Thursday, August 28, 2014

Barry & Linda Gibb 44th Wedding Anniversary

On september 1th 2014 Barry and Linda celebrate their 44th wedding anniversary and also Barry celebrates his 68th birthday!! Wishing a happy birthday and a lovely
anniversary!!



Friday, August 22, 2014

Bee Gees Mythology

Bee Gees Mythology Reprise

By Dan Forte


  When the Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1997, Barry Gibb acknowledged that they are “the enigma with a stigma.” Indeed, to find a musical act that has gained such enormous popularity while eliciting such passionate ire, you’d probably have to go back to Pat Boone. The staggering stats of brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb are well known. Originally Beatles influenced balladeers, their first five singles reached Billboard’s Top 20 in the mid ’60s.

Eight years later, they began a string of number-one disco hits that culminated with six consecutive chart-toppers. A career-spanning, four- CD boxed set and comprehensive, two-hour DVD mark their 50 years of music making. With so many unauthorized “critical analyses” flooding the market, it’s nice to see a proper documentary on any major group, and producer/director Skot Bright does a splendid job of telling the Bee Gees’ fascinating story – along with a lot of rock history. Interviews (some archival, including the late Maurice, some new for this project) and rare footage tell the story of the family’s move from the Isle Of Man to Australia; their early influences (adding a third voice to the Everly Brothers’ style); some initial TV appearances; and their decision to move to England – with Maurice laughingly recounting how they were advised, “Go back. Groups are dead, Clapton lives.”

The Bee Gees’ instrumental abilities have never received much recognition – overshadowed by their trademark vocal harmonies. But from their preadolescent beginnings, their sound was anchored by Barry’s rhythm guitar, with Maurice eventually adding electric 12-string, then bass and keyboards. He recalls a breakthrough on “Wind Of Change,” from 1975’s Main Course, when producer Arif Mardin gave his bass part a thumbs-up on the first take.

. It’s almost unfathomable that Maurice is never mentioned in discussions of great funk bassists, considering he laid down the famous part on “Stayin’ Alive.” Produced by the band with Albhy Galuten and engineer Karl Richardson, it featured Maurice on bass, Blue Weaver on keyboards, and Barry and Alan Kendall on guitars. The producers had to turn two bars from “Night Fever” into an eternal tape loop when drummer Dennis Byron had to fly home, so the record listed “Bernard LupĂ©” as drummer on the smash.

It’s hard to criticize the Mythology box, because the format (one disc focusing on each member plus younger brother Andy) and song choices were made by surviving brothers Barry and Robin. They purposely didn’t trot out every hit, including some nice album cuts and rarities instead, but omitting “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love),” “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart,” and the aforementioned “You Should Be Dancing” is unimaginable. Perhaps stranger is the exclusion of “Nights On Broadway,” the song in which Barry discovered his falsetto – which Billy Corgan (of Smashing Pumpkins) credits in the liner notes as heralding what was to come. A better history (without much overlap) is the four-disc Tales From The Brothers Gibb, whose 71 tracks, sans Andy, go only as far as 1990.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Radio.com Minimation: The Bee Gees and Life After ‘Saturday Night Fever’

By Brian Ives 
On Minimation, we comb through the archives of legendary New York radio station WNEW-FM and animate interviews with legendary rock artists. This installment is taken from a 1988 interview with the Bee Gees, where they discusses the effect that ‘Saturday Night Fever’ had on their career. This one is a bit bittersweet, in retrospect: Maurice and Robin Gibb do most of the talking (Barry was present, but had a cold). And of course, Maurice and Robin are, sadly, no longer with us. This Minimation was created for Radio.com by Max Werkmeister.
What do you think of when you think of the Bee Gees? The Beatles-eque young lads of “New York Mining Disaster 1941″ fame? How about the guys who did the definitive version of “To Love Somebody,” later to be covered by Rod Stewart, Janis Joplin and Gram Parsons?
Let’s be real: you think of the white suits, feathered hair, and disco jams. Today, “Stayin’ Alive,” one of their monster smashes from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is a much celebrated classic that even Bruce Springsteen has covered. But the post-disco era was very much an anti-disco era, and the brothers Gibb were smarting from the backlash.
“We are songwriters, mostly,” Maurice said. “We are performers secondly.”
“And,” he added, “We don’t deal in trends and images.”
Robin noted, “We didn’t even write them for the movie.” The band were recording their next album in France, and Robert Stigwood, their record label head and manager asked to use three of the songs for a film he was producing. “We were R&B,” he said, as opposed to a disco act like Donna Summer or Chic.
Not mentioned in this excerpt was their more ill-fated decision to co-star with Peter Frampton in a disastrous film version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By 1988 when this interview was conducted, the stink was still on them, a decade down the road.
But, years later, all was forgiven. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. And “Stayin’ Alive” was one of the songs they performed at the ceremony



