The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Barry, Robin and Maurice with moustache, in 1972. (Harry Goodwin)

  Barry Gibb at the Golden Garter, Wythenshawe, Manchester, 1974. (Harry Goodwin)

  Andy Gibb and his first band Melody Fayre. Left to right: John Alderson, Andy, John Stringer and Jerry Callaghan. (Courtesy John Stringer)

  Maurice marries Yvonne Spenceley at Haywards Heath, October, 1975. (LFI)

  Andy Gibb marries Kim Reeder in Sydney, July 11, 1976. (Courtesy Gibb Family)

  Clockwise from top left - The Bee Gees Band in Los Angeles : drummer Dennis Bryon, Maurice, keyboard player ‘Blue’ Weaver, guitarist Alan Kendall, Barry and Robin. (Ed Caraeff)

  Robin and Molly Gibb at the Empire, Leicester Square, London, for the premier of Saturday Night Fever, March 1978. (David Wainwright/Relay)

  The Bee Gees with Robert Stigwood and Dee Anthony at the time of the disastrous Sergeant Pepper movie. (Chris Walter/Relay)

  The Bee Gees outside their ‘Tour Headquarters’, their shop on New York’s 57th Street. (LFI)

  Ron and Joanne Selle leaving the Federal Court during their copyright suit against The Bee Gees, February 1983. (Rex)

  The UNICEF A Gift Of Song Concert, New York, 1979. Left to right: Hugh Gibb, Danny Kaye (background), Henry Fonda, Barbara Gibb, Andy, Robert Stigwood’s mother, Barry and Linda Gibb. (LFI)

  The Bee Gees with manager Robert Stigwood immediately after they settled their 1981 law suit. (Rex)

  Andy Gibb with Susan George

  Olivia Newton-John. (LFI/Rex)

  Andy. (Harry Goodwin)

  Maurice, Robin and Barry reunited with former Rattlesnakes Kenny Horrocks and Paul Frost, 1981. (Courtesy Gibb Family)

  Andy Gibb as Frederick in The Pirates Of Penzance and in the starring role in Joseph And The Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. (Rex)

  Andy with Dallas star Victoria Principal. (LFI)

  Robin with Dwina Murphy and their son Robin John. (D. White/Camera Press)

  Barry in a scene cut from his Now Voyager video. (LFI)

  A mini-Bunbury’s convention at a polo match in Windsor Great Park in 1986. Left to right: Barry and Linda, Ian and Cathy Botham, David English and Eric Clapton. (Camera Press)

  Robin, Beri and Hugh Gibb at Heathrow Airport immediately after Andy’s death. (Rex)

  Peta and Kim Gibb, daughter and widow of Andy. (Rex)

  Maurice and family in 1983. Daughter Samantha is held by her parents, son Adam stands below. (Camera Press)

  Left to right: Dwina Gibb, Robin’s second wife, Spencer and Melissa, Robin’s son and daughter from his first marriage, and Robin. In the foreground is Robin John, his son with Dwina. (Rex)

  The Barry Gibb family Christmas card, 1999. Left to right: Travis, Ashley, Michael, Steven and (seated) Ali. (Therese Hallman/background photo: Claude Zick)

  Reunited with Vince Melouney and Colin Petersen in Sydney, 1989. (Glenn A. Baker Archives)

  Maurice, Barry and Robin with Hugh and Barbara in 1989. (Camera Press)

  Prince Albert of Monaco presents a World Music Lifetime Achievement Award to The Bee Gees, 1997. (PA News)

  The Bee Gees receive a presentation board of stamps issued in their honour by the Isle of Man Post Office. Left to right: Robin, Janet Bridge, Dot Tilbury, Maurice and Barry. (Courtesy Isle of Man Post Office)

  Dick Ashby, the fourth Bee Gee. (Mark Crohan)

  The Bee Gees in 1998. (Rex)

  “This is where we came in”… with Barbara in 1997, the three brothers outside their old home in Keppel Road, Manchester. (Harry Goodwin)

  “This might sound corny,” he confessed, “we make our records like we paint a picture, but it’s true. It’s like a mental picture; you paint it, you know where the instrumental should be, you know the instrumental areas have got to be just as strong as the vocal areas. You can’t have a low for an instrumental area and go back to the … vocals for a rise. It doesn’t work — the whole thing has got to go up and go down and the instrumental must be just as important.”

