The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Acceptance was the key for the brothers. After the disco backlash of the early Eighties, they wanted to prove to their detractors that there was more to The Bee Gees than Saturday Night Fever. Referring to John Travolta’s trademark pose on the album cover, Barry joked, “Let’s be clear, here. We never did point at the ceiling!

  “I don’t think we really wanted a Fever,” he added seriously. “As a career move, we would have liked a couple of Top 10 records and maybe to have had a successful soundtrack. But it was such a really huge social phenomenon which nobody could have predicted. It was a stroke of luck in one sense, and a lot of people who loved the film discovered The Bee Gees for the first time. But it also created an image for us which was out of control. When that sort of thing occurs, your life turns upside down.

  “First of all, you don’t think you are that famous … you have got five singles in the Top 10 in America, two albums in the Top 20 … you can’t be any bigger than you are. At that point, you start doubting everything that you are. You feel insecure. Then you realise it’s not being there which is great but getting there — the trip there and the camaraderie of everyone making it together.”

  “We are actually quite simple in our needs,” Robin explained. “All we want is to be around for a long time, make nice hit albums with a few hit singles every now and again and have people come and see our shows. We are keeping our image at a low profile and making the music speak for itself. Fever was really all about John Travolta, not us. He can dance — we can’t!”

  “I want to see The Bee Gees where they are not made fun of,” Barry declared. “That’s my cause. And I’ll go on until that happens. It may never happen, but I don’t care. I’m prepared for the fight.

  “We have taken a lot of flak over the years. We’ve spent too many years on the defensive, and now that we’re on the attack, it feels a damn sight better. This band has been around for 30 years, so it’s a little unfair to tag us with a disco label. Paul McCartney made disco records. Rod Stewart did. Even Ethel Merman*, which shows you how outrageous the times were.”

  The brothers were distinctly perplexed by the public response. “It’s amazing how praise turns to scorn when it suits people,” Barry said. “It’s very confusing. If everybody said no, I would understand and maybe go off and buy a farm and raise pigs. On the other hand, I hear people say, ‘Your music is the most beautiful I ever heard.’ ”

  Despite their longevity in the pop music business, they were still young men. “We see ourselves as coming into our prime,” said Barry. “We don’t see ourselves as having been around a long time. I’m 42 and Maurice and Robin are 39. If you’re that age as a banker or accountant, you’re coming into your prime.”

  The group returned to the United States and on July 13, they appeared on David Letterman’s show, performing ‘One’. On July 29, they began their American tour — Michael Murphy replaced Chester Thompson on drums — with an outdoor concert before an enthusiastic crowd at Riverfest on Harriet Island, St. Paul, Minnesota. Teens too young to have seen Saturday Night Fever when it was first released were on their feet and dancing to the driving beat.

  “Journalists would actually say to our faces, ‘How can you carry on after Saturday Night Fever — it’s a bit of a joke, isn’t it?’ Well, to me, it wasn’t a joke,” Barry declared. “I mean, we had material success, but creatively nobody would take us seriously. It took a while but finally we decided to go out there and do Bee Gees music the best way we could.

  “The press would say, ‘The guys who brought you Saturday Night Fever are here to take you back to the lights and glamour of disco.’ But once they came, they went away with quite a different attitude. Hopefully, the image of being disco wimps is now gone. What we are finding is that there are a lot of girls in the audience around the age of 20. When they were 10 or 11, that’s when the Fever syndrome was very, very hot so they were our fans when they were just reaching that age. Consequently, a lot of our fans are still under 20 and it’s marvellous to see, especially the girls.”

  The concert began with the strong opening track from the One album, ‘Ordinary Lives’ and moved straight into another new song, ‘Giving Up The Ghost’. The Main Course to Saturday Night Fever period was well represented with ‘Jive Talkin’ ’, ‘Nights On Broadway’, ‘You Should Be Dancing’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’.

  “I don’t mind singing the old songs as long as there is a new song out there, a new single, an album that’s happening now,” Robin explained. “Then the old stuff has its place and the show isn’t just a retrospective. Audiences really want to hear the hits.”

