In Praise of Barry Gibb
by Michael J. Roberts
‘Never be ashamed of writing a memorable melody’
~ Burt Bacharach
It seems absurd that the world should need a reminder of the artistic capability of Sir Barry Gibb, the eldest and lone surviving Bee Gee, but I for one think he doesn’t get the kudos he deserves (notwithstanding that he was just given an Australia Day 2022 award to go with his Knighthood!) With a recent and well produced documentary, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, doing the rounds it might be timely to put some things in perspective – including the lack of respect he gets in the narrow minded too cool for school estimation of the Song Nazi cognoscenti. Like another melodic master, Billy Joel, who attracts much the same scorn, Barry is almost terminally unhip and often his own worst enemy – his crimes against fashion alone are problematic to say the least, and his personality reflects a charmless perfectionist with a multitude of insecurities, (nobody’s perfect) but his songcraft doesn’t wear silly puffy shirts or disco spandex, it speaks for itself and stands apart, inscrutable and eternal. So, how did he get here? Let me take you back…
Three Delinquents Shipped South
In 1958, 12-year-old Barry and his younger twins were following in some convict footsteps by being all but transported to the colonies for juvenile delinquency as their rowdy ways and penchant for starting fires had the authorities recommending to their parents that a new start in Australia might be preferable to a stint in some juvenile correctional facilities like Borstal. Hugh Gibb, the father of the boys was a jobbing musician and had found work for his sons as a singing act in working men’s clubs and venues in Manchester where they’d do cute 3-part harmony tune hits like Lollipop. Hugh’s chronic unemployment in a still devastated post WWII economy was another reason faux transportation was attractive as it was as much a way for Britain to reduce its welfare burden as for provinces like Australia and Canada to welcome ready workers and build afresh. Once in Brisbane the boys were cadging tips selling sodas at a local Speedway and would sing to punters as they did, which led to singing gigs and by 1960 regular TV work, so much so that Hugh, who’d struggled to do well as a salesman, took over their management.
Barry had been writing in earnest since he was a 10-Year-old. None of those songs survived the cut because of the same reasons no pre-teen compositions do, unless you’re Mozart. But he honed his craft even while the lads were singing for their supper in kitsch tartan suits and the like on shows like Bandstand. Hugh had them doing songs he thought would give them crossover appeal, like My Old Man’s a Dustman, which harked back to his own Music Hall days but was unlikely to point the way forward. Barry proved so adept as a songwriter that they were on national TV in 1960 playing an original Barry Gibb tune, Time Is Passing By, 2 years before The Beatles did the same. There is an Australian National Film and Sound Archive link to the clip available and it’s priceless and worth a Goog, revealing all the many dynamics that would make them global stars 7 years later were already in place.
History is an agreed set of lies, to paraphrase a particular height challenged French emperor, and often it’s just perceptions that become received history over time. Sometimes that time period is as short as a French… well, you get the picture. Take the Lennon and McCartney mythos of their songwriting ambition – as finally put to bed by no less a researcher than historian Mark Lewisohn. Thanks to the canny P.R. of Brian Epstein the story that took hold in the first flush of Beatlemania was that both John and Paul were prolific and committed songwriters who were writing dozens of songs all the time and had been since they were 14 years old. This was to use another French word – bullshit. They had dabbled on and off for some time as songwriters and were doing very few originals in the band as they mostly thought they were not up to the standard of the beloved covers they thrived on playing. It was not until Brian had amateurishly stumbled into the publishing side of the business that they would up their output at his behest because it gave them another foot in the cliquey London showbusiness door. So, let’s do our bit to correct the record or misconceptions – Barry played his own song on national TV when he was 13 and wrote continually and prolifically as a songwriting careerist from then on, John and Paul did not. While they were dabbling, Barry was beavering. At 17 Barry was a signed, commissioned songwriter, with artists keen to cover his seemingly endless flow of pop songs, at 17 John and Paul were part time amateurs with dreams of grandeur.
Barry was signed to a record deal with his then 14-year-old brothers as (as well as the crucial publishing deal) at the instigation of a key player in the early Oz rock and roll scene, Col Joye. In March 1963 the Bee Gees released their first single, The Battle of The Blue and The Grey, b/w Three Kisses of Love, both Barry Gibb originals. Col himself covered another song for one of his B-sides a couple of months later and soon Barry was placing songs with many Australian artists like Lonnie Lee and Judy Stone. In 1964 Barry registered around 30 songs as copyrights of his, and many of them were covered and made regional charts in Oz by names long since forgotten, like Bryan Davies or Tony Brady, or names that might still register with some, like Reg Lindsay and even Wayne Newton! The Bee Gees continued releasing Barry originals, even if they still had to go on TV shows like Bandstand and do covers of hits like Dylan’s protest song Blowin’ In The Wind, or The Beatles’ hit From Me To You, they still never released covers, even if the public wasn’t buying what they were selling – yet.
