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- The Weekend Australian Magazine
England’s Glastonbury Festival in 2017, was, says Barry Gibb, “the greatest night of my life, no question”. Occupying Sunday’s “Legends” slot, the 70-year-old musician treated the audience to an anthemic roll call of Bee Gees classics – Tragedy, Stayin’ Alive and Night Fever – a full 40 years after the release of the film Saturday Night Fever, whose soundtrack sent the band stratospheric and cemented their place in the annals of pop.
When the crowd, in unison, crooned along to the ballad Words, its creator, centre stage, fell silent in awe. “I just didn’t know people really cared that much,” he says today, still apparently baffled by the adulation. “And after we did To Love Somebody, and the applause never stopped, that was the greatest moment I’ve ever known on stage.”
Bittersweet doesn’t really begin to cover it, for Gibb, now 74, is the last Bee Gee standing, the sole survivor of the flamboyantly apparelled trio, the hirsute kings of disco. Maurice died in 2003 after complications in surgery led to a heart attack; his twin brother Robin died in 2012 after a long fight with cancer. The youngest Gibb brother, Andy, who performed mostly as a soloist, died in 1988, five days after his 30th birthday, following years of cocaine addiction. “I’m the eldest, so it probably should have been me first,” reflects Barry. “I guess it’s a form of guilt. Survivor’s guilt.”
While their culture-defining discography is baked into my dancefloor-hogging soul, I – like Saturday Night Fever – was born in 1977, so had never thought of the Gibbs like that. Barry’s a year older than my dad. Now, however – and I’m fully aware that I’ve spent a lot of time alone since March immersing myself in all things Bee Gee – I am struck, for the first time, by Seventies Barry: the wincingly tight trousers, satin shirts open to the navel, the chest rugs, bouffants and medallions. And the news that Bradley Cooper has been tipped to play a young Barry in a forthcoming biopic from the team behind Bohemian Rhapsody seems pretty perfect casting to me. Even if Gibb himself swats the suggestion away. “I’d be incredibly OK with it, but I think maybe that’s a little bit of made-up industrial PR,” he demurs.
Today, speaking on Zoom from his home studio in Miami, he’s still boasting an impressive mane, albeit whiter these days and under a straw hat, and a splashily printed shirt – buttoned all the way up and down. We’d hoped for me to fly down to Florida but, it was decided, with coronavirus rates spiking hard and Gibb in his 70s, a face-to-face meeting might not be that wise. And I would not want to be responsible for putting the health of the last Bee Gee in peril. Still, I’m disappointed not to get a tour of the mansion on “Millionaire’s Row” beside Biscayne Bay, with neighbours including Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez.
Gibb and his wife of 50 years, Linda, have five children and eight grandchildren, all of whom live close by. And, since the pandemic curtailed everyone’s movements, they’ve spent even more time together. “That’s the positive. You see much more of your family. You don’t take it all for granted.”
For a time, after losing his brothers, Gibb had no compulsion to perform the hits they’d created together. “Robin wanted us to be the Bee Gees after Mo [Maurice] passed and I couldn’t handle that,” he says. “I said, ‘We can be Barry and Robin, we can be Robin and Barry, but we can’t be the Bee Gees without Mo.’ ” And then, after Robin died, “I didn’t want to do anything for a while. I didn’t have the heart. I just didn’t want to carry on on my own. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know if I wanted to play anymore or make any more records. I spent at least a year just not understanding any of it – anything to do with life, anything to do with losing brothers or family members.”
One day, he says, he was lying on the sofa when Linda ordered him out of his funk. “She said, ‘Why don’t you get off your arse? You know what you can do. Go and do it. Stop floundering and turning yourself off to everything.’” He went back into the studio and wrote a solo album. In the Now was released in 2016.
His new album, Greenfields, debuted at No 1 on Australia’s Aria album charts (his first ever solo No 1) and No 2 in the US but, far from a solo effort, it’s actually a collection of Bee Gees numbers performed by Gibb and a gaggle of major country stars. “I love country, I love bluegrass, and there’s always been an element of that in our songs,” he says. The disco beats may have distracted from it in the Seventies, but many Bee Gees lyrics are perfect country fodder, filled with pain and melancholy. Recorded in Nashville, Greenfields includes duets with Keith Urban, Alison Krauss, Brandi Carlile and the queen herself, Dolly Parton, with melodies and harmonies rearranged for the guests. “A lot of those songs are not in my key. Where there’s a lady singing with me, you have to adjust to their keys,” says Gibb gallantly, though his voice sounds great on the tracks, the breathy vibrato still in full working order.