  ‘One’, ‘It’s My Neighbourhood’ and ‘House Of Shame’ received as enthusiastic response as the old standards, ‘To Love Somebody’, ‘I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You’, ‘Words’ and ‘Lonely Days’, No Bee Gees’ concert would be complete without ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Too Much Heaven’, ‘Run To Me’ and ‘World’, and all were included in the acoustic medley, which also highlighted the first time that The Bee Gees themselves had ever been heard to sing their compositions, ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘Islands In The Stream’. ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’, ‘I Started A Joke’ and ‘Massachusetts’ completed the “essentials,” and Robin’s solo hits even featured, with a snippet of ‘Saved By The Bell’ in the medley and all three brothers turning in an energetic performance of ‘Juliet’. The “disco wimp” image was well and truly laid to rest.

  The tour crossed the country, ending on September 2 with a show at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in San Francisco.

  The group made an appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show in November, performing ‘One’ and ‘You Win Again’, before setting off on the Australian leg of the tour.

  The promoters of the 1989 Australian Tour, The Bee Gees’ first tour there in 15 years, were David Trew and Garry Van Egmond. It was the fourth time Trew had been the promoter of a Bee Gees Australian Tour; the previous tours being 1971, 1972 and 1974. The Gibb Brothers’ friendship with Trew went back to their Australian days as teenagers performing in a regional Victorian city named Geelong, about 60 miles from Melbourne. Trew, about the same age as the twins, was something of a teenage entrepreneur and he took the time to give the exhausted teenagers a cold drink and meat pie after one of their shows. The Gibb brothers were impressed — never having witnessed such benevolence from a promoter before — and never forgot the favour. Trew also had the foresight to bring them to Australia during their relatively quite periods elsewhere in the world and was rewarded with sell-out tours every time. When The Bee Gees were touring the US during the Fever tour in 1979, the Gibbs invited Trew to join them for a few shows.

  The sell-out tour opened on November 7 in Canberra, with a concert in Adelaide two nights later. A pair of concerts in Perth followed, with three dates in Sydney, two in Melbourne and two in Brisbane. As with previous Australian tours, the November 18 Melbourne concert was captured on film, to be shown as a television special just after the band’s departure from the country.

  In 1990 the special was issued as a Video Cassette for commercial release under the title One For All. Although the video market was relatively new, for a band that had been internationally successful since 1967 with hundreds of live performances under their belt, it was still somewhat of a belated launch into the live video market. Their earliest foray into this genre had come in 1985 when MGM/United Artists released The Story Of The Bee Gees whilst Virgin Music Video issued Bee Gees Biography; both being similar in content, but sufficiently different to merit the purchase of both as far as their visually starved fans were concerned.

  Prior to the show in Sydney there was also a reunion of the 1967 Bee Gees band. Vince Melouney and Colin Petersen, both now Sydney residents, had been invited to catch up with the boys and be their guests at the show later that evening. Colin was later to describe the meeting as “quite tentative at first,” but once they relaxed — while not quite like old times — it was
very friendly.

  From Australia, the One For All tour took them to Japan for six concerts, opening at Yokohama Arena, Kanagawa-ken on November 28 and ending on December 7 at Ehime Kenmin Bunka Kaikan, Matsuyama, Ehime-ken.

  On March 3, 1990, The Bee Gees lent their support to the VH1 cable television channel’s fund-raiser in aid of cystic fibrosis research at Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado, playing an acoustic set.

  Later that month, Maurice began writing music for the proposed film, Sonja. It was a project close to his heart. Andy had read a book entitled Doctor And The Damned, based on the life of Albert Haas, a wartime resistance leader who spied on the Nazis for the Allies. He and his wife Sonja were betrayed by a member of the Hitler Youth and spent the next six years in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau respectively. Reunited after the war, Haas went on to be a leading consultant at New York’s University Hospital.

  Andy was gripped by the story and convinced his brothers of its potential as a film, and Maurice planned to co-produce it for Robin’s Redbreast Films. “It’s a chilling tale, but it has a great message of love conquering all … and survival against the odds.