Legendary indigenous performer Jimmy Little provided a number two hit for Barry in New South Wales with One Road, and being as it was 1964 all things Beatles were working on Barry’s imagination with one road out of Oz being plotted, however subliminally. In the interim Barry’s songs were in demand and if not yet providing the family a lucrative return he was now an established songwriter – bizarrely (in a Six Degrees of Charles Manson moment), producer, L.A scenester and son of Doris Day, Terry Melcher, proved the conduit to another Wayne Newton cover (They’ll Never Know) and for a US country singer, Jimmy Boyd, who did That’s What I’ll Give To You. The country force was strong in this one from an early age. Melcher had toured Oz with Newton and managed Boyd, and was approached by Belinda Music, Barry’s publisher, and that pitch provided at least 3 American covers, unheard of from an ‘Australian’ writer. Locally Barry was being covered by middling and forgotten acts like Michelle Rae, Jenny Bradley and Dennis and The Delawares.
Barry’s song Wine and Women finally gave the band a top twenty hit in late 1965, helped by another talented British expat in producer and arranger Bill Shepherd. Bill had been a part of an early iteration of the Mike Sammes singers when it was The Coronets and had as recently as the year prior released an album on Parlophone no less, Bill Shepherd Plays Evergreens. Prior to that he’d cashed in on the Beatle craze with Merseymania! – so his proximity to the Four Kings of EMI would have undoubtedly been a plus in Barry’s ambitious eyes. The Beatles phenomena saw John and Paul quickly overtake all the scope and possibility of what a pop song could offer. By 1965’s Help! they had released their first 5 albums, but only 1 of which (A Hard Day’s Night) contained exclusively original material – The Bee Gees first 5 albums in contrast, contain only Barry songs or those he co-wrote with his brothers once they became old enough to contribute meaningfully to the writing process. In 1965 the twins were barely 15 years old, and the first Australian album focused on Barry as the good-looking pop idol and was awkwardly titled Barry Gibb and The Bee Gees Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs. It was essentially a collection of 5 new recordings and previous singles but it was their start as serious artists and a marker in the sand that they were ones to watch.
Escape from Oz
The still teenage trio were heartily sick of the limitations of the small-time Oz scene by 1966, especially as they were at arms-length from the revolutionary goings on in the pop scene of the country of their birth and the epicentre of it all, Swinging London. The ambitious Barry saw the return to England and its conquest as nothing less than his birthright, an error of history corrected. Both he and his brothers were tired of the endless Aussie gig circuit and clueless record executives who couldn’t progress their career as well as they’d like. One talent they did find was American ex-pat Nat Kipner, an A&R man at Spin Records who teamed them with producer Ossie Byrne who gave the boys spare studio time in which they were able to craft a more polished sound and eventually during one of those sessions they recorded one of their finest early compositions, Spicks and Specks, produced by Kipner and released as a single on Spin, just as the band and family sailed for England. The lads couldn’t be happier that they’d left the blighted colony and spent much of the next few years pouring shit on their Australian experience.
The bullying Barry forced his parents into a tough decision – return to the UK with the 3 boys, sister Leslie and look after the still 16-year-old twins and younger brother Andy (born in 1958 in Queensland) or stay in Oz where they’d made a new life. Hugh and Barbara tagged along, against their wishes, which just demonstrated how determined Barry was to take his chance in London. Incredibly, a couple of pieces of luck fell their way – Hugh had naively sent some demos of the boys to Brian Epstein, the most famous manager on the planet, and Brian passed it on to one of his NEMS employees, the ambitious Australian Robert Stigwood. Stigwood heard something he liked and tracked down the family soon after their arrival – amazingly, it was during the voyage that the family got the news that Spicks and Specks had made it to become the number one single in Australia.
Stigwood was a fiercely ambitious showbusiness entrepreneur in the Svengali style, where he tightly controlled his acts and consequently (surprise surprise) great swathes of any profits. He had recently taken a position with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, where any proximity to the biggest act on the planet would be a bonus for his own profile and influence. Stigwood locked the wide-eyed lads into to a particularly one-sided (if industry typical) 5-year-deal and soon the boys set about recording their first singles and album under his tutelage. Barry was happy to wipe his almost 7-year career away by calling the resultant album Bee Gee’s 1st, in effect marking 1967 as Bee Gee Year Zero. While Stigwood helped birth the work, he was smart enough to re-employ Bill Shepherd to do the orchestrations and gave himself co-producing credit along with Ossie Byrne, though creatively the album has Barry’s fingerprints all over it. Meanwhile, Stigwood was in a professional life and death battle with The Beatles as it transpired that they had got wind of an arrangement that would have potentially seen Stigwood gain a controlling interest in NEMS, as Brian Epstein stepped back from day-to-day duties, and they were having none of it. It seemed McCartney particularly had a deep loathing of the lugubrious Australian and given that the move would provide Stigwood with effective management of The Beatles affairs, Paul did all he could to ensure that it wouldn’t happen.
