The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  The roller-coaster lifestyle of the rich and famous was beginning to consume them, and The Bee Gees would soon discover that their working-class roots and sensible upbringing would offer little protection.

  * * *

  Although only 17 years old at the time, Robin Gibb was addressing his future wife when he introduced himself to Molly Hullis at the NEMS office when the brothers first met with Robert Stigwood. Molly didn’t have any indication of future events either because, as Robin says, “I didn’t get around to being sociable until four weeks afterwards at a party in Kensington. Then the real thing started about May, 1967.”

  Molly remembered, “Robin would come and sit in the reception area and talk. At that time, he was very concerned about the number of late nights I was keeping up. I would only have maybe a couple hours of sleep and get into work the next morning and carry on.”

  But as she recalled it, Robin wasn’t the first Gibb brother to ask her out. “One day, Maurice invited me to this party,” she said. “When I arrived, Maurice was with somebody else. So I thought, ‘Ah, nice one here, I’m off.’ Robin said to me, ‘Don’t go. You might just as well stay now that you’ve got here.’ And that was really the first time we went out. We went from the party to a club, and then we started going out on a regular basis …

  “It was something that sort of grew. Robin’s a dreamer, a romantic person. Therefore, he makes a situation romantic even if it isn’t. He is very sensitive. People say he’s shy, but he’s not. He’s just very sensitive about everything, whether it’s good or bad … And terribly kind and considerate, not just to me and the family but to strangers. Always concerned, always prepared to take time out to talk to fans.”

  Colin Petersen also found romance at the NEMS offices, in his case with Brian Epstein’s personal assistant, Joanne Newfield, while Vince Melouney was already married to Dianne when he joined the group.

  For Barry and Maurice it was The Bee Gees’ appearances on Top Of The Pops that led them to meet girls they were destined to marry. Not long after their first Top Of The Pops performance, Colin’s girlfriend told her close friend and former flatmate, Lulu, that Maurice Gibb was very impressed with her. “He keeps talking about you,” Joanne added.

  “I thought Maurice was cute,” Lulu recalled, “so I said, ‘In that case, tell him to stop talking about me and take me out.’ He did just that.

  “I never expected much to come from this, but in fact our relationship grew – after a fashion … Going steady is quite the wrong way to describe what was happening between us. Going unsteady might better sum up the way we fell in and out with each other.”

  Lulu recalled one instance when she even attended a concert with The Bee Gees’ manager. “I knew Robert,” she explained, “and he offered to take me to see Pink Floyd at the Saville Theatre because he said Maurice would be there too. He was … with another girl! So I tried to be all tactful and asked him the name of his girlfriend. ‘She’s not my girlfriend and her name’s …’ he replied, so I breathed again.

  “I think I may have fallen in love with The Bee Gees’ music before I fell for Maurice … I always liked Maurice, and in the early days I thought he was uncomplicated. It was only later that I realised how wrong I was. When you are a child star, you are encouraged to be loud so as not to be ignored, and I must have been rather intolerant and spoiled … But Maurice saw the good side of me, and I of course saw the good side of him.”

  Lulu was born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie on November 3, 1948, the eldest of four children, in a two-room Glasgow tenement flat with no bathroom. At 13, Marie joined a band called The Gleneagles who performed in clubs and pubs. The pint-sized singer with the big voice was spotted in 1964 by record company talent scout Marian Massey. She became her manager and renamed the band Lulu & The Luvvers. Lulu had her first Top 10 hit at age 15 with her début single ‘Shout’ and quickly became an enormous star in Britain.

  Barry also fell for a Scottish lass. The guest hostess on TOTP on the evening of September 21, 1967 was a 17-year-old beauty queen named Lynda Ann Gray. Lynda was born on May 11, 1950 in Musselburgh, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, in Scotland. After winning the Miss Edinburgh pageant, she went to London to work as a “colour girl” on Top Of The Pops, where she was chaperoned by Jimmy Savile, the show’s disc jockey. Being a colour girl involved posing while the camera and lighting men adjusted their settings. The contrast of Lynda’s fair skin and dark hair made her ideally suited for the job.