  Blue Weaver believes that the secret of The Bee Gees’ success during this period was not down to any virtuosity but rather the willingness to work together until everyone was pleased with the final result. “None of us were incredible musicians, as such,” he admitted. “Barry is probably the most outstanding one, inasmuch as, even if he can’t play the instrument, he can sing a brass part or a string part … Vocally, they’re brilliant, all three of them. Whereas maybe myself, Dennis and Alan were not great individually, but worked incredibly well together. I think if you’d had so-called great players, it wouldn’t have worked as well as it did. Everything all fits together as a whole — the voices, the backing, everything.”

  “I always wanted Barry to sing in real voice again,” Blue said, “because I just love his real voice, but I was getting off on the songs, you know, it was great, so I wasn’t really thinking, ‘Oh, this is falsetto.’

  “I don’t analyse things, I just do it. I mean, it’s there, it happens, I don’t think why has it happened, or why did we do that, I just go ahead and do it. If you think it’s right at the time, and I obviously thought … it was all right, but I wished there had been some real voice.”

  “The control in Barry’s voice is actually better in falsetto,” Karl Richardson explained. “On a powerful, complex song like ‘Tragedy’, the lead vocal has to stand out, and a lower ranger would have little impact and be harder to mix. The first time I heard ‘Tragedy’ was at Barry’s house, with all three of the Bee Gees singing to an acoustic guitar. They even sang the explosion near the end, which ended up in the studio as five tracks of Barry cupping his hands over the microphone combined with Blue Weaver hitting random notes on the bottom end of the piano run through a product generator.”

  New technology was beginning to play its part in the recording process, as Albhy pointed out. “It was the first time we had the technology to give Barry the control he’d always wanted [with two 24-track machines, 44 usable tracks].”

  ‘Too Much Heaven’, a song that took full advantage of the upgraded technology, became a particular favourite of their friend David English. “I met a girl out there called Cindy Lee Johnson,” he explained. Cindy and her business partner, Jeri, had a company called “Home At Last” and rented out the house at 461 Ocean Boulevard to Eric Clapton, which gave him the title of his album.

  “When [The Bee Gees] went to Miami to record at Criteria Studios with Arif Mardin, Cindy and Jeri were the people that found them a house to live in, but they stayed in 461 Ocean Boulevard first … and I met Cindy and Jeri through Barry and the boys. Barry kept saying, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl, you’re going to really like her, her name’s Cindy Lee Johnson.’ Sure enough, I walked into the studio when they were having a playback of ‘Spirits (Having Flown)’, and in walks Cindy and I said, ‘Christ, they’re right, you’re great,’ and she laughed, and it took me two weeks of phoning her and pursuing her… They all knew that I had kind of fallen for her, and I did in a big way. She was probably the love of my life … I went there for three weeks and ended up staying there for two years. We had a little house together in North Miami. Very happy memories and, at that time, ‘Too Much Heaven’ came out and that was marvellous because every time it went on, it kinda helped me in my love affair. It’s lovely if you’re with someone and that lovely song comes on.”

  ‘Too Much Heaven’ was recorded with The Chicago Horns. Chicago were recording their Hot Streets album at Criteria at the same that The Bee Gees were working on their new album. The Chicago Horns also played on ‘Stop (Think Again)’, and in return, The Bee Gees provided backing vocals for Chicago’s ‘Little Miss Lovin’’.

  Blue Weaver revealed that most of the recording process for Spirits Having Flown was a painstaking series of takes. “My piano parts — don’t think that on things like ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ or ‘Too Much Heaven’ I just went out … and played … I’d be out there for hours — days — there could be hundreds of tracks of me playing the piano, and i
n the end, we’d just go in and sort out, and make one good one out of it,” he said.

  Maurice was credited as bass player on the album, along with “guest musician” Harold Cowart. At the time, he explained that he was unable to play bass because of a back injury. “I had to sit there and tell the bass player what to play. It was a bitch,” he added.