The ‘first’ album was an artistic triumph and contained the hit singles New York Mining Disaster and Holiday as well as the critically lauded To Love Somebody and I Can’t See Nobody. Mystifyingly, the UK and US didn’t warm to Barry’s certified classic, To Love Somebody and ironically the one place that it was a hit was in the much-reviled Australian charts. By the time the album was released, with its hip up-to-the-minute psychedelic cover a la Beatle associate Klaus Voorman and became a top ten hit on both sides of the Atlantic, the Stigwood squabble with The Beatles was moot, as Brian died in murky circumstances and all deals were null and void. Indeed, Stigwood always maintained that the night before Brian died, he and Stigwood had had a shouty argument at NEMS because Robert wanted Brian to join him for the weekend at his Sussex home, not wanting Brian to be alone in the emotional state he was in, (The Beatles were away in Wales that weekend) but Brian refused and stayed in London. The death shook up the British pop scene and contained the seeds of The Beatles eventual split, but Stigwood was now fully independent and his RSO company had Cream.
A New Prince in Town
Barry was all of 20 years old with the world at his feet, and probably feeling that this ‘sudden’ success and fame was vindication of his decision to uproot the entire family and scarper back to England, where his rightful destiny awaited. The twins were only 17 and even though they were seasoned professionals by then, the challenges of the next few years in the heart of the pop maelstrom would test the hardiest mettle. Barry and the boys threw themselves into writing and recording the follow up album, Horizontal, even before Ist was released. Robin and Maurice were now better able to contribute meaningful material and work on co-writes as legitimate partners (Robin showed prior just how much he’d been paying attention by bringing in the classy I Can’t See Nobody), and now Robin and Maurice had initiated the writing of their first number one, Massachusetts. Robin delivered the bulk of And The Sun Will Shine and Really and Sincerely, both great tunes, and the competition between the primary lead singers Barry and Robin, began in earnest. Words was Barry’s major contribution, a killer-if-corny ballad that would be recorded by no less than Elvis Presley, some compensation for the fact that Otis Redding hadn’t lived to record Barry’s bespoke soul song To Love Somebody, even if Nina Simone did an unforgettable interpretation.
The Bee Gees enjoyed global chart success in those heady days, but suffered in comparison to The Beatles, but then again, who did not? Maurice embraced the fame and notoriety with the glee of an addict offered a smorgasbord of a favourite drug, married a bona-fide pop star in Lulu and lived the high life in company with London’s swinging-est beautiful people. Robin retreated into his own odd psyche and Barry worked constantly to ensure they would not lose these hard-won gains. Barry’s ever-present feelings of not being good enough would not have been helped by his introduction to John Lennon at one of the cool London clubs – as Barry told it he was admitted to the groovy inner sanctum and Pete Townsend, whose band was involved with Stigwood, dragged the new prince in town Barry across to meet King Lennon, deep in conversation with someone else. Pete said to John, ‘This is Barry Gibb of The Bee Gees,’ at which a beaming Barry proffered his hand, which John shook without breaking his conversation or looking at Barry, leaving the hapless new pop star stranded. Welcome to the big time.
The first two albums did well, but the third one (Idea) stalled, despite having the excellent and odd hit single, I Started a Joke from Robin. Now that the twins were a present and contributing force for Bee Gees material as well as for the sound, egos and insecurities bubbled to the surface in a way that the benign dictatorship of Barry had not seen before. Robin married and soon had a falling out with his brothers that made The Beatles acrimonious break-up look positively friendly. The struggle was for individual recognition in the collective umbrella of a band, a band of brothers, an unhappy few and it mostly manifested between Barry and Robin in the issue of who sang lead on the singles. Robin’s immediately recognizable quavering light tenor had provided two massive hits with Massachusetts and Joke, and Stigwood usually followed the money while Maurice followed the booze.