  At rehearsals for the show, Lynda was embarrassed by the teasing of the other girls at the show, who insisted that Barry was staring at her. He introduced himself, took her down to the restaurant for coffee and invited her to a party at Robert Stigwood’s house in Adam’s Row. Jimmy Savile took his responsibility to Lynda’s parents seriously and refused permission for her to attend. He hadn’t reckoned on Lynda’s rebellious streak though – when she got back to her hotel, she jumped into the nearest taxi, with Savile’s personal assistant in hot pursuit in the next cab.

  She arrived in tears at Stigwood’s house, where his servant Victor, undoubtedly accustomed to hysterical fans, was understandably reluctant to let the distraught teenager in.

  Lynda remembers, “I said, ‘I’ve come to see Barry.’ Mascara was running down all over my face, and Victor said, ‘I don’t know who you are.’ Just then, Barry came running down the stairs and said, ‘It’s okay. I’m expecting her.’ We didn’t go straight into the party; we went into the study. Barry was on the phone to his mother, and his wife was threatening to come to the party. I thought, ‘My God, he’s married. Oh no!’ ”

  When Barry finished his telephone conversation, he told Lynda, “Don’t look so worried. You tell me your problem and I’ll tell you mine.”

  Barry’s marriage to Maureen was rapidly falling apart. Obliged to keep the marriage a secret from fans and the press, Maureen was kept out of the public eye and away from any of the group’s appearances. Barry’s burgeoning career, his single-minded quest for success and recognition for the group, was placing an intolerable strain on the relationship. Inevitably, he had come to regret his hasty marriage and wanted his freedom. Indeed, in an effort to distance himself from the stressful situation, he had separated from Maureen and was living at Stigwood’s Adam’s Row home.

  Lynda says, “He told me all about his relationship, how he was separated, and then I told him how I shouldn’t be there.” But she didn’t leave. At the party she says that Barry “gave me all the usual crap. ‘Oh, I love you,’ this and that. And I said, ‘Oh yes? How many people have you said that to today?’ ”

  Lynda returned to the Musselburgh council house, where she lived with her parents, and found a job as a typist, which reportedly earned her £8 a week. The couple saw each other a few times after that when Barry went to Scotland; then, after Lynda turned 18, their paths crossed again. “I came down to do some modelling in London,” she recalled. “We met again, and shortly after that, we started living together. I stopped working then because Barry didn’t want me messing around with photographers. I thought, ‘He’s so sweet; he’s really nice.’ And he was very nice. He was so polite and well-mannered which you don’t always find in young guys. He was very romantic, opened the door for me and things like that.”

  The couple moved into a lavish penthouse flat built for the millionaire property developer, Bernard Sunley, just a few years before he died. The flat boasted panoramic views of London, with a quirky Gibb decorating touch of a foam rubber model of the New York skyline hanging upside down from the ceiling, with lights flickering in the skyscraper windows.

  Then there was the problem of how George and May Gray would react to the news that their daughter was moving in with a married, albeit separated, pop star, but as Lynda explained, it was only a minor glitch. “I’ve told my parents about us. I never lie to them. I thought they’d be upset, but they have both been marvellous about it. In fact, my mother even stays with Barry and I from time to time. She loves the flat, as
you can imagine.”

  * * *

  The Bee Gees had begun writing songs for their second album of 1967 almost as soon as the first was finished. The recording sessions were scattered over a few months from July, the month when Bee Gees 1st was released, to as late as November or December.

  The group’s personnel was now stable for touring and recording, with Bill Shepherd arranging, Barry on rhythm guitar, Robin on occasional organ, and Maurice on several instruments, bass on all songs and piano on many, in addition to Vince Melouney on lead guitar and Colin Petersen on drums.

  But a question mark still hung over the future of the group. Despite having won an extension for Colin and Vince to stay in Britain, legal battles continued to obtain unlimited visas for the boys. With the flair for showmanship that has become Robert Stigwood’s hallmark, his mighty publicity machine rolled into action, organising a series of events to bring the case into the public eye.

