcel arrived from Australia.

  “We sent all our records which we made in Australia, all the LPs, acetates of new songs, tapes of new songs, all to the Epstein agency,” Maurice recalled. “We sent them all to Brian Epstein. Robert was the managing director of NEMS, Brian Epstein’s company. Brian and he had a few drinks one night and started to play all the tapes and things they had received from all over the place and ours came up and Robert saw something in the songs and thought ‘these guys are good.’ ”

  Maurice exaggerates the amount of material shipped to NEMS as Hugh had actually sent only two discs, the Spicks And Specks album and an acetate with additional songs including some The Bee Gees never released, such as ‘Mrs Gillespie’s Refrigerator’, ‘Deeply, Deeply Me’ and an early version of ‘Gilbert Green’.

  Along with the parcel, which arrived at NEMS on December 3, was a letter saying that the group wrote all their own songs. The letter, dated November 25 and signed Hugh L. Gibb, began:

  This is just a preliminary letter to advise you of the arrival in London of a young vocal group, who, having reached the top of their field in this country, are returning home to the U.K. to further their career. They are the “Bee Gees,” who consist of three brothers, Barry Gibb, aged 19 and twins Robin and Maurice, aged 16. I am writing to you on the suggestion of Mr. Harry M. Miller of Sydney, who feels you are the best person to look after the interests of this talented young group.

  The boys migrated from Manchester as schoolboys and made their TV début in March 1960 and have been in the business ever since. Although still youngsters, the boys have had an enormous amount of experience in all facets of show business; TV, recording, pantomime, hotel and club work, etc. Naturally, their records have been aimed at the teenage market and at the time of writing, they have a hit record, ‘Spicks And Specks’, which has just reached the number three position in every state in Australia. We quite realise that this does not mean very much overseas, but considering the enormous size of Australia, this is considered quite a feat here.

  Another side to this talented group is the fact that all their records, plus three albums and several EPs, have all been written by themselves. The eldest boy, Barry, is acknowledged to be the top songwriter in this country. Practically every ‘name’, top recording artist here, has recorded his material. In addition, Barry cracked the American market by submitting six numbers and then having two recorded, one by Wayne Newton and one by Jimmy Boyd.

  Hugh went on to mention Barry’s 5KA composer award and explained that they had unreleased material on the acetate and ‘about another 20 numbers’ besides. In reality, only two albums and the same number of EPs had actually been released. To be fair, there was an album’s worth of material in the can, and Turn Around, Look At Us was issued by Festival in late 1967, after Spicks And Specks had gone out of print. Immediately following the boys’ departure, Spin had also rush-released a Spicks And Specks EP which included three other tracks from the album: ‘Jingle Jangle’, ‘Tint Of Blue’ and ‘Where Are You’.

  Stigwood was intrigued enough to listen to the material that Hugh had sent. The first song he remembers hearing was ‘Jingle Jangle’. “I heard it and was astounded,” he recalled. “It was some of the best harmony singing and composing I had ever heard. I was absolutely knocked out with their writing. I thought it was sensational … It was pointed out to me that the boys had been barely sixteen years old when the songs had been written. So I figured that if boys of that age had been able to turn out material of that calibre, they must have immense potential. They were probably the best new writers to emerge since Lennon & McCartney …

  “After they arrived [in England] I had a meeting with them and offered them a deal for recording, management and publishing. They were incredibly amusing. Often when people are just starting up in the business they’re fairly nervous when they meet managers. I was amazed at their relaxation; they were polite, but just totally relaxed, cracking lots of gags. I thought with their harmony singing, that natural quality that you only get with brothers really, and with their writing ability, it would be very difficult for them to go wrong.”

  The first person they met at NEMS was a 20-year-old receptionist named Molly Hullis. A small brunette, Molly was born February 16, 1947, one of seven children brought up in a council house near Hastings. She had left her village home looking for the excitement of the city life in London and found a position as personal assistant to a London shipping company executive. It wasn’t exactly the stimulating career which she had envisaged. One day she answered an advertisement for a receptionist position at Brian Epstein’s NEMS empire and became involved in the pop music scene almost by accident.

  Having worked in the office which was home to The Beatles, she was not particularly impressed with the three Gibb brothers at that first meeting. Molly recalled, “They arrived late one afternoon, very bedraggled looking, very old-fashioned clothes as far as England was concerned … They were all sort of terribly shy and didn’t know how to conduct themselves. So I said, ‘Who do you want to see?’ They said, ‘We’ve come to see Robert Stigwood. We’re The Bee Gees.’ ”

  After speaking to the boys and their father, Stigwood told the group that he would like to hear them perform live before signing them.

