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Friday, December 18, 2015
Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Bee Gees: Gail Williams talks to Bee Gee Barry Gibb
By Gail Williams, The Sunday Times,
March 6, 2005)
With 'Saturday Night Fever' soon to hit the Perth stage, GAIL WILLIAMS talks to Bee Gee Barry Gibb, whose music helped define an era of white satin suits, fabulous flares and strutting on the dance floor.
The Manchester-laced voice of Barry Gibb - he of the tight pants and gold chains and the hairy third of the mega group the Bee Gees - says down the phone that he still calls Australia home. The toothily handsome Bee Gee is one of the top five most successful artists in pop-music history. He's in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. His face has even appeared to a British carpenter on a toasted crumpet, who immediately interpreted the vision as a sign of the second coming of Christ. But that's another story.
Let's just say that for a legion of well-worn groovers who cut their adolescent teeth on 'Spicks and Specks' Barry Gibb is an all-round icon.
But something's telling Gibb he must go home. And this time it's not to Massachusetts.
On the eve of the Perth premiere of 'Saturday Night Fever,' the musical which forever cemented him and his brothers Robin and Maurice in the annals of pop music history, he's hankering after Brisbane's Redcliffe racetrack, Bunnerong Road, Maroubra, the Palm Lounge on the Gold Coast, and the town hall at Cohuna in Victoria - all fond memories of a childhood spent penning heartfelt lyrics and putting them to upbeat tunes while dreaming of fame and fortune.
Gibb's present home of 26 years is celebrity-studded Miami, a palatial testament to a realisation of those dreams - 110 million times over. That's how many of his records - with names like 'I've Gotta Get A Message to You', 'Don't Forget to Remember', 'I Started a Joke', 'To Love Somebody', 'Massachusetts', 'Nights on Broadway' - have sold over four decades.
Miami's nice, even with vice, but 39 years after Barry and his younger twin brothers sailed from Australia on the Fairsky hoping to make their mark on the international music scene, he wants to revisit his roots.
"Leaving Australia was the hardest thing I have ever done," he says. "They were probably the greatest years of our lives - larking around on the beach, going barefoot to school, fishing, playing on the mudflats."
Gibb is remarkably charitable seeing that the Bee Gees left Australia under a cloud of legal activity with Festival Records trying to prevent them from going.
And it was a less than enthusiastic public which saw the Gibb brothers, then aged 20 and 17, seeking new horizons despite having already written 60 songs that were recorded by others. 'Spicks and Specks', their first No. 1 single, had just taken off in November 1966.
Gibb, now 58, also reveals he will have to overcome his fear of flying - something which has plagued him since September 11 - to complete his planned Australian tour in which he will retrace the steps of the young Bee Gees who moved from Manchester to Queensland when Barry was just 11.
This, his first Australian tour since 1999, will be without Robin. While Barry was always seen as the leader of the group, it was Maurice, who died two years ago just before undergoing emergency surgery, who was the glue that bound them together.
"Robin and I won't get together to do anything," says Gibb. "We are so different as people. It was great being together as a band, but much more difficult being brothers than it was being in a band. We have no plans to do anything at the moment, but who knows?
"Right now I'm writing songs for me (as well as Sir Cliff Richard and Barbra Streisand) and I'll keep doing it for as long as I stay balanced and I don't fall over. Everything seems to be working OK at the moment. I don't want to live on past records."
It's timely that Gibb plans to tour Australia when 'Saturday Night Fever' - nearly three decades after the Robert Stigwood film hit world screens and ended up defining an era - is once again sweeping the country, this time on stage.
After a successful Melbourne season the show opens in Perth on March 15, offering the Bee Gees' disco beat for a whole new generation with hits such as 'Jive Talkin', 'You Should Be Dancing', 'Stayin Alive', 'If I Can't Have You' and "How Deep is Your Love'.
No one, it seems, is more delighted than the man who made it all possible, Robert Stigwood, who produced both the 1978 movie and the musical which premiered in London in 1998.
Stigwood, now aged 70, has been a longtime friend of Gibb's since he signed up the Bee Gees three weeks after they hit London. He saw the show recently in Melbourne and declared it the best production he'd seen.
So impressed was Stigwood with Melbourne boy Adam-Jon Fiorentino in the lead role of the disco king Tony Manero that he could be drafted for the West End production in London.
Though Gibb has seen the production half a dozen times in London and New York, he says he can easily resist the temptation to leap up and stab the air like John Travolta. Apart from the fact he was never really into disco dancing, he also suffers from rheumatoid arthritis which prohibits him from dancing.
"I never really did any disco dancing," he laughs. "I would just move around on the stage. But even now, when people see me in the street, they point upwards to the sky. It's just something I'll always have to live with.