Tensions came to a head during the recording of what many consider their early masterwork, Odessa, an overly ambitious double album where they obviously tried to make an artistic statement to prove they were more than Beatle wannabe’s. The album is full of classic Bee Gee bits of business – glorious harmonies, odd lyrics not easily interpreted, offbeat arrangements and immediately accessible and memorable melodies. The title track is a mesmerizing and meandering oddity and if David Bowie had recorded it surely it would be held in higher esteem? But consider the masterful Melody Fair, the enigmatic Suddenly, the catchy Band-esque Marley Purt Drive or the country swing of Give Your Best – it’s a fine collection of songs and also has the best of what classic Bee Gees records still represent – a singular mood or feeling that transcends the era of production, simply put, very few acts could produce pop music so ethereal, almost other-worldly and affecting just by the sheer sound of the music. Their classic era pop evokes something that is powerful and entrancing, and they did it while in their teens or early 20s and remarkably by providing all their own compositions for the material – except for one song provided by their guitarist Vince Melouney.
The Unhappy Few
The tensions continued to build as Stigwood, as much as the breakneck era, set a cracking pace and had Barry supply Words as a bespoke song for a Brit-film called The Mini-Mob starring Georgie Fame, after The Beatles blocked Stigwood from using one of their songs. Barry and Maurice also produced and wrote Only One Woman, for The Marbles, a top 5 hit in the UK, a Bee Gees song in all but name – and it would not be the last time their lead singer Graham Bonnet would benefit from a Bee Gee’s tune. Exhausted from recording their epic double album and from touring, the straw that broke the camel’s back saw Robin and Barry fall out over what song should be the released as the single from Odessa. Robin pushed for his lovely Lamplight, and on the back of the success of I Got To Get a Message To You and I Started a Joke he had a case, whereas Barry wanted First of May, a lovely commercial song and typical of his best work, as was Words. Stigwood still favoured Barry, a classically good-looking pop star over the odd-looking Robin, and as a result Robin promptly left the group.
The split was bitter, deep and beyond acrimonious, so much so that parents Hugh and Barbara tried to get Robin made a ward of the court, stating that the recently wed and still 19-year-old singer was in danger from his manipulative wife! Stigwood went legal of course and tried to stop the release of Robin’s solo single, Saved By The Bell, and Barry called on their sister Lesley to fill Robin’s place in the band temporarily for live shows.
Apartness
The brothers worked apart for the first time in their lives as Robin embraced solo work and even pioneered the use of drum machines in pop recording. Robin published some 35 self-penned songs and Barry and Maurice registered at least 28 co-writes during 1969, an astonishing output given Maurice also wrote and recorded an album’s worth with his brother-in-law Billy Lawrie for a solo album that never saw the light of day and Barry also wrote tunes for his unreleased solo album. On top of this Barry and Maurice wrote and produced for P.P. Arnold, Tin Tin, Samantha Sang, The Marbles, Billy Lawrie, Lulu and others.
After a legal battle, Robin eventually had a hit with Saved By The Bell and the Bee Gees released Tomorrow, Tomorrow around the same time but it did less well. Barry and Maurice put their energies into a TV special and album called Cucumber Castle, and odd stew of pantomime comedy and earnest pop tunes set in medieval England where the brothers play young princes against Frankie Howerd’s king! Arise Sir Barry indeed! The film lurches from charming tosh to embarrassing amateurism in the course of mere frames but is mildly redeemed by having Spike Milligan as The Court Jester, Vincent Price, Eleanor Bron (who was in the first two Beatle feature films) and Lulu singing a wonderful version of Barry’s lovely ballad In The Morning. Stigwood produced the special, shoehorned in footage of Blind Faith at Hyde Park and it aired to general public indifference and scathing reviews on Boxing Day 1970, (as did Magical Mystery Tour in 1967). The shadow of The Beatles still loomed large.
Cucumber Castle (the film) may have been a mess, but it contained several gorgeous tunes with the country lilt of Don’t Forget To Remember Me a standout (it had already been a number 2 hit in the UK) and the pulsing The Lord, sounding like Barry had been listening to The Band and paying attention.* The album expanded further on the country melodicism and contained If I Only Had My Mind On Something Else and Sweetheart, as well as the upbeat throwaway glory of I.O.I.O and the more urgent I Lay Down and Die and the song P.P. Arnold recorded, Bury Me Down By The River. The failure of the film was the last straw for Barry who announced he was going solo too, and soon he released his first solo single I’ll Kiss Your Memory, another country classic, albeit one that failed to chart except in The Netherlands. Stigwood released the album version of Cucumber Castle 4 months after the Bee Gees effectively stopped existing, and the new singles and album did poor business.
* In a conversation with drummer and original Bee Gee Colin Peterson years ago, he told me that both he and Maurice were huge Band fans and turned Barry on to their Music From Big Pink album during the recording of Odessa. When I asked him what else he remembered about Maurice he said, “compulsive liar.”