Friday, August 15, 2014

25 Years Ago: The Bee Gees Rebound With ‘One’


“It was never our intention to do anything else with our lives except to become famous,” admitted Barry Gibb in a 1989 interview. In fact, he added, he and his younger twin brothers Maurice and Robin — or, as the three have always been more popularly known, the Bee Gees — were busy making plans at an age when most kids were still playing with toys: “Before we ever got into our teens, we had already agreed with each other that that’s where we were going.”
The brothers’ ambition paid off in a big way. The Gibbs formed their first band in the mid-’50s, when Barry was nine and the twins were six; 10 years later, after the family moved from the UK to Australia, they were already a successful recording act with a budding discography that started producing Australian hits as early as ‘Wine and Women’ in the fall of 1965. And although those early years were followed by plenty of ups and downs — including a brief breakup — by the end of the ’70s, the Bee Gees were one of the biggest bands on the planet.


That torrid late ’70s run, fueled by the string of hits that came out of the Bee Gees-dominated ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack, eventually turned into a liability, as the group’s sound and public image became intertwined with the disco craze. When the disco backlash inevitably followed, the Bee Gees became a convenient scapegoat for a musical and cultural fad that, for awhile, proved maddeningly pervasive. In 1979, their ‘Fever’ follow-up LP, ‘Spirits Having Flown,’ topped charts around the world; two years later, its successor, ‘Living Eyes,’ peaked at No. 41 in the U.S.
To their credit, the Bee Gees responded to their sudden change in fortune by going away — or at least seeming to. For listeners who were paying attention, the Gibbs were almost as active on the charts as they’d been during their peak; they just did much of their work behind the scenes, penning hits for artists such as Dionne Warwick (1982′s ‘Heartbreaker‘), Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (1983′s ‘Islands in the Stream‘), and Diana Ross (1986′s ‘Chain Reaction‘), while Barry and Robin continued their solo careers.


By the middle of the ’80s, however, they’d started to get antsy for a return to their roots as a trio, even if resurrecting the Bee Gees banner meant starting over from scratch on the professional front. “We’d lost our management and our record company,” Barry admitted later. “And all of those legal problems associated with both led us into a vacuum for years. And so, for those years we weren’t a pop group and we enjoyed it. It was good for us. Then I think we basically just got tired of listening to everything that was on the radio and knowing we could do just as well, if not better.”
 

The Gibbs broke the Bee Gees’ recording hiatus with 1987′s ‘E.S.P.’ album, which served as a sonic evolution of sorts, while maintaining ties to the group’s platinum past. Co-producer Arif Mardin, working with the band for the first time in over a decade, had earlier been instrumental in helping them refine the sound that led to their work on ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ And although ‘E.S.P.’ wasn’t a major hit in the States, it enjoyed substantial success in other parts of the world, led by the No. 1 UK single ‘You Win Again.’

“It sustained us,” Barry admitted of ‘You Win Again’ catching on. “It proved our belief in what we were doing and that was encouraging. So we carried on.”
Their resolve was tested harder than ever the following year, when preparations for the ‘E.S.P.’ follow-up were derailed by the sudden death of the Gibbs’ younger brother Andy. Just 30 at the time of his passing, Andy Gibb enjoyed his own late ’70s successes as a successful solo artist, but he struggled out of the limelight. Well-documented battles with substance abuse contributed to the heart troubles that ultimately killed him on March 10, 1988.
In the years before he died, the elder Gibbs had been working on demos for a new Andy Gibb solo record, to be followed by an album and tour with the Bee Gees. “We were going to be together, to go out as a force,” Barry recalled. “He wanted to do another solo album to prove he was good at what he did and then he was going to join us. … That has to be the saddest, most desperate moment of my life, when I heard he was gone. Since then, I’ve asked myself a thousand times, could I have done more or said more to help him?”
 

The Gibbs’ sadness echoed through some of the material written for the new Bee Gees LP, ‘One,’ which arrived in the summer of 1989 — but while songs such as ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘Tears’ seem directly inspired by Andy’s passing, the album’s tone was far from funereal. In fact, as evidenced by the title track and leadoff single, the trio’s trademark sibling harmonies and knack for radio-ready melodies remained intact. As Barry later told it, their younger brother’s death ultimately served as a sort of rallying cry.

