by Hector Cook
The visit also included appearances on American television programmes such as The Mike Douglas Show, where they performed their new single, the title track of the forthcoming Mr. Natural album.
As always, Hugh Gibb was in attendance, running the lights and acting as unofficial supervisor-consultant-advisor — being a father, in other words. “Dad taught us how to be professional,” Maurice admitted. “How to shine our shoes, how to act on stage, how to be ourselves.”
“I’m one of the few guys the boys listen to,” Hugh said. “If I say they’re out of tune, they listen. Anyone else, they’d get mad. They’ve never forgotten the things I’ve taught them: how to walk on stage, how to bow, how to be nice people.”
The tour’s penultimate show at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville had a special guest watching from the wings. Roy Orbison dropped in to tell the boys that he was recording ‘Words’ on his next album. Another Nashville musician called the group before the show to offer his studio and instruments in case The Bee Gees felt like jamming with any friends. The boys were finding it easy to stick to the tour rules of fun and co-operation.
* * *
The group returned to Britain on a high and went straight into what Barry has called “the lowest point of our careers,” the cabaret circuit of Northern England.
Molly Gibb recalled that Dick Ashby had suggested that the group should “do one or two club dates,” and with a new baby on the way, Robin had little choice but acquiescence. Still, it wasn’t an easy decision.
“Robin had always hated nightclubs because of Australia,” she explained. “They didn’t like to go into a nightclub and see beer-swigging men talking and ignoring what you’re doing. Robin wasn’t very keen on the idea, but there was nothing much else happening. It was quite a lucrative fee, and it was ready cash.
“After they’d signed the contract, Robin knew that it was a mistake, and he didn’t want to do it. He would have done anything not to have done it.
“They were at a really low point in their careers. And it was getting to be, ‘What are we gonna do?’ There was no way they would have fallen into a trap of doing one-night stands again, and sort of becoming a nothing group and struggling on. Robin’s a positive thinker and will not be defeated. If a record doesn’t go, it’s not going to bring him down. He will be more determined that the next one is going to go,” Molly added.
For all three brothers, it felt like a giant step backward in their careers. On April 28, 1974, they played the first show of a week of appearances at The Batley Variety Club in Leeds. They had gone from playing concerts at prestigious halls backed by the finest orchestras to a nightclub act backed by the clinking of cutlery, clatter of crockery and the occasional sound of breaking glass, as people chatted, ate and drank their way through the shows.
“We ended up in — have you ever heard of Batley’s, the variety club in England?” Barry asked. “It was a little club up north, and if you ended up working there, it can be safely said that you’re not required anywhere else. In those days that was the place not to work in, and we ended up working there.
“We were back doing the Northern clubs. We realised we’d come full circle, and we were back doing clubs again,” he emphasised. “It was the most horrible sinking feeling.”
In a review from the first show at Batley, Chris Salewiez cited Robin, in his bright blue jacket, as “definitely the one to watch under the spotlights” although pointing out that his “gauche rag doll dancing” made him “the most unlikely pop star ever”. The group’s comedy routine was panned as “so super-kitsch that the audience were baffled rather than amused”. Not exactly the accolades of their American reviews.
Although The Bee Gees have a particular horror of the place, to be fair, it’s not quite the career death knoll they make it out to be. They were certainly not the only big names to play Batley, though the biggest names were more generally comedians.
At any rate, things could get worse — and they did. Having enjoyed a week’s break to recover from playing the Batley Variety Club, they resumed their cabaret tour with a week at The Golden Garter in Wythenshaw, Manchester, and followed that with another at The Fiesta Club in Sheffield. A further week at Bailey’s Club in Liverpool was cancelled.
“Robin said, ‘Nothing has changed about performing in front of nightclub audiences.’ He came back from that very down,” Molly recalled. “He said, ‘It can’t be like this. It’s not going to be like this. Something has got to happen. I’d rather give up than do that again.’ It’s like a nightmare to him. He really hated every minute of that.”
“We thought, ‘We’ve come to this,’ and we just walked out of that club and we never looked back,” Robin continued. “We said, ‘That is never ever going to happen to this group.’ We knew we’ve got so much to offer.”
Barry remembered thinking, “This is it. We’ve hit bottom. We are has-beens. We have to get back up there. It has to happen. We’d lost the will to write great songs. We had the talent but the inspiration was gone. We decided right then we were going to do it, and honestly, it took us five years to get to know one another again. Those five years were hell. There is nothing worse on earth than being in the pop wilderness. It’s like being an exile. And the other artists treat you like crap. They say, ‘Hey, I didn’t know you were still together.’ It’s then you realise they haven’t thought of you for years. It’s all ego. This whole business is ego.”
“We were in a real dead zone,” Robin agreed. “No one wanted to hear us; the record company wasn’t interested … It was a real down period, a wilderness.”
Notwithstanding their negative feelings about their surroundings, fans who saw them during this period say that despite poor attendance at some of the dates, The Bee Gees’ professionalism never wavered.
