The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Management

  The Management Agreements with RSO have been terminated. Accordingly, Robert Stigwood is no longer The Bee Gees’ Manager. The Bee Gees are free to undertake whatever projects they choose (including outside production work and ‘guest’ recording appearances) without any right of RSO to be consulted in connection with or approve any such projects.

  Songwriting

  The existing arrangements, whereby all works written by The Bee Gees are published by RSO in perpetuity, have been terminated. All works written by The Bee Gees or any of them will be vested in a new entity beingformed by The Bee Gees. Similarly, RSO have agreed that all previous compositions written by The Bee Gees (right back to 1967) will likewise be vested in the new venture with RSO merely retaining a modest financial interest in those compositions as well as the compositions recorded and released on or before 31st December 1985 and cease altogether after 31st December 1989.

  Audit Claims

  Claims were made against RSO by The Bee Gees for substantial arrears of royalties. Many of the claims (totalling millions of dollars) have been paid in full, other claims have been compromised and other claims have been conceded by The Bee Gees. In addition, various other outstanding claims for substantial royalties remain to be resolved primarily because further investigation is needed by both parties. Furthermore, other audits are in progress which may well give rise to further claims. It is not unusual where high selling records are involved for audits to give rise to substantial claims, but any suggestion made by RSO that The Bee Gees’ claims for arrears of royalties were without foundation is totally untenable.

  General

  The more general claims made in the name of The Bee Gees in the litigation seeking a repudiation of the Agreements from the outset and substantial damages were dropped by The Bee Gees. Similarly, we would like to point out that the counterclaims made by RSO against The Bee Gees amounting to some $310,000,000 were likewise dropped.

  The statement you have just read is the true one; it has been witnessed, confirmed and co-signed by our personal attorney, Mr Michael Eaton. Mr Gershon and any other member of the entertainment industry is free to challenge this statement at any time he or she wishes.

  B.A.C. Gibb M.E. Gibb R.H.

  Gibb Co-signed

  M.C.A. Eaton

  It came as little surprise that RSO took up The Bee Gees’ invitation to challenge their remarks with a terse statement. “The press release issued by The Bee Gees is inconsistent with the terms of the settlement. Indeed, as was clearly understood, any settlement with The Bee Gees was conditional on a worldwide apology … and without it no settlement would have been concluded.” The increase in The Bee Gees’ royalties was referred to as “modest” and “The claim to an underpayment of recording and publishing royalties was settled by a payment, which, in the context of what they had earned, was not material.”

  For The Bee Gees, the financial aspects had never been of importance in the litigation; rather, it was the freedom to make decisions for themselves. Although the young Gibbs had initially required the support and the guiding hand of Robert Stigwood to develop their fledgling career; by 1980, they were ready to leave the nest. Their multifaceted management contract to RSO had failed to acknowledge the fact that the young lads, whom Stigwood had signed in 1967, had indeed grown up.

  “It was a total misunderstanding and we patched it up,” Robin would later explain. “We made friends with each other. At that time, RSO was folding up anyway as a record company, and everybody was parting ways. It was just that time where everybody was moving on, and I think it was the right thing to do. Robert didn’t really feel like he wanted to keep managing artists all the time …

  “With Polydor and RSO splitting, and Robert wanting to do personal things with his life, and we coming off the back of all this huge chaos, we needed to clean our heads out, we needed a break. We just wanted to concentrate on writing and producing other people, which we did.”

  * * *

  In July, 1981, Robin and Molly’s acrimonious separation took a bizarre turn. Robin alleged in the press that his estranged wife had conspired with black show business lawyer, Ashley Adams, to try to get him to accuse her of adultery so that they could hit him with a £5 million slander action.

  He alleged that, with the knowledge of the local police, he and a private detective had broken into the couple’s Weybridge home the previous summer to get evidence of the purported conspiracy. Police confirmed that an incident was reported in August, 1980, in which he broke into his home after telling police that he needed to do this because he had no keys. “I got into the house by smashing a window. Then I broke into the safe and uncovered all the evidence. I discovered signed documents and letters which made it clear they had been planning to set me up for about a year — and were ready to put that plan into action.