How does he find reaching for that famous falsetto these days? “Oh, that’s not a problem,” he assures me. “I don’t do it much at home. At the moment, I don’t do it much anywhere else either. But it’s still there. It’s resting,” he laughs. “If I ever get on stage again, I’ll blow it out.”
And for anyone who can’t wait that long and wants that falsetto in all its arresting glory right now, there’s also a documentary. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart is aptly titled – a two-hour, two-hanky watch. I cried buckets. “I did too,” smiles Gibb. “Though I only watched the first cut, made my comments, then left it to the people who know how to do it.” He won’t be watching the finished version, partly because “I can’t watch my brothers, who are no longer here. I just can’t. It’s impossible for me.” Also because, “If there’s a negative in there it’ll last me for days. I’m quite fragile.”
Critical recognition never really came with the Bee Gees’ commercial success; 21 No 1 hits and at least 120m album sales never translated into them becoming cool. Did that bother him then, I ask, and does it bother him now? “As a young man, I would get easily offended,” he says. “But as the years go by, you toughen up, and there’s nothing makes you stronger than failing. There were periods of our life where we weren’t acceptable, where we couldn’t get played on the radio. So every time that occurred, we didn’t take it personally – we just went back to work. You have a hit, you’re over the moon. If you have a flop, well, you’re disappointed, but you get tougher.”
He also recognises now that their music has something potentially more precious: longevity. “My daughter has been in her car, turned Stayin’ Alive up on the radio, put the windows down and people have danced in the street. For some strange reason, it’s still part of the culture. So I have to end up being proud of it. I can’t apologise for six [US] No 1 records in a row.” That’s an achievement shared only with Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
The Gibb brothers, and their elder sister, Lesley, were born on the Isle of Man, then grew up in Manchester. Their father, Hugh, was a drummer who never quite hit the big time, but who filled the house with Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers – a family quartet who sang in four-part harmonies – while Lesley, two years older than Barry, introduced the family to rock’n’roll via the Everly Brothers, Tommy Steele and skiffle stars such as Lonnie Donegan.
Gibb remembers standing on a Manchester street, aged eight, telling his twin brothers, aged five, “I want to be a pop star.” “Robin and Maurice said, ‘Oh, can we do that too?’ And I said, ‘OK, let’s be pop stars together.’” (His ambition never waned. He also recalls, aged 14, being dumped by his first girlfriend. “I said, ‘Well, you’re going to be sorry, because I’m going to be really famous,’” he laughs.)
At nine he got a guitar for Christmas and the twins, toy guitars. “We didn’t have to learn about harmonies; it just happened organically,” says Gibb. They started performing, as the Rattlesnakes, but off stage they were getting into trouble with the law, “trespassing all the time”. According to Gibb, the police advised his parents to consider emigrating to keep the boys out of trouble. This seems a bit of an overreaction to teenage hijinks but the Gibbs decamped to Australia in 1958, where the trio spent seven years living in Redcliffe, north of Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sydney, playing hotels and RSLs. They were, says Gibb, “my happiest years as a kid. I never really wanted to leave, but we couldn’t have become international as a group if we stayed [in Australia]. And we were not going to be deterred.”
Back in Britain, by then the epicentre of the ’60s music scene, Beatles manager Brian Epstein turned them down, but his colleague Robert Stigwood signed them. Their second single with him, To Love Somebody – since covered by Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart and Michael Bolton, among others – was their breakthrough hit. Soon, the Bee Gees were seeing the fruits of their focus and their labour; Barry bought a Rolls-Royce, a Bentley and a Lamborghini, and there was booze and drugs and girls galore. He was still only 21, Robin and Maurice just 18. “There were always things available to you – it was up to you to say no and keep clean,” says Gibb. “You can’t write great songs if you’re not clean. That doesn’t work. People think it does, but it really doesn’t.” He did party though? “I can’t deny that,” he chuckles.
Unlike Maurice and Robin, who struggled with drinking and amphetamines respectively, and Andy, whose addiction killed him, Barry managed to pull himself back. “If I didn’t have Linda, I would have gone the same way,” he admits. “We were all subject to the same demons.” But Linda “just wouldn’t allow that. If I brought anything into the house, it went down the toilet.”
With their newfound fame came newfound conflict, for which Gibb places much of the blame with the music industry. “We had a lot of professional people jump in the middle of our family, take sides and create conflict. People whispering that you didn’t need anyone else, that you didn’t need your brothers.” There were three healthy egos at play. “Every one of us wanted to be a solo star,” he says. “My guess is that’s part of every group. But if you are brothers, you’re going to have problems, because every brother wants to be up front.”