  “I had fans chaining themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace,” he recalled. “I marched an elephant on the Home Office in Whitehall, a procession that tied up London’s traffic for a day. I landed a helicopter full of fans in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s garden. They ran and [verbally] assaulted him and told him what a terrible thing it was. I had the Prime Minister’s holiday residence picketed … We blew it up so much that in the Home Office itself that dealt with immigration, all the secretaries started putting up ‘Save The Bee Gees’ posters.”

  Whilst Stigwood undoubtedly pulled the strings, Julie Barrett was in the front line. For a 19-year-old girl, whose day-to-day job more often than not involved replying to fan letters, that September was quite an ordeal. “When all the deportation stuff started, that’s when it got a bit heavy,” she conceded.

  “Tony Barrow was the press officer at the time and he was the one who’d say, ‘Right, today Julie, you’re going to Carnaby Street to walk up and down with placards saying “Do not deport The Bee Gees”’ and we got a good press coverage. I was just told each day what I was to do, and it was all done in my name. He would phone the press and say, ‘Julie Barrett says today (this is going to happen),’ and I remember for the chaining at Buckingham Palace we had actually Deirdre Meehan from the office chained up instead. I’d had a couple of threats from the police to the effect that I must not keep doing this kind of thing, and I was warned that if it continued, I could be in trouble, so I was a bit scared.

  “We went down to Buckingham Palace and I can remember being petrified because Deirdre stood out so much – she had this great big ‘10 gallon’ Stetson hat on – and there were policemen walking by. I thought, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ and we went up to the railings a couple of times and I pulled her back and then I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it.’ I did it very quickly, and when I chained her to the railings, I didn’t realise that I’d chained her in the end to one that didn’t go all the way up because it was broken off at the top. But it was quite good because, by the time all the photographers had taken all their photos, and there was a lot of hoo-hah, the police eventually realised, ‘Oh we don’t need to saw her out after all,’ which Tony Barrow was a little bit upset about. We were able to just lift her arm out, but it made the papers, well all over the world actually. It was pretty hair-raising although it was quite exciting too.

  “Then with the elephant, I chickened out. I didn’t mind my name being there, but I wasn’t going to be prosecuted, I didn’t want anything going against me. So we got another girl from the office, and she was a beautiful girl as well, with long lovely hair, and we went down Whitehall with this elephant and that was quite amazing. We also went to the Scilly Isles in a helicopter to see Harold Wilson with our petition. He lived in a little council house with his bike outside, and I remember speaking to him and being flabbergasted that I was presenting something to the British Prime Minister, and I made some silly comment like, ‘Oh you’re a nice little man!’

  “Then Tony came up with his classic, which he said would finish the whole campaign off. He said that I had to stand on a window ledge, about three storeys up and next to The London Palladium, and threaten to throw myself off unless Vince and Colin were not deported. That was getting to the silly point and I told Tony I wouldn’t do it.”

  As an alternative to Tony Barrow’s dramatic stunts, Stigwood took a more astute approach to solving the deportation issue, and played a winning hand in presenting the authorities with a detailed account of The Bee Gees’ dollar earnings which amounted to over a million dollars so far that year. “Finally, there was such an uproar in the press that the Prime Minister had to intervene, and he declared The Bee Gees a national asset,” recalled Stigwood. In October, the Home Office rescinded the expulsion order, and Colin and Vince were given unlimited work permits to stay in Britain. The Bee Gees were staying together.

  On September 30, BBC Radio One began broadcasting, taking over from the Light Programme. Most pop aficionados know that the first song played by DJ Tony Blackburn was ‘Flowers In The Rain’ by The Move. Less well known is the fact that the second was ‘Massachusetts’, and The Bee Gees were there in the studios waiting to tape their appearance on the first ever Saturday’s Club, hosted by Keith Skues, which was broadcast later that day.