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
It would be nice to report that the brothers kissed and made up out of filial love and devotion, and that was surely part of it, but after they’d realised the money was drying up, and that Stigwood had an iron clad contract (of the classic ‘what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine’ variety) and it required new Bee Gees material from all three, they swallowed their pride and reformed. They were still young men and prone to rash statements, many of which were breathlessly reported in the music press, but for whatever reasons they determined that together they could sell records and generate an income befitting three princes of the realm, apart not so much. To underline the point Stigwood released a Best Of collection in lieu of new trio material and it sold well worldwide. They finally got together as a trio again in August 1970 (after it seems both Maurice and Robin had been working on songs with the intention to release those duo tracks as The Bee Gees) to consider songs for a new album, and keep in mind that during 1970 between them they registered some 110 new songs! Competition for a place on the next record was beyond fierce.
The lads always insisted that the first session as a reconstituted trio produced the modern standards Lonely Days and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, but their recording schedules were so hyper-charged and sporadic it’s hard to be sure. Print the legend, it’s a good story. Barry was hedging his bets as well, continuing to write and produce songs for his solo album at the same time as contributing to the group sessions. Robin and Maurice were doing the same thing, so a continuing arrangement that could satisfy all the brothers under the band umbrella was no sure thing, no matter how fervently Stigwood and his bankers were wishing it into being. Barry was quoted as saying, “The Bee Gees are there, and they will never, ever part again. If a solo record comes out, it will be with enthusiasm and great support of each of us.” In truth, the market success of the reunion would dictate terms it seems, and just as it had rejected Robin’s Reign, it embraced Lonely Days, sending it to number 3 in America, which gave the accompanying album 2 Years On some momentum when it came out in October. In any event the album only sold moderately, but the appetite and potential of the band was back. Tellingly, there were no Barry and Robin only co-writes on the album, just 3 credits for songs by all 3 brothers and 4 Barry, 1 Robin and 1 Maurice solo tunes and 3 Robin and Maurice co-writes. Some bridges, clearly, had yet to be mended.
After touring on the back of the album the lads got together in January 1971 to work on the follow up album, Trafalgar. They finally recorded How Can You Mend a Broken Heart and it was the lead single from the album, giving them a much-coveted Number One in America. It speaks to the prolific output that the song was not identified as a commercial hit earlier, but that was the nature of the beast at the time – they actually wanted Trafalgar to be a 20- song double album but settled on a conventional 12 song single album. The album was moderately successful, it appeared that some members of the public loved the melodic pop on singles but the Bee Gees themselves were a deeply unfashionable album act at the time, just as albums were the increasing dominant form artistically and commercially. Even the release of Barry’s magnificent, essentially solo cut, Don’t Want To Live Inside Myself, couldn’t whet the album market’s appetite to investigate what other gems Trafalgar may be hiding.
It’s a shame, because that song is one of the finest Barry ever produced and may be one of the most revealing of his character and philosophy. And like his best work the song has a mood that can’t be contained in any description or breakdown of its component pieces – it’s as mysterious, atmospheric and moody as any contemporary Carly Simon piece for instance, and speaks to Gibb’s ability to create something of pure feeling, beyond words. It must have galled Gibb that in an era where mega-sales were being clocked up by the new Singer-Songwriter set, the likes of Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Cat Stevens et. al. – here was a bona fide original singer-songwriter who couldn’t catch even a backhanded compliment from the taste cognoscenti or Rolling Stone writer brigade. Most of these performers were bracketed under the catch-all ‘confessional’ descriptor, which was at once lazy and moderately accurate as inward-looking navel gazing was indeed the order of the day. To that end Barry looked inside and produced several magnificent songs, buried on albums that were ignored, even as the singles market sent the Bee Gees offerings to the top of various charts around the world.
Their next album, To Whom It May Concern, was a band album and one with a title that indicated they were as unsure of their audience as much as they were of their own continued relevance. The single Run To Me was effortlessly catchy and affecting, a top ten hit around the world while the killer ‘confessional’ ballad Alive showed depth and rawness and Road To Alaska was a thumping roots/country workout before alt-country was a thing. The album contained another overlooked classic country song that could be a standard in Sea of Smiling Faces, but the work again failed to find significant acceptance. The band was caught between being seen as an anachronism on one hand and not yet able to build a live audience that could translate to album sales in the same way The Grateful Dead and The Beach Boys were doing on the other. As if to underline their credentials they used concert photos on the cover and intimated that they were a working band as much as a recording act, but to no avail. The situation worsened in 1973 after their next album, Life In a Tin Can (full of solid country/roots tunes) also tanked, to the point where Robert Stigwood rejected the album that followed, A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants, and refused to release it.