  “By breaking into my own home, I was able to get hold of papers and documents, including letters from Molly,” Robin told the Daily Mirror. “At the time she was in New York. After what has happened, I can never forgive her. I haven’t said anything about this until now. My London lawyer has prepared the case, which will come up in London in a few months. The whole thing has been a terrible shock, but I am determined to go ahead. The papers containing the proof have been shown to Scotland Yard and the FBI.”

  Molly retorted, “The allegations are absolutely untrue. The only part of what he said that has any truth in it is that he did break in here while I was away. But he certainly didn’t find anything incriminating.”

  While the accusations might once have come as a shock, Molly claimed, “I have got past being surprised by anything Robin says now.” She added that Robin was making life miserable for her and the children.

  “The whole matter is now in the hands of my solicitor, who has advised me to say nothing more at the moment except that all the allegations against me are completely untrue,” she said.

  Ashley Adams, who had offices on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and on Broadway, was unavailable for comment, but an associate stated, “It’s an astonishing allegation that Robin is making.”

  * * *

  In September, the first single from the forthcoming Living Eyes LP was released. ‘He’s A Liar’ reached number 30 on the American charts but failed to make a showing in Britain.

  “A few people thought it had something to do with Stigwood,” Barry said later. “It was wrongly timed. At another time, it could have been the right single. It doesn’t reflect the rest of the album.

  “We originally felt the single should have been ‘Living Eyes’ but I don’t want to put the blame on anyone’s shoulders. ‘He’s a Liar’ was the choice of everyone involved … We still believe it is the one to go with first because of its radical differences and because we simply have to break new ground. We can’t go on being the falsetto singers … ‘Oh no, not that again,’ and as with the whole of this album, there’s only one falsetto song on this album. We went out of our way to show that … the original Bee Gees are still there, those voices are still there and we know how to use them.”

  “The Bee Gees were suing Robert at the time, and radio thought it was a personal vendetta,” Albhy confirmed. “It had never been meant that way. It was meant to be about a love triangle. They thought it was all subtle. The radio stations, programme directors, always give people too much credit for subtlety. When you think people are working on subtle levels, you’re usually fooling yourself.

  “I thought that, at that time … it was a great song with great vocals and great hooks … We had political backlash, but at the time, I believed it was a great track.”

  Unlike the rest of the album, ‘He’s a Liar’ is a rock song, with former Eagle Don Felder contributing a solid lead guitar line and Barry singing full voice for the first time since Mr. Natural back in 1974. Barry and Maurice play rhythm, Albhy and George Bitzer play keyboards and synthesizer, Harold Cowart plays bass as usual, and top drummer Steve Gadd rounds out what was the basic perso
nnel list for all the songs on the album, although Jeff Porcaro drummed on some others. The near total lack of success for ‘He’s A Liar’ calls for some explanation. The Bee Gees had reached saturation point by 1980, so much so that people probably wanted to move on, yet paradoxically it’s possible that this release sounds so unlike The Bee Gees of the Seventies that they were unrecognisable. The group’s management dispute with RSO and the collapse of the label cannot have helped garner enthusiasm among the promotion staff either. Maybe it was just doomed to failure.

  ‘He’s A Liar’ was the group’s first single to be released commercially on 12-inch with an extended version of the song, whilst both vinyl formats contained an instrumental version on the B-side, another trend they would flirt with briefly for the next few years.

  The album followed in October. In Japan, there was a special promotional record from the album for DJs and dealers, which played the six songs — three on each side — from the centre outwards. Living Eyes was also chosen by Philips to be the very first album manufactured in compact disc format, as could be seen in close-up when the new technology was first demonstrated on the BBC’s futuristic television programme, Tomorrow’s World.