  “We did an audition at the Saville Theatre,” Barry said. “Well it’s gone now, but it was in the basement of the Saville Theatre and Robert was sort of brought in. We think he’d had a bad night the night before because he was helped in by two men and sort of sat down in front of us with his arms hanging limp at his side. He had a hangover like you would not believe. He put his head in his hands and said, ‘Carry on.’ So we did what we had worked up in Australia.”

  “We did our nightclub act and he watched and listened and never smiled once,” Maurice recalled.

  Barry elaborates even further, describing a “Peter, Paul & Mary segment” of ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’ which “concluded with Maurice kissing Robin on the cheek. It used to be funny. As you get older, it’s no longer funny. It’s highly suspicious and shouldn’t be repeated!”

  The brothers, watching Stigwood closely to try to gauge his impressions, saw only his miserable expr
ession. “He never saw a minute of [the audition],” Barry remembered. “He heard something, told us to come and see him in his office later and staggered out again.”

  “He said, ‘Be at my office at six o’clock,’ and we were, and we signed contracts,” Maurice added.

  “Robert’s an Australian,” continued Barry, “but we’d never heard of him when we were there. It was purely coincidental. When we asked him where he was from and he said ‘Adelaide,’ we said ‘Adelaide’s beautiful.’ After we’d signed the contract and had a glass of champagne, we said ‘Adelaide stinks.’ ”

  “It’s a funny thing, but not long before we left Australia, there was an article in one of the papers saying that Brian Epstein was looking for the new Beatles,” Hugh Gibb pondered. “I thought, ‘You’ve got them here if you only knew it.’ Then it happened – they were signed up by the Brian Epstein office within a week of arriving in England.”

  On the voyage from Australia, the brothers had again discussed a change of name for the group which they hoped would bring about a change in their fortunes as well. Having already had some posters printed, they told Robert Stigwood that they would like to change their name to Rupert’s World (inspired by the cartoon bear), a change which Barry now likens to “changing your name from Charlie Shit to Fred Shit” but in the psychedelic Sixties, it seemed to the brothers to be a good choice. Stigwood was not convinced and suggested that they bring out their first record under the name The Bee Gees, then if it “stiffed,” they could change their name later and no one would be the wiser. No such change would occur although Barry’s friend in Australia, Colin Stead, would use the concept to title his group, Lloyd’s World.

  Strangely enough, a British psychedelic band by the name of Rupert’s People surfaced in July of that same year. This was probably nothing more than a coincidence although, just months previously, Howard Conder, one of Robert Stigwood’s understudies, had tendered his resignation solely to take on the management of the trio who would shortly form the nucleus of that new group.

  “There are many intricacies as to whatever became an agreement between us and Robert,” Barry recalled. “There were so many side deals to which we had no knowledge … even memories of details are no longer there … We signed a record agreement and a publishing agreement with Robert and a management agreement at Robert’s offices … For us it was the opening of the doors to the world. Robert’s faith in us was the equal to having a hit record. It wasn’t having a hit record then, it was the fact that someone had signed us up. That was more important than anything else … It was a very exciting period.”

  Robert Stigwood offered them a five-year contract, almost unprecedented for a new group. He says that in those days, he often offered new artists a one-year contract with the option to extend, but so convinced was he of the Gibbs’ songwriting and performing talents that he never considered anything less than a firm five-year deal. The contract was signed on February 24, 1967, only three weeks after their arrival in England.

  Seen against the background of the comment made by Alan Bates that Polydor, through the good offices of Roland Rennie, “gave” The Bee Gees to Stigwood, it appears more than just a coincidence that The Bee Gees’ contract with Polydor should also expire in 1972. Again, thanks to Alan Bates, the complex question of just who “owned” The Bee Gees can be answered.

  “Polydor went into joint ventures with people such as Chas Chandler,”* Alan explained. “There was Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who we also went into a joint venture [for The Who] with as well. It might be that that was some sort of a joint venture that we went into with Stigwood.

  “The essence of it was that Polydor put up all the money as an advance, and the management paid themselves out of the advance, which was then in itself an advance against the future royalties.

  “We would advance [the manager] a substantial chunk of money, out of which he had to do everything – produce the records, pay himself, keep the band going, and then the theory being that in the end results, the profits would be shared.”

  Stigwood announced the signing with a press conference, and described the brothers’ audition to gathered journalists with genuine enthusiasm. “The Bee Gees put on one of the most exciting stage shows I’ve ever seen. They have a tremendous versatility, an unbelievable professionalism. It’s impossible to overstate their international potential both as performers and composers.” The announcement was timed to coincide with the Polydor release of their Australian single, ‘Spicks And Specks’, to introduce the group to the world.