  In recent years, Maurice has admitted that he was going through a critical period in his life. His drinking would begin in the morning and continue throughout the day, and he would hide bottles from his family and friends. “I could get up in the morning and have a Scotch and coke for breakfast,” he confessed. “I’d be doing bass work … and behind my back, [Barry and Robin] would bring someone in to play a part that I was supposed to be playing and stuff like that. I played fine, but it was just that they couldn’t rely on me.”

  “It was very important to Barry to have stuff in tune and time,” Albhy explained, “and the meter was critical and the feel was critical, and so he would have liked to use Harold from the day he met him. But it was delicate with Maurice. Harold was a great bass player and had incredible meter … He’d listen to a track that would slow down or speed up a little in some place … Harold had incredible meter, which was so important to Barry … Switching was just a matter of finding a way where Maurice could feel comfortable and save face. So he was a songwriter and singer and major in the band, so he didn’t need to do trivial stuff like playing bass on the record. A lot of life is about saving face.”

  Both Barry and Robin have admitted that by covering for Maurice, they were enabling him to continue drinking, to pretend to himself and the world that he didn’t have a problem.

  Being outside the family circle, Albhy Galuten could observe the mechanics of co-dependency. “There was a lot of stuff around Maurice constructed so he could keep the facade going, and then even in the social environment, when the family’s sitting around, they’d all pretend … which forme never helps anyone solve their problem. You need to say, ‘Fine, we spoke to the press, but you’re fuckin’ up, dude.’ And I’m sure they told him a lot he was screwing up, when not drinking … There was a lot of … unclarity … a lot of going overboard to not hurt someone’s feelings, to the point where you really are not telling the truth.”

  The album went through working titles of Spirits and Reachin’ Out before the final title of Spirits Having Flown was chosen. It was a change in title for both the album and the song, which had originally been called ‘Passing Thought’. “[It] started in the studio,” Barry recalled. “It wasn’t written at home … We sat down with a guitar and just strummed, and we found different chords on the guitar that we don’t normally look for … That’s really how it was written and without words and without a title, we put the backtrack down the way you heard it. Then we worked on the lyrics, and we worked on the additional, the overdub structures and things like that.

  “It was really an experimentation of us trying to move away from Saturday Night Fever,” he added. “We were trying to follow up such a mammoth album, but not really knowing how to do that, and we were trying to get back to the mind-set we had before Saturday Night Fever. It was sort of a scatterbrained scenario. We were looking for a focus, and Spirits Having Flown as a title reflects that.”

  The first single from the album, ‘Too Much Heaven’, was released in November, with all proceeds to be donated to UNICEF. It is a slow ballad with an enormous number of Barry vocal tracks in falsetto and whispery voice, repeating a limited amount of melodic and lyrical material over and over to a slow but steady rhythm and an ample horn accompaniment. In no way could it be described as a disco song. The B-side was the totally different country number ‘Rest Your Love On Me’, a clear indication that someone wanted to show off The Bee Gees’ versatility.

  The single soared to the top of the American charts and reached the number three spot in Britain. It was also a number one in Norway, number 10 in Germany and a Top Five single all over Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Much to the group’s delight, it also rapidly gained recognition on the American soul radio stations. “At the moment, it’s really taken off big on the black stations,” Robin said. “We’ve got a lot of black people buying our records, but we’ve never had [acceptance from] black stations.” And while the A-side was getting airplay on American black radio stations, the country stations were playing the B-side, resulting in The Bee Gees’ ‘Rest Your Love On Me’ climbing into the Top 50 of the US Country charts.

  ‘Heaven’ was one of three songs written in one very productive day during a break in the filming of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “We had an afternoon off and we wrote ‘Tragedy’ and ‘Too Much Heaven’ in about an hour and a half,” Maurice revealed. The title track of Andy Gibb’s second album, ‘Shadow Dancing’, completed the trio that evening.