"But it's the tennis I really miss. I didn't start playing till I was about 35 and my joints are no good. I have had an operation on my back and apparently arthritis occurs with a lot of people who have had back surgery."
Even when sitting in the audience and hearing the opening strains of 'Staying Alive' - which sold 40 million copies - Gibb barely raises a goosebump.
"I think (hearing) it's quite fun," he says. "It's great for people who love dancing. The only thing I miss on stage is the falsetto."
After the huge success of 'Saturday Night Fever', which saw them become the biggest band in the world, there was shame, stigma and ridicule as the world left disco behind. The Bee Gees never shook the disco image despite such achievements as being the only pop group to have written, produced and recorded six consecutive No. 1 hits on the US charts. Only Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney have sold more records.
But their songs live on, having charmed three generations of children and they continue to be parodied in television programs from 'The Simpsons' to 'The Office'.
Gibb is intrigued, like most people, at the resurgence of the '70s - the fashion and the old bands touring.
"I think people are going back to it because it was an innocent era and they just want to live through it all again," he says. "You got to dress up and wear those great big jeans and a lot of strange clothes."
These days Gibb spends his days ferrying his daughter, 13-year-old Ali - "a Justin Timberlake fan, no less" - to and from school and writing songs with his son Stevie, who is in a heavy metal band, Crowbar.
"I still write in the same way that I always did, " he says. "I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then. Anything can inspire me - a conversation, something strikes you about words which can end up being a title."
Gibb attributes his creativity to being a left-hander and also to being badly scalded as a two year old.
"I was given about 20 minutes to live and I can't remember any of it," he says. "I think sometimes when you feel so much pain it gets stored away in your mind somewhere and then it comes out later in some creative way."
It's the same with the pain of his brother's death, which he says will not go away. "We were sort of like the three musketeers," he says. "We were all looking for the same thing. Suddenly one of you is not there. I have to get used to it, get on with life. Maybe the way to do it is through music - keeping the music alive."
http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/
Bee Gees : "AT HOME WITH MAURICE GIBB"
(TG Magazine, September 1978)
"How does it feel being on top of the music business?" Maurice Gibb, one-third of the most successful act in the history of popular music, knows and answers. "Fabulous," he says, almost without thinking. But there's something hollow about the answer.
Maurice Gibb. The name - along with those of twin brother Robin and older brother Barry - is magic. Over the past two years, the Bee Gees have redefined the meaning of success. The soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever (sold exclusively on the strength of the Bee Gees' name, even though it contains only five tracks by the Gibbs) is selling so well in the United States that customers don't get a complete set of records and jacket - they get the records and a coupon which they can exchange for a jacket later when the printer is able to catch up with the demand.
In Canada, the Saturday Night Fever album has sold almost 1.5 million copies, making it the all-time best-seller in this country. Only Rumours comes anywhere close in sales - and the movie soundtrack is a double-record set selling at a much higher price.
Estimates of the Bee Gees' earnings last year alone came to something over $15 million - and that was just before the Saturday Night Fever music flung them out of the category of superstars and into a galaxy of their own.
So why shouldn't Maurice be turning cartwheels over glee? It's the same old story: success brings financial rewards on the one hand and takes away personal privacy on the other. Or, as Maurice puts it, "we're reached the point where we can't simply walk around unnoticed anymore."
There have been Bee Gees fans for years, of course. The brothers had their first major hit in 1967 and, particularly in Canada, have been stars ever since. But now, with their pictures on every magazine cover, television screen, movie poster and billboard in North America, the Gibbs can't even hide unrecognized in dark restaurants. "I can't even go out for dinner without a bodyguard," Maurice complains. "Not that I want to avoid our fans -they're great - but there are kooks who want to start a fight with someone well known just so they can brag to their friends later."
It's a summer afternoon in Miami Beach, adopted home of Maurice and Barry Gibb. (Robin has refused to leave England but spends so much time as a guest in Miami - the group records at Miami's Criterion Studios - that he may as well make it official.) The temperature is already in the high 80's (fahrenheit) and will go considerably higher before the day is over. Palm trees, a pool in the courtyard, American cars in the drive and a boat moored in the lagoon behind the house - it's a far cry from the England where the Bee Gees spent so many of their formative years.
"I need a wall and an iron gate around my house. We have to take a private plane when we travel. And there are special police patrols in this neighbourhood. I know it's hard to believe but life isn't necessarily as much fun anymore, even though our success has been fantastic."
"Practically speaking, we didn't have much alternative to moving to the States," Maurice points out. "We finally found a recording studio (Criterion) which we love. So much of our performing is done in the United States now. And there were tax reasons involved. Besides, we love the area."