Robert Stigwood was a big noise in the entertainment industry by now, and he’d just formed his RSO label, of which the Bee Gees were a key if under-performing player. Eric Clapton had been associated with Stigwood since the days of Cream and Stigwood set about rebuilding his career, after a debilitating round of heroin addiction, by sending him to Miami to record his comeback album, 461 Ocean Boulevard, to be produced by the legendary music figure Arif Mardin. Clapton recommended Mardin to Barry and after Stigwood concurred the brothers brought Mardin to London to record Mr. Natural. Mardin was a famed producer at Atlantic, having produced Donnie Hathaway and Aretha Franklin et. al, and he immediately encouraged the Bee Gees to embrace rhythm and dance music. The album was a transitional one and the worthy title track, the slick pop of I Can’t Let You Go and soft-rock ballad Charade pointed the way to a future full of punchy rhythm tracks and breathy, layered vocals across Rhodes electric pianos. Barry gave a great vocal performance on the country-gospel classic Lost in Your Love, orchestrated beautifully by Mardin with a tasteful string section augmenting Barry’s full-throated singing. The band may not have set the charts alight again, but the experience pointed a way out of the dark to a much brighter future for the now 28-year-old Barry and his over-the-hill 25-year-old brothers!
World domination – When too much Bee Gees is barely enough. Until it is.
Barry and the brothers were still functioning as a band through this period and using their live line-up as the basis for recording the singles and albums, with guitar player Alan Kendall, drummer Dennis Byron and keyboard player Blue Weaver providing the backbone of the sound. Barry used his peculiar tuning and played mostly acoustic guitar parts and Maurice doubled on bass and piano and any number of guitar or synthesiser bits. After hearing of Clapton’s idyllic Miami recording experience at Criteria Studios, they relocated to Florida and teamed up with Mardin again, who’d used Criteria often, and set about the follow up, Main Course. Barry remembered driving across a bridge and the mildly jolting rhythm the tires were causing had him singing a simple pentatonic melody as Drive Talking, but soon they pivoted to Jive Talkin’ and found the driving synth bass and beat to match the tempo. The single (the first to feature Barry’s falsetto voice) was a smash, embraced by their usually welcoming singles market but this time the album went Top Twenty all around the world. Album buyers would have heard several topflight compositions, from the powerful Nights on Broadway and Wind of Change to the delicate Come on Over, a country ballad that Olivia Newton-John had a big hit with. Country Lanes and Songbird were fine ballads, and Edge of The Universe was a superbly melodic (if uncategorisable) piece of pop rock. Fanny (Be Tender with My Love) was a sweet pop confection that concealed its origin as a bad taste joke from Robin (apparently a recidivist in that regard) aimed at homosexuals! Fanny has a different connotation in the British world to the one American’s associate it with, and the difference obviously tickled the fancy of Robin, prone as he was to juvenile humour. The album, nonetheless, was an artistic triumph and easily the strongest consistent collection of songs since Odessa, some six years before.
Having refocused Barry and the band, Mardin was unable to continue as producer because Stigwood signed a deal away from Atlantic, leaving Barry and his engineer Karl Richardson to do the bulk of the production chores. The twins contributed as did new young arranger Albhy Galuten and the model for a stable set up was established as they tackled the new dance-oriented material. The core band from Main Course remained the same and they stayed at Criteria to produce Children of The World, an album that featured a number one single in You Should Be Dancin’ and successful follow ups in the sappy ballad Love So Right and the predictable Boogie Child. Ironically, after producing good songs that were ignored by the public for some years, now the problem they had seemed to be the songs were less well written, albeit cleverly produced, and the public was lapping them up. In Barry’s mind (as in Stigwood’s) the public reaction, in coin and acclaim, was all that counted, and in that regard the Bee Gees were hot again.
Robert Stigwood wanted to position RSO as a film production company, and he’d recently purchased the rights to a Nik Cohn piece involving working class New York kids burning off their weekend energy at saturday night dances. The band was happy at Criteria but without Mardin now and following the lead of the success of Elton John at the Château d’Hérouville in France, they decided to work and record there for the next album. 1976 was also Year Zero in Rock, as Punk Rock in the UK gave popular music, in David Bowie’s memorable estimation, the enema it so desperately needed. Miami may have isolated and insulated Barry from the fallout of the movement, but in time he would feel the ripples. Either way it was unlikely he was paying much attention, as he was too busy in search of the next hit, expanding his version of urban dance music in using probably the first ‘sample’ drum loop in history. Their drummer had to leave the sessions in France for a few days and the production team simply looped a section of one of his dance beats on a tape spool so they could record the backing for a song called Stayin’ Alive. The result thrilled them all and coincided with Stigwood requesting dance songs for his New York film called Saturday Night. Another new song, Night Fever, was pressed into service (and added the third word to the finished film title) as well as the smooth ballads More Than a Woman and How Deep Is Your Love and eventually the soundtrack album was cobbled together with a grab bag of acts (most of whom Stigwood had a percentage of) and a couple of ‘old’ Bee Gees hits in Jive Talkin’ and You Should Be Dancin’.