  The Bee Gees appeared on Let’s Go as guests of Dave Symonds on the new station during the first week of October and also taped their second BBC session at 201 Piccadilly, Studio One, in London with producer and engineer Dave Tate. They performed with a small backing group, and the session featured ‘In My Own Time’ (once again), ‘I Close My Eyes’, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’, ‘Massachusetts’, ‘Mrs Gillespie’s Refrigerator’ (an original song which the group would never release themselves), ‘To Love Somebody’, ‘Cucumber Castle’ and ‘World’. The show was broadcast on Radio One’s Top Gear, which was presented for that show only by Pete Drummond and Tommy Vance.

  They made an appearance in Manchester on The Joe Loss Pop Show, where Barry was astonished to see Loss march over to their father and say, “Hello, I know you, don’t I?” The show gave Hugh Gibb a chance to catch up with his fellow bandleader years after the time both had spent on the Isle of Man, just after the war.

  They also appeared on Radio One’s Pete’s People with Pete Murray on October 21 and on The Jimmy Young Show the following week.

  The Bee Gees turned down an offer to write and perform the soundtrack for the film Wonderwall. According to director Joe Massot, “The Bee Gees were interested in doing something and came to Twickenham Studios to see me. It seemed the movie had created a vibe as Graham Nash [of The Hollies] also wanted to join in.” After the Gibbs had turned down Massot, the director turned to George Harrison. “George told me that he had been working on Magical Mystery Tour helping out, but that was Paul’s project, and that he would like to do something solo.” Harrison agreed to take on the project – a strange turn of events for one of The Beatles to take on a project rejected by the Gibbs.

  They seemed to be flying high, but Barry Gibb insisted that they were not becoming complacent. “In England, at least, you might say we’ve had a lot of success for the group, but none of us see it that way,” he insisted. “None of us ever will, because if you see success, you stop trying. And that’s the whole secret. Success is not a symbol – it’s seeing our music recognised. That’s the important thing.”

  11

  FOR FAWKEs’ SAKE!

  TODAY’S ECO-WARRIORS have nothing on Guy Fawkes. On the night of November 5, 1605, Guy and his cronies attempted to blow up the Houses Of Parliament but were caught in the act and sentenced to death in the most unpleasant of circumstances. Since then the Gunpowder Plot has been celebrated annually in Britain with fireworks and bonfires, but on the night of November 5, 1967 near Hither Green in South London, sights and sounds of a different sort filled the air.

  It should have been the end of a pleasant outing. Robin Gibb and his girlfriend, Molly Hullis, had been to Hastings to visit Molly’s parents; a chance f
or Mr and Mrs. Hullis to get better acquainted with her boyfriend. “They’re ordinary folk who’ve never before had any connection with celebrities,” Molly said. “When they first realised that Robin was famous they were very overwhelmed. My mother kept asking me, ‘Are you sure he’s the right person for you?’ It was just that Robin was so different from any other boyfriend I’d taken home before.”

  The weather had been unseasonably fine, and the young couple spent the afternoon walking on the beach in the autumn sunshine. As evening approached, Robin and Molly prepared to return to London. That night, he needed to see Robert Stigwood to pick up some tapes, believed to consist of demos of ‘Sinking Ships’ and ‘When Things Go Wrong’, so they climbed aboard the 7.43 Hastings to London express, carrying a suitcase, a bread pudding made by Molly’s mother and some apples for the journey.

  The ride began unremarkably, but as the train approached Hither Green it began to shake. Robin was afraid that something was wrong and reached for the alarm cord. “What I didn’t realise was the engine had just become uncoupled. Then the carriage rolled over and big stretches of railway line came crashing in straight past my face.”

  “Suddenly it felt as if we were going over great boulders,” he would tell reporter Camilla Beach the following day, the horror of the accident still fresh in his mind. “Rocks were hitting the side of the compartment. Molly and I held on to each other as the train turned over and over, still going forward along the line.

  “It almost seemed as if the train was going to pieces around us,” he recalled. “One minute we were in the luggage rack, the next we were on the floor. The train finally came to a halt on its side 1,400 yards from where it had come off the rails.” The official inquiry would reveal that the actual distance covered by the derailed carriages was half that which Robin had claimed but, to those on the train itself, the time it took for the train to stop must have felt interminable.