For that matter, the Bee Gees always had reservations about life in England. For years, none of the important British music newspapers would say a good word about the Bee Gees. There were few honest-to-goodness Bee Gees fans in the country. Everyone there, it seemed, regarded the Bee Gees as second-string Beatles.
It wasn't a fair comment, as the more recent Bee Gees albums have proven. But, as Maurice admits, there were always similarities between the two groups. "I lived next door to Ringo. Our manager worked with the Beatles. And we both liked to use big orchestras, which wasn't like the rest of the music business. So people naturally started thinking of us and the Beatles together.
"In the rest of the world, it didn't hurt us. But, in England, there was always a wall between us and the public."
Ironically, the group which caused so many difficulties for the Gibbs back in England also wrote the music which forms the basis for the latest recording and first film appearance by the Bee Gees.
The Beatles wrote St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a collection of songs which would fit nicely onto one album. There. was no continuity of theme from one song to another - "Tell me the connection between Lovely Rita Meter Maid and Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and She's Leaving Home," Maurice challenges - just a unique collection of musical and lyrical images. When The Bee Gees' manager decided that the time was ripe for a Beatles' musical revival, he simply acquired the rights to the Sgt. Pepper name and many Beatles' songs; a writer was then assigned to put the songs into a story form suitable for filming.
The movie title itself is misleading. The songs involved do come from the Sgt. Pepper album - along with songs from several other Beatles' collections. Anything that seemed to find a niche in the writer's background was slotted in. And, according to some viewers, the movie is one of the year's masterpieces. And then there are the other viewers who regard it as a piece of junk. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
"It was easy for us to work with all those Beatles songs," Maurice admits, "because we grew up with them. We'd sing them at parties with the Beatles. And the vocal parts closely resembled the way we arranged many of our songs. Certainly it wasn't hard for us to get in the mood.
"And we love the songs. There was never any thought on our parts that we shouldn't record anything that wasn't our own music. In fact, it proved to be a nice change from having to create all our own music."
Creating. The life - and death -of any musical entity depends on the creative forces. When the creative forces are strong, the musician thrives. But when the forces are weak, the career is in trouble.
The Bee Gees know what it's like to run out of creative energy. Between 1972 and 1975, the group couldn't beg a hit. They stuck closely to the ballad style which had built their reputation in the first place. But the ballad style wasn't contemporary anymore. They sounded dated.
In 1975, they made the most important decision of their career: to work with a producer named Arif Mardin, well-known for his work with soul acts like Aretha Franklin. Mardin taught the brothers how to work a dance beat into their music. ("I never knew I could play bass like I do now until Arif showed me," Maurice claims.) Then they went to work recording Main Course.
"There's a bridge that we have to cross on the way to the studio," Maurice remembers. "And every time we crossed it, the car would make a clickety-clack sound. After a few days of this, we realized that the clickety-clack rhythm was perfect for a song. And it turned into Jive Talking'." And a new career was born.
"People accuse us of being nothing more than a disco band now," Maurice says defensively. "But they don't know what they're talking about. If you listen to our records, you'll find that there's dance music. But there are also ballads like More Than A Woman. And there are some very beautiful, undanceable songs, too.
"But the key to our success, I think, is the lyrics. People can listen to our lyrics and relate to what's happening. Everyone has loved somebody. Everybody knows what it's like staying alive."
And the Bee Gees' beat is the freshest sound in years.
At one end of his house, Maurice has set up a small studio. It's full of instruments - from drums to keyboards to guitars. Maurice plays them all - and Maurice works out his musical ideas here. Right now, he's playing back some of the results from the Bee Gees' first normal recording in more than two years. Since Children of the World in 1976, the Bee Gees have released only the live album, the Saturday Night Fever recordings and now the Sgt. Pepper music. Everyone wants to know what the new album will sound like.
After a brief burst of static, the speakers roar into life. Robin is singing his heart out about "It's a tragedy" and the band is grooving more solidly than the Bee Gees have ever sounded before. The dance beat is there alright. And the bass is mixed stronger than the Bee Gees fans are accustomed to hearing. It is, in short, brilliant.