  “I don’t think we ever thought for a moment that we should drop the project after Andy died,” Maurice declared. “Instead it will be a tribute to him, Andy’s name will be the main credit on the film, and we will dedicate it to him.”

  Although Kevin Costner was touted for the role of Albert Haas, the project was eventually shelved.

  In April, the brothers came together again for Barry’s sixth Love & Hope Tennis Festival at Turnbury Isle Yacht and Country Club in Aventura, Florida. This time they performed a full set comprising ‘To Love Somebody’, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’, ‘Holiday’, ‘Too Much Heaven’, ‘Heartbreaker’, ‘Islands In The Stream’, ‘Run To Me’, ‘World’, ‘Words’, ‘Lonely Days’, ‘Jive Talkin’ ’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing’.

  * * *

  In August 1990, a live version of ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’, taken from the Melbourne concert, appeared on Nobody’s Child, a Warner Brothers Record’s album to benefit the Romanian Angel Appeal launched by Olivia Harrison, Barbara Bach, Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono the previous April.

  By the end of the year, The Bee Gees’ status in the music world was recognised with a career retrospective entitled Tales From The Brothers Gibb -A History In Song, 1967—1990, a boxed set of four CDs or cassettes, released in November.

  “Looking back, as we’ve been doing for this compilation, the songs have a certain naïveté to them but we were finding our own sound,” Barry explained. “There were the harmonies, that particular vocal style, and a sort of Sixties folksy feel that runs through those songs.”

  In addition to The Bee Gees’ hit singles, the set included some rare B-sides and 10 live tracks from the 1989 tour. Outside the United States, the set included three tracks from Barry’s Hawks soundtrack. It would have seemed a perfect opportunity for more rarities — perhaps previously unreleased tracks from A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants. Indeed, Polygram’s box set co-ordinator Bill Levenson disclosed that this was one of the ideas discussed for the set, but they all finally decided not to do so for this particular project, with the sole exception of the demo version of ‘E.S.P.’ possibly included to reduce the number of songs licensed from Warner Brothers’ records. Some of the B-sides, however, had originally had such limited release that, even in England and the United States, a claim could be made that the box included “previously unreleased” songs.

  Perhaps with the lucrative Christmas market in mind, outside the USA, a 21-track CD called The Very Best Of The Bee Gees was also issued, specifically aimed at those who preferred a briefer trip down Bee Gees’ memory lane. In November, a four-track CD single of ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ was released in the UK. The CD also featured ‘Too Much Heaven’, ‘To Love Somebody’ and a Bruce Forrest remix of ‘You Should Be Dancing’. A special 7.15 dub version also appeared on a promo-only 12-inch single.

  To further promote the album in mainland Europe, ‘Words’ and ‘Run To Me’ were the selected tracks on a CD single manufactured in Holland early in the New Year. The marketing strategy paid off as The Very Best Of The Bee Gees scaled the charts in the UK, Europe and Australia.

  By the time Tales From The Brothers Gibb was in the shops, The Bee Gees had already completed their next album, and Barry re-enforced the brothers’ claim that financial gain wasn’t the reason for their continued presence in the studios.

  “We don’t make records to make money — we don’t need to anymore. But we are creative people and we want to have hits, to make records that people like. I don’t see anything wrong with that. The new album will surprise a lot of people, and it’s perfectly timed after this greatest hits package, the old and the new.”

  In February, 1991, The Bee Gees were under the impression that they were about to be filmed for a Channel Four documentary called A Day In The Life Of Steve Wright, appearing on the disc jockey’s popular radio programme when television presenter Michael Aspel entered the studio with his requisite big red book and announced, “The Bee Gees, This Is Your Life.”

  “We always used to watch This Is Your Life as kids and wondered if we would ever be on it one day,” Maurice said.