  The album’s cover photos were taken in New York. The front photo shows a well-dressed trio on a Manhattan rooftop at sunset, somewhere in east Midtown, within a few blocks of 46th Street and Second Avenue judging by the perspective, looking west by southwest towards the Chrysler Building and Pan Am Building. The inner gatefold shows them in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center, while on the back, still wearing the same clothes, they are at Robin’s house on the North Shore of Long Island, about 25 miles east of Manhattan.

  Living Eyes was certainly an album of change. There were no dance tunes, and Barry avoided singing everything in falsetto. Robin, who’d conspired to showcase Barry for a few years by adopting a role as co-writer, production adviser, and harmony singer, once again took lead vocal on several songs, which probably also influenced the sound of those songs since they tend to write for the singer. However, it was Maurice, newly sober, who positively bewildered Albhy Galuten, who had never seen him take such an active role in every aspect of the production. While the idea had been to break with the past, the project lost its sense of direction with so many hands at work.

  Although sessions had started with Blue Weaver, Dennis Bryon, and Alan Kendall, they were stopped and picked up again later using top session players instead; some the same as on the Andy Gibb and Barbra Streisand projects. The Bee Gees were no longer going to play live, and consequently were no longer a band. This had been coming ever since Barry’s eyes were opened at the Andy Gibb sessions. Hiring session men could fulfil Barry’s desire for perfect timing and pitch.

  With this album, Barry completed a transition from the Beatles-like concept of a self-contained band to the R&B concept of a hot house band backing the featured singers. It is a remarkable change of philosophy because most artists prefer one of the two concepts and cannot stand the other. It was a case of the authenticity of friends and brothers playing the best they can with great, but limited, ability, against the professionalism of the best musicians that money can buy who can play with great skill and beauty.

  One song written at this time, Barry and Maurice’s ‘Hold Her In Your Hand’, would come out as a solo single for Maurice three years later, but three others from these sessions, ‘Heat Of The Night’, ‘Loving You Is Killing Me’ and ‘City Of Angels’, remain unreleased.

  At the time Living Eyes was released, Barry declared, “It’s our finest album in terms of depth, performance, and quality of the production. It’s been about 11 months working on this album, and we do tend to work an awful long time on our albums because we want to be sure.”

  Three years later, his views had changed considerably. “Obviously we had a scare with Living Eyes,” he admitted. “It wasn’t the kind of album we should have brought out at that point. It was a little too downbeat, as opposed to having energy. But we were trying to go for a change, to draw ourselves away from the falsetto vocals and do something that might be a little different. We knew the risks when we did that.”

  Reflecting on the album’s failure to make any significant impact on the charts, Robin insisted that that had been their plan all along. “Living Eyes was a turkey, I think, for a good reason,” he explained. “I don’t think that last album does any harm but I’m really glad it was a turkey.”

  “Living Eyes … was just what was needed for us,” Barry claimed in 1990. “We needed to stop being what we were. It was driving us all round the twist. We needed at that point to step back and look at our lives as individuals.”

  “We were suffering burn out and the public had OD’d,” Robin added. “I believe when people do too much or have that kind of phenomena to go through, they become parodies of themselves to the public. You don’t become art for arts’ sake, your credibility is ignored. We were pressured to bring out [Living Eyes] by our record company and by certain individuals because of the cashing-in process.”

  The brothers admitted that having their own studio had given them the freedom to take as long as they wanted.

  “We knew how much we had to do this time, we knew it was going to take a year,” Barry explained. “We talked about the fact that, no, we’re not going to spend a year on the next album, it’s ridiculous, but we’ve ended up doing it again. We’ve become more fortunate than the average artist and in that way we get to be able to do virtually anything we want sound wise. All we have to do is be creative. All we have to do is think what sound we want and we can probably get it. And that’s where the money helps us. What we do with our money is, is we put it back into what we do.

  “It’s a fallacy that money doesn’t mean happiness. Money can be very good to you,” he laughed.