  “Three number ones in about two hours!” Robin exclaimed. “Robert Stigwood was there [when] we wrote [‘Tragedy’], actually. He was downstairs, and we were talking. He went upstairs for half an hour, and we had written it. That’s how we write — we get an idea, and we got straight through it … He heard it, and he said, ‘Amazing, a number one record.’ ”

  “The Bee Gees have the tendency to disobey the laws of music because they are not formally schooled in it,” Richardson said. “They don’t even know the names to all the chords they write with. But if they studied formally, they’d never have sung the melodies they do.”

  While The Bee Gees have always taken their songwriting very seriously, the atmosphere in the studio was hardly sombre. “If a group gets too serious and stops bantering when they record, you stagnate and lose your creativity,” Karl continued.

  While Maurice has always been the comedian of the group in public, it was his seemingly more reserved twin who livened up the studio. “Robin may be shy alone but not when he gets with his brothers,” Dick Ashby revealed, adding that even on his first meeting with the group in Polydor’s studios in 1967, “Robin turned out to be hilarious — totally crazy — constantly cracking one-liners.”

  “Robin’s into blue humour,” Karl added, “and I don’t know if you’d be able to print a lot of his jokes. He also draws caricatures of everybody and hangs them up in the studio.”

  “We have a serialisation called The Adventures of Sunny Jim,” Barry divulged. “It only happens at recording sessions, and no one else ever hears them. We do them to relax ourselves when we’re singing. So we do them first, have a bit of a laugh, and then we’re ready.”

  With Robin revelling in the role of the hapless Sunny Jim with his high pitched, vacuous whine and Barry as the suave voice-over announcer, the adventures began with the recording of the Main Course album and are best described by Maurice as “wonderfully dirty and sick!”

  “We start the stories off the tops of our heads and call them The Continuing Adventures of Sunny Jim,” Barry said, “and there’s always an echo chamber effect there. Then we go off into Sunny Jim In Brazil, Sunny Jim Joins The Army and strange stuff like Sunny Jim Steals Surgical Instruments. He’s just an imaginary character. A lunatic, I suppose.”

  A cleaner tale of Gibb inspired lunacy, The Rescue Of Bonnie Prince Wally was recorded as a members-only single for The Bee Gees Fan Club. “What they used to do, in between takes, they used to just lark around in the writing room upstairs at [the studio],” David English said. “They were very influenced by The Goons so that was just something that they came up with. It happened, just like when they write, they get very prolific.”

  One can only wonder what Senator Ted Kennedy made of all this when he dropped by the recording studio to meet them during a visit to Miami that September.

  Later in the month, Barry organised a soccer match for family and friends on Yvonne’s birthday. Although Andy had always been athletic and Barry had become an accomplished tennis player, by no stretch of the imagination could any of the brothers be considered keen footballers. Working as they had since childhood, The Bee Gees never really took time out
for sport when growing up, so the game was strictly for fun.

  The Bee Gees’ work was finished for the year, and it was time for quiet family Christmases all around. While Maurice, Yvonne and little Adam flew back to Leeds for a white Christmas in Yorkshire, Robin, Molly, Spencer and Melissa spent Christmas in New York. Barry and Lynda and their family had a low key Christmas in Miami Beach as little Ashley was recovering from an illness.

  Robert Stigwood opined, “[The Bee Gees] are all family people, which is very strange in this business. They don’t create scandals just to see their names in print.”

  Barbara Gibb explained it further. “It’s a very big thing, this family thing. People are either family or they’re not. And if they are; well, that’s that. Robert Stigwood is family. When Brian Epstein asked Stiggy to manage The Beatles and Cilla Black, Stiggy said no, he had The Bee Gees. Families take care of each other.”

  Contrasting the difference between his first and second marriages, Maurice said, “[Yvonne is] a lovely Yorkshire girl who’s not in show business. Of course, she knows a thing or two about the business but doesn’t want to get involved in it.”

  But in Molly Gibb’s eyes, the Gibb family togetherness was something from which she was happy to remain distant. “I couldn’t stand it — I mean, could you?” she asked. “Barry, Maurice and their mother all within half a kilometre of each other in America — much too close. I wouldn’t even like to live that close to my own mother, and I love her dearly.”