And the answer to the question everyone asks- can the Bee Gees survive? - becomes obvious. They'll survive. And the world hasn't heard anything yet; the Bee Gees are just finding their groove now.
http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/
Sunday, December 13, 2015
The Life of a Song: ‘To Love Somebody’
By Ian Mccan
Barry Gibb only revealed the inspiration for the Bee Gees’ third UK single more than 30 years after its release
©Getty
The Bee Gees in 1968, from back left: Vince Melouney, Maurice Gibb (centre), Barry Gibb; on front row: Robin Gibb, Colin Petersen
The Bee Gees had not been in Britain long when they recorded “To Love Somebody”, their third UK single. They had arrived from Australia in November 1966 and signed a management deal with Robert Stigwood, who found them a contract with Polydor Records. Stigwood, an astute Australian who worked for Brian Epstein, touted the Bee Gees as a rival to the Beatles, and persuaded Otis Redding that the material the brothers Gibb wrote might suit him. Redding was a beefy blues bawler from Macon, Georgia; the Bee Gees were Mancunian stick insects with nasal voices who’d grown up in Sydney. Undeterred, Stigwood told Robin and Barry Gibb that Redding liked their songs, and to write something for him. The manager arranged a meeting at the Plaza Hotel, New York, where Barry Gibb played “To Love Somebody” to Redding. But the soul giant would never sing it: he died in December 1967, six months after the Bee Gees released their version, which flopped in the UK but made number 17 on the US chart.
Other soul acts stepped into the breach left by Redding’s death. Female trio The Mirettes were first on the case in November 1967; Aretha Franklin’s backing vocalists The Sweet Inspirations gave it a touch of gospel in 1968; and Nina Simone added a funk groove a year later. In 1969 came the definitive heartbroken rendition by James Carr, another icon of southern soul. If Otis Redding had lived long enough to sing “To Love Somebody”, it might have sounded like Carr’s passionate, regretful performance. By proxy, the Bee Gees were now deeply immersed in black music — six years before they launched their disco career with “Jive Talkin’ ”.
The song grew legs in Europe, too. With an arrangement full of harpsichord, horns and strings, Yugoslavian band Siluete tackled it in 1967; Italy’s I Califfi amended it to “Cosi Ti Amo”, which was all “Whiter Shade of Pale” organ and token psychedelic effects. There were further covers, too. In 1979 “To Love Somebody” received an earnest rendition by Hank Williams Jr, giving it country credibility. In 1990 Jimmy Somerville wove together two of the song’s paths, singing it falsetto like the Bee Gees over a reggae beat.
Only in 2001 did Barry Gibb reveal who’d stirred the emotions behind his agony in “To Love Somebody”. He hadn’t been lamenting a girlfriend or trying to walk in Otis Redding’s soul shoes. Gibb told Mojo magazine he wrote it for someone closer to home: “It was for Robert [Stigwood.] I say that unabashedly. He asked me to write a song for him, personally. It was played to Otis but, personally, it was for Robert. He meant a great deal to me. I don’t think it was a homosexual affection but a tremendous admiration for this man’s abilities and gifts.” “To Love Somebody” may have been all things to all men, but it was inspired by just one.
http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.nl/
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Friday, December 4, 2015
the Bee Gees and their music influences
Influences:
| Barry Gibb: "I like music that moves you emotionally, music where if you're in pain, it works for you. The first record I bought was 'Cryin' by Roy Orbison, and that destroyed me. I figured, 'There's a guy who's writing for people, who's writing for emotions." (1990) | Robin Gibb: "The black music grooves me, influences me the most. The three of us, still get our inspiration from black music. It's the most innovative in terms of grooves." (Still Waters Press Kit, 1997) | Maurice Gibb: "I've always admired Peter Gabriel and musicians like him, who've had longevity - I love anyone who can last this business because there's not many of us around." (Ok On Air, 2001) | Robin Gibb: "We've often been influenced by lots of music in the past and today. I think you've got to stay, at some point, true to your art, and without, you know, you've got to sail between the winds of change, and if you get too trend-orientated, you become that trend. And so you've got to really stay between them, and be influenced by them." (BBC, 2001) |
| Robin Gibb: "We've always been influenced by particularly American R'n'B." (BBC, 2002) | Robin Gibb: "I am a big fan of Gregorian chant." (Still Waters Press Kit, 1997) | Robin Gibb: "Barry's a great Noel Coward fan." (BBC, 2001) | Robin Gibb: "Clannad, the Irish folk group. Enya was originally a member of the group. I like their vocal sounds." (Size Isn't Everything Press Kit, 1993) |
| Maurice Gibb: "We love and have been influenced by many country artists particularly Roy Orbison." (Ticketmaster online chat, 1997) | Robin Gibb: "Otis Redding, for me as a singer, was the greatest, because I think soul music is a great art form of music which should go into every decade. I think it has an important role in every decade and in the future." (BBC, 2002) | Maurice Gibb: "Usually I like a total mixture ranging from classical and R&B to early stuff like the Beach Boys and Beatles." (OK On Air, 2001) | Robin Gibb: "I would say The Beatles, Otis Redding and the whole Motown scene really. There aren't so many contemporary people that would influence me, as there are just far too many cover version artists." (Top of the Pops, 2003) |
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