“It devastated the whole family,” he admitted. “Nobody expected anything like that to happen to Andy.” But, he said, “It’s been a very spiritual experience for us; it’s made us all much more interested in the metaphysical side of life, and it’s made us want to perform much more than we would have normally. We want to get up and be counted — we want to play our music live, we want to become a performing group like we used to be … I think losing Andy has brought that out in us, in that we always feel that he was a very gifted person and a lot of it was wasted for various reasons. We don’t want to waste what we do, and that’s been a lesson to us: We want to do everything we can do and get better at it, and I think Andy’s responsible for that also.”
Whether ‘One’ represents a musical improvement for the Bee Gees depends on one’s personal point of view, but it definitely marked a surprising commercial rebound for the group, particularly in the U.S., where the ‘One’ single peaked at No. 7, giving them their first Top 10 hit since 1979. The album’s success coincided with the Bee Gees’ first full-fledged tour in years, and a decade after being crucified for disco’s sins, they were finally able to resume their recording career in earnest.
“We’ve always had a feeling about something we thought was a hit. We feel in our bones that that’s a hit record,” Barry noted of ‘One.’ “If we’re going to reclaim ground we’ve lost, then we have to make the best album we know how to make — not just make an album for certain ears, or an album that’s commercial. Just what we love as music.”
 

Recorded mostly with a relatively small four-piece session band, ‘One’ was neither as dance-driven as their ’70s hits nor as synth-dominated as ‘E.S.P.’; it was simply a snapshot of where the Bee Gees happened to be musically at that point in time. Even as it returned them to the public eye as something other than a punchline for the first time in years, however, it didn’t exactly restore them to their former commercial glory. In the U.S., the album stalled at No. 68, and its follow-up, 1991′s ‘High Civilization,’ failed to chart altogether.

Still, ‘One’ proved far from the Bee Gees’ final chart appearance; while 1993′s ‘Size Isn’t Everything’ failed to catch on in the States, it did well around the world, and both 1997′s ‘Still Waters’ (featuring the Top 40 hit ‘Alone’) and 2001′s ‘This Is Where I Came In’ peaked in the Top 20 of Billboard’s U.S. albums chart. Sadly — but perhaps fittingly — it was finally only death that could drive the Bee Gees apart; Maurice passed away suddenly in January of 2003 while awaiting intestinal surgery, and although Robin and Barry mulled over carrying on as a duo, those plans died with Robin after he succumbed to complications resulting from liver cancer in May of 2012.
Ultimately, while they may always be most strongly identified with one particularly powerful moment in their long career, the Bee Gees never really stopped moving creatively — and although they were counted out countless times, they never lost the drive that initially propelled them to stardom. “We totally believe in our music,” Barry explained in the months after ‘One’ was released. “That’s it, regardless of what anyone else may think of it, and it just drives us on.”
“It was never our intention to do anything else with our lives except to become famous,” admitted Barry Gibb in a 1989 interview. In fact, he added, he and his younger twin brothers Maurice and Robin — or, as the three have always been more popularly known, the Bee Gees — were busy making plans at an age when most kids were still playing with toys: “Before we ever got into our teens, we had already agreed with each other that that’s where we were going.”
The brothers’ ambition paid off in a big way. The Gibbs formed their first band in the mid-’50s, when Barry was nine and the twins were six; 10 years later, after the family moved from the UK to Australia, they were already a successful recording act with a budding discography that started producing Australian hits as early as ‘Wine and Women’ in the fall of 1965. And although those early years were followed by plenty of ups and downs — including a brief breakup — by the end of the ’70s, the Bee Gees were one of the biggest bands on the planet.

That torrid late ’70s run, fueled by the string of hits that came out of the Bee Gees-dominated ‘Saturday Night Fever’ soundtrack, eventually turned into a liability, as the group’s sound and public image became intertwined with the disco craze. When the disco backlash inevitably followed, the Bee Gees became a convenient scapegoat for a musical and cultural fad that, for awhile, proved maddeningly pervasive. In 1979, their ‘Fever’ follow-up LP, ‘Spirits Having Flown,’ topped charts around the world; two years later, its successor, ‘Living Eyes,’ peaked at No. 41 in the U.S.
To their credit, the Bee Gees responded to their sudden change in fortune by going away — or at least seeming to. For listeners who were paying attention, the Gibbs were almost as active on the charts as they’d been during their peak; they just did much of their work behind the scenes, penning hits for artists such as Dionne Warwick (1982′s ‘Heartbreaker‘), Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (1983′s ‘Islands in the Stream‘), and Diana Ross (1986′s ‘Chain Reaction‘), while Barry and Robin continued their solo careers.