Saturday Night Fever became a phenomenon and launched the Bee Gees to the toppermost of the poppermost where they stayed in their ivory tower for several years. The John Badham film was grittier than many recall and John Travolta’s star-making turn anchored a solid effort that helped propel the soundtrack album to unheard of sales numbers. Stayin’ Alive is now a cliché in regard to its association with the band, sailing into the charts and cementing Barry’s falsetto as the sound of the era but in reality, only 6 of the 17 songs on the double album are Bee Gee’s recording, and the cover is Travolta dancing in front of an insert of the Gibb brothers, so the message is clear – the Bee Gees are responsible. This would prove a double-edged sword in that ‘disco’ became ubiquitous as every label chased sales by releasing carbon copy acts trying to cash in. At the same time as Punk had chased away Prog Rock and forced navel gazing bands like Yes and Genesis (and even Pink Floyd) to get more concise and singles focused, and as West Coast soft rock disappeared into a fog of cocaine dust, Barry sat atop the pop music ziggurat like a colossus enjoying what he’d always deemed would be his just rewards. Three of the four singles the band released from the soundtrack album, How Deep Is Your Love (surely another juvenile Robin sex pun?) Stayin’ Alive and Night Fever all went to Number One and the band was being mentioned as a matter of course in the same terms as The Beatles chart successes of 13 years prior, oh… and the band dominated the Grammy Awards for their efforts.
Barry could do no wrong, he wrote and produced the title song for Travolta and Olivia Newton John’s film Grease, sung by Franki Valli and it also hit Number One. In 1978 he had a hand in singles that had the top spot in the USA for 26 weeks of the year, an amazing and unequalled run. Never mind that the feel and style of the song Grease was completely out of kilter with the rest of the 1950s pastiche score, the public didn’t mind, and the hits kept coming. And what did Robert Stigwood do to capitalise on the historic momentum? He convinced the band to act in a crap feature film and record songs by a band they would always be in the shadow of (as every other band is) – and so it was they lined up with another non-actor in Peter Frampton to deliver one of the great turkeys of all-time, the feature film of Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Perhaps unsurprisingly the execution of the concept was as inept as the awfulness of the actual concept and such hubris did not go unpunished.
The band eventually licked its wounds and returned with a full Bee Gees album in 1979, the lacklustre Spirits Having Flown, but the band did a lap of honour live tour to promote it and it duly went to Number One, not only in the USA but also in the UK, the first band album to do so. Three of the singles were Number One on the back of the tour, the synth heavy high drama of Tragedy, the slick faux funk formula of Love You Inside Out, replete with Barry falsetto, and the glossy ballad Too Much Heaven. Barry’s insecurities and perfectionism met head on in the recording of the ballad, where he added 17 different vocal overdubs of himself to create the vocal rich chorus, but the fact that he did this while not referencing any of the previous takes and that they synced up perfectly speaks to someone who is beyond the realm of any previously known Obsessive Compulsive Disorder! Maurice was lost in alcoholism and contributed little to the sessions, dominated by Barry.
Plan B – Write and produce others, distract and dig in.
Stigwood may have sensed the goose was out of golden eggs after the Disco Sucks backlash in 1979 seemed to focus on the Bee Gees as the main culprits in the genre’s outsized success in the late 70s, so he duly released a Greatest Hits double album. The 20 songs designed to squeeze even more cash out of the saturated market were remarkably only drawn from 1975 to 1979, completely ignoring the quality songs from 1967 to 1974. The record still made Number One as Barry wisely turned his focus to other artists, as did Robin and the health challenged Maurice. Barry’s perfectionism finally found a way to steady his insecurity, in the time-honoured manner of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson before him, by hooking up with ace session musicians instead of his brothers and the jobbing, if competent musicians in the Bee Gees band. For Barry the penny finally dropped during sessions for his Barbra Streisand project where outwardly co-written Gibb brother’s compositions were tailored for the notoriously fussy diva and put into the hands of the best studio sidemen money could buy. Barry loved the result, and this became his go to model for several years as he applied his skills to making massive, worldwide hits for Streisand, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick.