  The second single from the album was the title track, released in November. Despite promoting it with appearances on the Donahue show in the US and on Parkinson in Britain, ‘Living Eyes’ was not destined to be a hit, reaching only number 45 in the States and 41 in Holland, while failing to chart in the UK. Barry described ‘Living Eyes’ as “an up tempo, philosophical … ballad … Basically the message in the song, if there is to be a message, is that, ‘God, if only everyone felt like this!’ There was a slight paranoia on our part on being afraid to change with the falsettos, you know. You get into that thing where, ‘God, every falsetto record we’re putting out is a monster, we shouldn’t change yet.’ That’s what stopped us from saying, ‘Well, it’s time Robin had a lead.’ … But now it’s no longer a sales point, it’s important that Robin’s voice gets heard. It’s equally important that Maurice’s voice gets heard. And it’s becoming less important that I get heard. And that’s the way we work. There’s no ego within the three of us, whoever’s singing most or whoever has the most hits is irrelevant.”

  In Britain, the backlash against The Bee Gees was exemplified by the appearance of a new musical/comedy trio called The Hee Bee Gee Bees. Dressed in the flying jackets and scarves (but in their case, the scarves were held fully extended) of the Children of the World album cover, Philip Pope as Dobbin, Angus Deayton as Garry, both Oxford University students, and Mike Stevens as Norris, a graduate of Oxford Polytechnic, performed a merciless Bee Gees parody that was brutally funny.

  Angus Deayton explained, “The Hee Bee Gee Bees act was part of a show that we did at The Edinburgh Festival, which was the Oxford Revue, where the final part of the revue, ‘Meaningless Songs’, was a parody of The Bee Gees. There were a couple of record producers from a company called Original Music who came to see it, and they basically offered us a recording contract for a single there and then.”

  Phil Pope wrote all the music, with Pope and Deayton collaborating on the lyrics for ‘Ah!’. ‘Meaningless Songs’ and ‘Posing In The Moonlight’ featured lyrics by Richard Curtis, MBE, who wrote Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill and has been involved in several other high profile activities such
as Comic Relief.

  “ ‘Ah!’ was inspired by ‘Children Of The World’ “ Deayton said. “We were always slightly touchy about that [word] because The Barron Knights did use the same tunes and put different words on them, so we slightly prided ourselves on the fact that the music was an original composition, as were the lyrics.”

  The Bee Gees’ reaction was swift and furious. While the group would later profess to find Kenny Everett’s parody of them hilarious, they were outraged at the implication that their lyrics were meaningless.

  “I don’t think that we were aware that The Bee Gees would react so unkindly towards us,” Angus said. “Obviously you never quite know. We did do parodies of a large number of artists on our two albums in the ensuing years, and there were very few, with the possible exception of Abba, who were really against their parody. In fact, a lot of them, like Francis Rossi of Status Quo, were actually quite a fan of it.

  “If you look at Kenny Everett’s parody, effectively what that was, was Kenny miming to ‘Children Of The World’ and taking three pills, one of which gives you a hairy chest, and another a medallion, so it wasn’t particularly offensive. Also, The Bee Gees maintain that Kenny Everett’s one came first, trying to make out that we pinched his idea, but actually ours a), came first and b), was quite a lot more hard hitting and satirical, so that’s probably why they objected to it. I think also in retrospect, with the hindsight that one has and, for example on the Clive Anderson show, I think it’s quite clear that they don’t really have that much of a sense of humour about themselves.

  “We did get the feeling that we did upset them more than others. We only got feedback through third parties, but we got the impression that Maurice was about the only one who had any time for it. I don’t think it did much damage. I mean in a way, I think it does more damage if you object to satirical comments than if you simply go along with every one else and laugh at it. I think if they’d laughed at it, and seen the funny side of it, they probably would have scored more brownie points than objecting to it and slamming the phone down on music journalists, as they did whenever they were after something. I think it just sort of gave people the impression that they don’t have a sense of humour about themselves,” he repeated.