By the middle of the ’80s, however, they’d started to get antsy for a return to their roots as a trio, even if resurrecting the Bee Gees banner meant starting over from scratch on the professional front. “We’d lost our management and our record company,” Barry admitted later. “And all of those legal problems associated with both led us into a vacuum for years. And so, for those years we weren’t a pop group and we enjoyed it. It was good for us. Then I think we basically just got tired of listening to everything that was on the radio and knowing we could do just as well, if not better.”


The Gibbs broke the Bee Gees’ recording hiatus with 1987′s ‘E.S.P.’ album, which served as a sonic evolution of sorts, while maintaining ties to the group’s platinum past. Co-producer Arif Mardin, working with the band for the first time in over a decade, had earlier been instrumental in helping them refine the sound that led to their work on ‘Saturday Night Fever.’ And although ‘E.S.P.’ wasn’t a major hit in the States, it enjoyed substantial success in other parts of the world, led by the No. 1 UK single ‘You Win Again.’
“It sustained us,” Barry admitted of ‘You Win Again’ catching on. “It proved our belief in what we were doing and that was encouraging. So we carried on.”
Their resolve was tested harder than ever the following year, when preparations for the ‘E.S.P.’ follow-up were derailed by the sudden death of the Gibbs’ younger brother Andy. Just 30 at the time of his passing, Andy Gibb enjoyed his own late ’70s successes as a successful solo artist, but he struggled out of the limelight. Well-documented battles with substance abuse contributed to the heart troubles that ultimately killed him on March 10, 1988.
In the years before he died, the elder Gibbs had been working on demos for a new Andy Gibb solo record, to be followed by an album and tour with the Bee Gees. “We were going to be together, to go out as a force,” Barry recalled. “He wanted to do another solo album to prove he was good at what he did and then he was going to join us. … That has to be the saddest, most desperate moment of my life, when I heard he was gone. Since then, I’ve asked myself a thousand times, could I have done more or said more to help him?”



 



©  ultimateclassicrock.com


Sunday, August 10, 2014

Samantha Gibb Web stream 2009


RJ about the article about his mother's play and cd Robin Gibb 50 St. Cat's Drive

Myself and Megan never agreed to our child Max's image being used in the paper, we were never consulted. We were told that we would be able to see the article before print, and then the appropriate pictures would be selected.

We never saw a preliminary write up of the article and if they got the go ahead from someone else, they should not have complied. I call on the paper in question to now remove Max's image from at least their on-line posting if they have any respect for ...a child and the wishes of his parents, and before they even try to say anything about my mother's presence in the photograph then I will state now of course that it has nothing to do with her and all to do with the article astride the photograph.

No shame, it's the same old stuffings. It is truly boring now, like the literary version of watching bad soap opera repeats. There were great interviews that had taken place with us for that article, on upcoming projects, new songs that my father wrote, songs my father and I wrote together and much much more, information that I'm sure lots of people would have been interested in knowing, but no mention.

Why interview anyone when you know what your going to print from the get go? Also, my mothers play was written years ago, in the 90's as a fiction. She turned people she knew in the villages around Northern Ireland, (where she grew up), into characters. For the papers to somehow relate the play to my father is ridiculous. According to them I compiled songs of my father's for 50 St Cats
Really, apart from a couple of remakes of older songs, new songs were composed for 50 St. Cat's by my father, myself and my father, and Pete Vetesse.


 As anyone who is a true fan or who is familiar with the story knows, my father began writing songs for 50 St. Cat's Drive with Peter John Vetesse. My father and I then composed songs and wrote lyrics for 50 St. Cat's before we began work on the Titanic Requiem. After his passing, I went into Red Bus Studios in London and finished the production of the album before it finally went on to Metropolis for the mix down.
Best wishes to all RJ

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Dwina and RJ Gibb chat to Steve Wright

Steve Wright chats to comedian Johnny Vegas and the late Robin Gibb's widow and son.

broadcast :06 Aug 2014

Dwina discusses her new play and RJ has news of a Robin Gibb album coming out next month.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0249v64