Frederic Tanner, a veteran from the 1968 tour, was again in attendance to provide another eye-witness account. “I was horrified to find the club virtually empty, with no more than 30 or so fans dotted around it. When they came out to sing, their hearts must have sank, yet they performed as if the club was packed, giving the few of us there a performance to remember. They were superb and totally professional throughout.
“Another fan who was at the same table as me had spent up, on the obligatory chicken & chips in the basket, so I agreed to give him a lift back into town. As we left, we saw Robin at the end of an alley at the back of the club walk past looking totally dejected.”
By a remarkable coincidence Frederic was to meet the same Manchester fan again at a Bee Gees convention. “As we chatted, I learned that he had also been at the 1974 Golden Garter Concert and had been given a lift back into town after seeing Robin down an alley at the back of the club. After 25 years … we meet again!”
Although Frederic remembers The Golden Garter theatre-restaurant as being “almost empty” on the night he attended, Graham R. Gooch definitely recalls that the place was virtually full on Thursday, May 16, the evening he was there. He also remembers that, mindful of their new surroundings, the brothers had made some changes to their regular concert tour act, although a contributory factor may have been the popularity of their Midnight Special appearances.
“I saw them sing ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ as part of a medley of three old vaudeville/music hall type songs, where Maurice clowned around and tried to put the other two off their singing, copying Robin with his finger in his ear, and Barry brushing his hands through his glossy mane of hair.
“Funnily enough, the tickets all had a clause which said that you ‘must’ buy a full-price meal during the evening as a condition of entering the club. But I’d spent almost all my money on the ticket and bus fare, and so I had to convince the waitress that I was feeling unwell, and she agreed to let me order just a Coca-Cola. This left me with no money at all. Luckily we got a lift home with some people at our table who were also huge fans.
“It was amazing that some of the people there had only come to have a meal like at any other restaurant and grumb
led that they couldn’t hear their conversation when songs like ‘Heavy Breathing’ were blasting out. And blast out they did!” Graham exclaimed. “The 15-piece orchestra, which included a brass section, together with the group’s amplification was almost deafening in that medium-sized hall, which had a low ceiling. Sheer bliss.”
Setting the scene, Graham continued, “There weren’t any ordinary concert seats — just large dining tables complete with paper tablecloths, cutlery and menus. People were still eating after The Bee Gees started singing their old hits and selections from the newly released Mr. Natural album. It was noticeable that the new songs were not applauded as much as their chart successes.
“After the show ended, we were leaving the car parking area just as the brothers emerged from the club’s backdoor and they walked over to two waiting cars … no security, no writhing mass of fans and almost total darkness … but I could still recognise their shadows.” It seemed an appropriate way for them to leave the venue, as by their own admission, they were indeed shadows of their former selves.
As much as they hated going back to club work, Tom Kennedy believes that the nightclub dates had a positive effect on the group. “It was a good thing in one way because it showed them what not really trying could do and where you could end up,” he maintained. “If you try and do something and it doesn’t happen, you think maybe it’s finished. And I think maybe they were beginning to accept that when Batley came around. That was so bad for them — young people eating while they were performing. They thought, ‘How can anyone do this?’ From that point on, they went for broke. And they made an album that was worthy of being called a Bee Gees album.”
It was a wake-up call for the brothers that they had to make the effort to get their career back on course. “I remember us talking about it backstage at that place,” Barry affirmed, “and I said, ‘If this is the bottom, there’s no further we can fall. Something’s gotta happen for the positive.’ I think it was positive thinking that got us back to where we are now, refusing to accept anything negative. Like, making a three-week album became a negative thing. It was time to start working on three-month albums and making the very best of them. It was a frightening time.
“Now I still believe in what I started to think about then … A characteristic I noticed about us at that time was that we were very negative in our thinking. I think that changed The Bee Gees, and we got ourselves in a rut. The worst part about that was that we refused to come out of it for a while. We shut the door on everybody and said, ‘We like what we’re doing…go away!’ That did us a lot of damage. When we realised that negative thinking was destroying us, we came out of it.”
One other positive result came from the week at Batley’s. “Derek Smith, the booking agent for Batley, came backstage after the Tuesday show,” Maurice recalled, “and he brought Yvonne in to say hello … She just smiled, and I thought, ‘What a beautiful smile!’ ”
Yvonne Spenceley was born on September 24, 1950 in West Yorkshire. “She was the manageress of the steak house [attached to Batley’s],” Maurice recalled years later, “and she told me that when she first saw me on stage, she thought I was gay. I never wore that suit again, I can tell you!”
But of that initial meeting, he said, “It was love at first sight. I couldn’t believe that smile, that sort of shimmer in her eyes, laughing teary eyes. When she smiles, you don’t know whether she’s laughing or crying. That smile really knocked me out. I thought, ‘What a lovely girl.’ There was a pure innocence about her, which is what I loved. She was something that I never thought I’d come across. I was quite thrilled. Changed my life as quickly as that.”