Ironically, Punk marked a kind of death knell for the ‘old guard’ of musicians just as the Bee Gees were taking the charts by storm. In the UK Punk was a social and political movement as much as a stripped back musical one, but it paved the way for fine song craftsmen like Nick Lowe, Elvis Costello, Andy Partridge, Difford and Tilbrook and Joe Jackson to find acceptance, writers who embodied many of the values Barry Gibb had always represented. In America the confluence of youth disaffection and politics was never going to play out the same way as the youth music there, in many ways, was the dance music the not yet 30-year-old Bee Gees were providing to ignite the multi-coloured floor lights of the nation’s clubs. The hedonism and freedom hinted at in America by dance music by acts as varied as Kool and The Gang, KC and the Sunshine Band and even the cartoonish Village People had no real equivalent in the UK, more in thrall of the retro soul/pop of Culture Club and The Style Council. When dance music took its turn in the UK it had a perhaps inevitable political edge.
Barry produced his unremarkable solo album Now Voyager in 1984, a collection of slick sounding, glossy nondescript tunes just as some of the dance music he’d been at the forefront of promoting found an unlikely outlet in the UK via the gay scene and the club scene surrounding it. The gay scene had always loved Bee Gees music, and if Barry had been able to muster enough A-grade material to meet the moment then he might have reminded the market and the critics that they’d written him off too soon, but he did not. Hedonism was not cool in the UK in 1976 when American dance audiences embraced the Bee Gees, and when it did cross the Atlantic it was driving, sexual and political in the form of Relax and Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood or subversive with the Pet Shop Boys. Sade and Simply Red hinted at the easy melodicism that Barry favoured but the simple fact was that Barry was yesterday’s man and over the hill at the grand old age of 35.
Wouldn’t I be someone…
In the intervening years and into the 21st century Barry spent a lot of time polishing the Bee Gees legend, doing rote new albums every half dozen years or so and touring on the back of them to remind people of their deep and abiding repertoire. Never a cutting-edge live act, and often with a touring band that verged on a mid-level club act level of presentation they relied on the songs to do the work to a greater degree than many of their contemporaries, and the songs proved remarkably resilient. If the masses came for the disco hits, they went away with many beautifully written, melodic classics lodged in their memory banks. Barry lost all three brothers over the years, Andy shockingly young to drug addiction, Maurice to heart issues linked to his alcoholism and Robin to liver cancer. Barry knew all too well the cost of fame.
If the counterculture movement motto of the 60s was ‘never trust anyone over 30’ then time was up decades ago for all the icons of the 1960s and time waits for no one. In truth most creative musicians or songwriters, even those in the top rung of talent, will have a few years at the cutting edge of their craft, or maybe even a couple of decades but most fall far short of that. Icon legacy acts in the 21st century like Cat Stevens or John Fogerty produced the songs most associated with them in a mere 4 years or so in the late 60s and early 70s and have traded on the reputation and bankability of those songs ever since. Barry Gibb belongs in the top tier of songwriters who scrapped and grafted their way to decades of prominence, if not with a concomitant period of relevance. His canny skill and his intuitive melodic craft enabled him to ride out the deep and unfashionable caste markings with which he’d been branded and dismissed by the critical cynics of the time – to the point where the span of his acceptance reaches from John Lennon singing his praises to Ed Sheeran doing Bee Gees covers in concert. No less a figure than Jimmy Webb identified that ambiguity was a songwriters friend, and Barry Gibb has created a catalogue full of mood pieces that can’t be pinned down in a conventional sense, strange and lingering tunes that take the listener to rare places, both familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and surreal at the same time.
Despite all this, Barry Gibb is an odd man out in the songwriting pantheon of greats and still seems mostly overlooked by critics – never fashionable to begin with, damned with the faint praise of being like other great songwriters (name one that isn’t?) and then carrying the can for the ultimate sin of Disco, his timing was generally less than optimal for ensuring the stellar reputation he surely deserves. With his bratty younger brothers, he was convict-adjacent banished to the colonies as a teen, just as he was starting to play music and from that vast, disconnecting distance of the Antipodes he was fated to watch as his homeland turned from a drab monochrome to a vibrant technicolour, the epicentre of pop culture -all the world envied London in the swinging sixties, but none more so than Barry Gibb.
Barry intuited that music was a way out of inherited ordinariness, a way to make his mark and prove he was good enough. That underdog drive should never be undersold in the story of his climb – John Lennon said that you needed to be a “bastard” to make it in the rock industry, and steely-eyed Barry proved that very little would stand in the way of his success. Family was moved and moulded as required and most relationships needed to be transactional in order to continue – when they were no longer transactional, they were ended and the ever-forward-looking oldest Bee Gee moved on to the next challenge, never resting on his laurels or looking back too closely.
Barry Gibb – songwriting titan, can look back on an amazing career, his music loved by people all over the world, more credits on Billboard hits than anyone except Paul McCartney, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, a knighthood and riches too great to count, I only hope he knows that he was good enough after all.