After almost two years of not speaking and briefly pursuing solo careers (to mixed responses), the band reunited in 1970 and, a year later, scored their first US No 1 with How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. By 1973, however, they were in a rut. Radio stations would no longer play their sincere, sentimental ballads. “We thought maybe we’d done our time. Everyone gets about five years, if you’re lucky, and some only have one hit,” Gibb reflects. “But we weren’t ready to sit down. We thought, ‘No, we’re going to keep going.’ ”
To keep going, they needed a new sound. Stigwood stepped in and suggested a change of scene, a beachside villa in Miami where Eric Clapton had recently recorded his hit album 461 Ocean Boulevard. There, they wrote the infectious, utterly unballady Jive Talkin’. Strategically delivered in 1975 to radio stations in a plain white cover, with no band name on it, the single went to No 1 in the US, No 5 in the UK, and, after almost five years in the wilderness, the Bee Gees were back.
When, a couple of years later, Stigwood asked them to write a few sample songs for a new film starring John Travolta, “we hadn’t even seen a script”, says Gibb. They recorded five tracks, Night Fever, If I Can’t Have You, More Than a Woman, How Deep Is Your Love and Stayin’ Alive, in little more than a weekend. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack double album, which also featured KC and the Sunshine Band and Kool & the Gang, would become the biggest-selling soundtrack in history, since eclipsed only by The Bodyguard. “It catapulted us to another level, immediately.”
Massive, unbridled global fame is, he says, “a ball, if you’re young. And if you accept all the excitement, always being told how wonderful you are. That stuff really never sank in with us. Because we’d been through so many ups and downs, we thought, ‘Oh, here we go again.’” He didn’t trust the enormous success, he claims. “Never did, never will.” This feels a little revisionist – who, given the era-defining Saturday Night Fever, would have foreseen the Bee Gees’ fortunes changing yet again, so dramatically, so soon? Their 1979 album, Spirits Having Flown, was another huge hit; its first three tracks – Tragedy, Too Much Heaven and Love You Inside Out – all reached No 1 in the US, giving the band six consecutive No 1s in little more than a year. They wrote the first two in one afternoon, along with Shadow Dancing, sung and released by brother Andy, and also a US No 1.
But while the band was jetting around on private planes and playing to packed stadiums, a backlash was gathering pace. Their ubiquity was now working against them; US radio stations were promising “Bee Gee-free” days. Meanwhile, disco as a genre was suffering a very public death, with records physically blown up at a “disco demolition” event in Chicago. Gibb, again, believes it had little to do with the Bee Gees. “At the end of every decade, listeners tend to reject what was happening in that decade and they start wanting what will be happening in the new decade,” he shrugs. “We understood [that] what was happening had happened before. It didn’t really bother us.”
By that point, why not call it a day? But that, clearly, is not the Bee Gee way. Barbra Streisand stepped in and asked Gibb to write and produce her album Guilty, featuring the single Woman in Love. They won a Grammy for the title track. Soon, the Bee Gees were writing chart-toppers for everyone else: Chain Reaction for Diana Ross; Heartbreaker for Dionne Warwick; Islands in the Stream for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Gibb is now officially the second most successful songwriter in history after Paul McCartney.
What a wonderfully subversive “up yours” to the industry that shunned them, I say. “Well, I can’t say I would have thought of it that way,” says Gibb. “But I convinced Robin and Maurice that we should write for other people, to show everybody that we’re songwriters before anything else. You don’t have to live in one zone.”
The success of their writing gave the band confidence to record again, releasing singles such as For Whom the Bell Tolls. They invited Andy to join them, but he died before the Bee Gees could become a foursome. Barry had been closest to Andy. “Even though I was the eldest and he was the youngest, we gravitated to each other. He was in England trying to make a comeback, but his demons got the better of him. I said, ‘Come back to America.’ But it was too late for that. His last words to me weren’t friendly.”
This seems to have plagued Gibb, who has said of all three late brothers that “my only regret is that we weren’t great pals at the end”. “Maurice was gone in two days, and we weren’t getting on very well. Robin and I functioned musically, but we never functioned in any other way. We were brothers, but we weren’t really friends. You never find peace really with that,” he adds. Playing their music helps. “I always feel their presence, but more so on stage than any other time.”
These days, the stage features other family members too: Barry’s son Steve, who plays guitar in his band, and Maurice’s daughter Samantha, who sings and has toured with them. Pandemic depending, he’d like to perform Greenfields live, with the country stars who recorded it with him. “And I’d like to do an album of Bee Gees songs that’s really stripped down, purely acoustic. There are different ways of treating all that music, but it’s got to live and it’s got to breathe,” he says. “My only real mission now is to keep that music alive.”
Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook Vol. 1, EMI
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