  Meanwhile, in the land that could rightly claim to have created The Bee Gees, Spin released the brothers’ fourteenth Australian single with barely a whisper. ‘Born A Man’ and ‘Big Chance’ were the chosen tracks. Spin would now require to negotiate a licensing agreement with Polydor if they wished future output bearing the group’s distinctive sound to be released on their label in Australia again.

  There was also a certain irony in the news that Barry had collected another writers’ award and that The Bee Gees had won the 1966 National Radio 2UE award for best group. They might not have won Barry’s treasured 4KQ talent contest but they now had something far more important – tangible proof that they did indeed have the ability to go to greater things. Full of confidence, and with their creative juices flowing, they went into the studio to commence their first British recordings.

  *Chandler was the former bass player in The Animals, who became co-manager, along with Mike Jeffery, of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. He later managed Slade.

  8

  A MAN CALLED STICKWEED

  FOR THE GREATER part of their career, one man in particular has been responsible more than any other in bringing The Bee Gees success on a scale they never dreamt of, and the Gibbs widely acknowledge the importance of his influence on them.

  There was little in the family background of Robert Colin Stigwood to indicate the theatrical flair and shrewd foresight that he would bring to his glittering career as a popular music impresario. He was born in Adelaide, Australia on April 16, 1934 where his father was an electrical engineer and his mother ran a nursing home. His parents, descendant from Scottish, Irish and German Protestant roots, divorced when he was 12 and attending a private school. He converted to Catholicism at age 15 and later considered becoming a priest, spending three years at Adelaide’s Sacred Heart College. However, he decided he didn’t have the calling and left to become a copy writer for a local advertising agency, progressing to the grade of junior account executive.

  Robert also walked the boards in his home town. “I did appear on stage myself as an amateur,” he admitted. “I played Toad in Toad Of Toad Hall. That was my first assessment of talent, the elimination of myself as an actor. I got wonderful notices, but I knew it was typecasting.” There is talk that he trained as a hypnotist during this period too.

  In 1955, aged 21, he left Adelaide for London.

  His reasons may have been as simple as a young man’s desire for a change of scene and the Australian desire to experience the British homeland. A romantic story has been told about pursuing a girl he wanted to marry, only to be stood up for their rendezvous in Paris.

  The journey was a difficult one because he travelled overland on “the most ill-equipped expedition of all time” as he later called it. At length, he arrived in London with £5 and dysentery, two stone lighter than when he left home. He settled at first in what was known as ‘Kangaroo Valley’, the small Australian colony at Earls Court, and embarked on a variety of jobs from selling vacuum cleaners to working at a hostel for delinquent boys.

  He appears to have been at loose ends about what he wanted to do with himself, but something brought him into the theatrical business, which has attracted many men of genius on or behind the stage. His first such job took him south of London to Southampton, but by 1959 Robert had found a position running a theatre in the East Anglian city of Norwich called the Hippodrome, and here he not only began his managerial career but also found his
first business partner, Stephen Anton Komlosy.

  Robert Stigwood never married or had children. Many have said that his best clients became his family, and he looked after them like a doting father, or perhaps a favourite uncle. One thing he tried a few times was to find a handsome young man to turn into a star, and perhaps it is not too much of a leap to speculate that this came from the same feelings as parents who work for their children’s success. He eventually found his concept of a talented teen idol in Barry Gibb, but that was a few years off yet.

  “The idea was I was going to be a pop star,” Stephen began, “but there were a few problems. I’m too nervous and I can’t sing.” Komlosy had taken a job painting scenery at the Hippodrome before planning to head off to University, which he never did do. Despite his being the wrong person for Stigwood’s starmaking plan, “we got on very well, and I left school and we ran that theatre together. It went on for about a year … both of us doing everything from management to scene painting to a bit of acting.”

  Hoping for better things, they quit in 1960 and moved to a cottage in Hampstead near New End Hospital. They opened the Robert Stigwood Associates in a tiny office at 41 Charing Cross Road with £5,000 from Komlosy’s mother and Komlosy himself as the only model. In retrospect, Robert can’t quite believe his own naïveté. “It was a lunatic thing to do,” he admitted, “because I didn’t know anybody.”

  The only reason it succeeded was that Stigwood found an angle that was being overlooked by others. “The big theatrical agencies treated the advertising agencies very badly,” he recalled. “Even though TV commercials were only 30 seconds long, the [advertising] agencies wanted those commercials to be like feature films. Vast amounts of money were spent on time buying, after all.” So it became a specialty agency, casting actors for television commercials. The advertising agencies were delighted to find someone who gave them the respect they thought they deserved, and business flowed into Robert Stigwood Associates. It wasn’t only brief commercials, but longer “advertising magazines” similar to today’s infomercials, and as Komlosy recalled, “In time, there were about eight presenters and we had them all.”