Maurice wasted no time in letting her know his feelings. With their week at Batley drawing to its close, Yvonne recalled that, “On Friday night he asked me to live with him. I wouldn’t go straight away. I went out with him for a few months. He seemed really nice, a very warm person. That’s what struck me first of all. The first night, all I remember was he just kept looking at me and chatting away. Of course, I was more quiet then — all I did was smile.”
* * *
After the New York Philharmonic Hall concert Barry had raved about working with Arif Mardin. “He’s marvellous … He has a wonderful ear. This album will be a distinct new sound for The Bee Gees.”
Engineer Damon Lyon-Shaw, back twiddling the knobs again, claimed that Barry’s praise for Arif, while genuine now, represented a shift from the eldest brother’s original standpoint. “Stigwood brought in Arif Mardin, which they weren’t very sure about; in fact they were furious I think, because they thought that they could do it all, and they’d just lost their direction. The bloke who has been genuinely fantastic throughout this, was old Stigwood. He gave them that chance, and I think it was a real master stroke to get Arif in.”
Just who recommended Arif to Robert Stigwood in the first place is another question. Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler recall having a discussion between them, and each put forward the names of expensive independent producers before they looked closer to home, remembering that not only did they have a very good producer in their own backyard, but also already on the payroll.
“They still had the talent obviously,” Damon continued, “which was shown after that, but they needed a new direction, and Stigwood was clever enough to think that Arif would actually guide them without actually putting pressure on them. In fact he did very little, he very tactfully guided them away, and into this American sound that they went onto, which I thought was amazing.
“[They were] still a very difficult band to work with. Barry was always the professional and very easy-going, but the two younger brothers were hard — difficult band! They were a problem in the studio. They were very grumpy with Arif Mardin, [but] he was fantastic trying to keep them together, he was a real gentleman.
“They were not easy, because I guess they didn’t want to particularly go that way, and maybe they were disappointed that Atlantic had dared to say that their [previous] album wasn’t [good enough].”
For their fans, a new sound perhaps, but still classic love songs, sentimental favourites; some things never change. “We are all romantic,” Maurice admitted. “Whenever we write a song, alone or together, it’s romantic.”
Echoing his twin brother’s thoughts of three years earlier, Maurice continued, “But the advantage is, people hear us singing, and they remember what they were doing when they first heard the song. Five years later, they still remember it. And that’s the advantage of sentimentality, our songs stir up memories in people, and so they remember them, and they remember The Bee Gees.”
The album they recorded with Arif Mardin, Mr. Natural, was released in the United States on May 13. The Bee Gees do not appear in the cover photos, which were shot at a bar and restaurant called the Corner Bistro, still in business 26 years later at the same location, 331 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village. Both sides depict a pudgy middle-aged man who seems to “smile secretly” as he sits with a glass of beer. On the front, he gazes dreamily into space; on the back, he seems barely disturbed about the bartender lifting him out of his seat to eject him.
The new album had been recorded in a series of sessions, starting in November, 1973, fitted in between their various live engagements, in London and New York. A harder electric sound emerged on many of the tracks, the closest The Bee Gees have ever come to rock and roll, mingled with a few ballads featuring Arif’s beautiful horn and string arrangements.
In retrospect, it can be seen as the key transitional album between the old Bee Gees sound and the new rhythm and dance music that they would soon begin recording. Because it failed to spin off any chart hits, the record is relatively little known, but taken in context it is fascinating to listen to the band take such a big step. While not generally well received by critics, by its very transitional nature, Mr. Natural is a favourite of many of the “old guard” fans, for whom each of the following albums was a shift away from the sound they had grown up with. Commercially, however, the
change in direction was a necessity, and for each old fan lost, there would be several new ones to replace them.
The band now consisted of permanent drummer, Dennis Bryon, Alan Kendall on lead guitar, who benefited from a much increased role, and for the first time a keyboard player, Geoff Westley, as Maurice stayed with bass guitar on stage. The live band were becoming more important, and on this album they began to record arrangements that could be substantially duplicated on stage.
Mr. Natural wasn’t the monster hit they had hoped for with the new change of direction. “We simply were not devoting enough time to our albums,” Maurice admitted. “We recorded Mr. Natural while on tour. Every time we had a few days off, we’d be shooting back to New York to do a few tracks. When we finally finished, we knew we could do better work.”
The promotional blurb for the album quoted Arif Mardin as saying that Mr. Natural “brings The Bee Gees’ sound and identification into today’s vein … while there are fresher and newer techniques used, the group still retains their individuality.”
Robin called it a “transitional album,” the tentative first step towards the R&B direction they would later follow, and Barry has dismissed it as an album that, once finished, he never listened to. Once again, lack of commercial success seems to have coloured the group’s feelings about their work and prejudiced them against it.
In June the second single from the album, ‘Throw A Penny’, was issued, although not in Britain, where even the album release was delayed until July. Unlike its August successor, ‘Charade’, where the removal of a segment was at least subtle, ‘Throw A Penny’ was mercilessly edited by the removal of its slow section for single release and was not the chart success the group had desperately wanted.