  The brothers were whisked away to the television studio, where their families and friends were waiting to surprise them. As Hugh Gibb quipped, “It took a television show in England to get your mother away from the slot machines in Las Vegas.” The programme didn’t run to plan at first; the taping was delayed for 40 minutes when the projector malfunctioned. Frankie Howerd, Kenny Everett and Susan George were among the celebrities on hand to share their anecdotes about the group, with taped messages from Robert Stigwood, their sister Lesley and her family, as well as such luminaries as Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Dionne Warwick, Kenny Rogers and Neil Sedaka, who was returning the favour from their appearance on his This Is Your Life.

  Video clips of the very young Bee Gees from Australian television reduced the brothers to fits of embarrassed laughter, but the mood turned sombre as the focus shifted to Andy. Although disc jockey Bill Gates was there to represent the early days in Australia, it seemed odd that there was no sign of their Manchester friends, nor indeed any of the various band members who had worked with the group through the years. Considering The Bee Gees’ long and prestigious history, to those not used to the show’s low key format, it came over as a rather bland special on the band, although it was well received according to TV audience figures. The occasion also marked the last official appearance of Hugh Gibb.

  On March 2, Beri Gibb married Harry “Chino” Rhoades at a chapel in Las Vegas. Although Barry, Robin and Maurice weren’t there to see Hugh give the bride away, their gifts enabled the couple to take a honeymoon in Mexico. At the reception in the ballroom at the Holiday Casino, the newly-weds danced to a recording of a love song written and sung by Beri for her new husband.

  The Bee Gees, meanwhile, were kept busy promoting their latest album, High Civilization and its first single, ‘Secret Love’, released in March in most parts of the world, although American fans would have to wait two more months. The album was again recorded with just a small group of musicians: returning favourites Alan Kendall on guitar and Chocolate Perry on bass, and Tim Moore on keyboards and programming and Lenny Castro on percussion. As usual, Barry and Maurice played guitars and Maurice also played keyboards.

  The overall sound of the album, as well as its follow-up, has been described by some as cold and mechanical and by others as sharp and clear, and the man most associated with this difference is Prince’s engineer Femi Jiya, who worked on only these two albums. The most obvious change is that the percussion tracks, a mix of real and synthesized sound, are loud in the mix, but that’s not the whole answer.

  This was the first Bee Gees album issued essentially on CD. The natural dividing point of two sides was gone, and the album length also increase
d, this one clocking in at just over 60 minutes.

  The second single was released in May. ‘When He’s Gone’ is a genuinely exciting track which again has Robin singing a strong lead most of the way, and a thumping syncopated beat propels the song along. A strong single, it nonetheless failed to make any impact on the charts, despite the sleeve featuring a great picture of Maurice with his hands crossed over his face.

  ‘The Only Love’ sounds like a classic Bee Gees ballad, and it was released as a single in some parts of the world in August but reached only number 88 in Britain. Barry himself must have favoured the song as he featured it as his solo spot, relegating his long time favourite ballad ‘Words’ to a less prominent position during the 1991 European concert tour. The single’s cover artwork featured a photo of Maurice’s daughter Samantha.

  On May 2, The Bee Gees appeared on Arsenio Hall’s late night talk show, performing ‘When He’s Gone’ and ‘To Love Somebody’ but pointedly not being interviewed, amidst rumours of dissatisfaction with the way Hall conducted their chat on a previous appearance. The following night they appeared on fellow former RSO artist Rick Dees’ Into The Night, performing ‘When He’s Gone’ and ‘One’, as well as an interview, the only promotion in the United States for the album and single. Later in the year, a Going Home one-hour special for cable TV’s Disney Channel would highlight the group’s career.

  American radio proved resistant to The Bee Gees once again, with a general feeling of astonishment that the group was still recording. The attitude rankled with the brothers. “You wouldn’t be surprised if Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, David Bowie or Elton John had a new album out. We’re younger than any of them,” Robin protested. “Why do you think we should retire? We’ve a long way to go yet.”

  On May 25, The Bee Gees kicked off their 23-city High Civilization European tour in Kiel in Germany. During that first evening’s concert, they included their tribute to Andy, ‘Wish You Were Here’, but perhaps the memories were still too fresh, as the song was dropped from the set list for the remainder of the tour.