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FAME, FAMILY & TRAGEDY
Jealousy, heartbreak and addiction couldn’t stop them from making hit records
Inspired after a day in the studio with his brothers, Robin Gibb would often return home enthusiastic to share their music.
“He was like a little kid, always excited about a song they’d written,” recalls Robin’s eldest son Spencer. “Working with his brothers was one of the things that made him the happiest.”
With more than 120 million records sold worldwide, the Bee Gees were one of the most successful groups of all time – and one of the few of its stature whose core members were family. The brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb, whose songs for the movie Saturday Night Fever became the soundtrack to the disco era, also enjoy the distinction of having written all of their hits.
But perhaps their greatest achievement was finding a way to remain family despite incredible fame, rivalries, substance abuse and heartbreaking loss.
In a new documentary,
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, producer Frank Marshall explores the fascinating dynamic between the singing brothers.
“They transcended five decades, and somehow they stayed together over these five decades and kept reinventing themselves," he says.
David N Meyer, author of
The Bee Gees: The Biography,
told Closer magazine of the group, “They always recognised that they needed one another to do their best work. So they were stuck with all their love, all their resentment, all their anger, and all the inspiration they gave each other.”
OBSESSION
Twins Maurice and Robin discovered music when they began singing harmonies together at the age of six. By the time their family emigrated from England to Australia in 1958, their father Hugh had put them into a singing trio with their older brother Barry. “Music became an obsession, and eventually we felt more comfortable with each other than we did with anyone else,” Robin said. “The three of us were like one person.”
But a birth-order dynamic emerged, and no matter how much time went by or how hard they tried to escape it, each always played the same role.
“Barry had considerable music gifts. He was very much the big brother, the alpha. Robin, meanwhile, was a great singer and a pretty good songwriter, but he just didn’t have the will to stand up to Barry,” says
David, who notes Maurice was always the one in the middle.
The group enjoyed their first rush of fame in the 1960s. “One of the most incredible moments I can remember is being in the north of England on stage and our manager told us that Massachusetts had gone to number one,” said Maurice.
There were many more hits, including Spicks And Specks and I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You, but they soon suffered a decline in popularity. After their early fame, the brothers got married, dealt with substance abuse issues and, in late 1969, split up briefly to pursue shortlived solo careers.
“Their nicknames for themselves were Pissy, Pilly and Potty because Maurice got piss-drunk, Robin liked pills and Barry liked weed,” confides David.
Barry has said, “We never saw the hard stuff. But we saw enough. I watched that go on constantly with all three of my brothers.”
The trio’s younger brother, Andy, who was born in 1958, shared a special kinship with Barry. “Maurice and Robin were the real twins, but Andy and I were like twins," he says. “We sort of looked alike and even had the same birthmark.”
Together again by mid-1970, the Bee Gees scored hits in 1975 with Nights On Broadway and
Jive Talkin’. In 1977 came the
Saturday Night Fever album, one of the bestselling LPs of all time and a chart-topper in many countries including the US, UK and Australia.
That same year Andy, 19, enjoyed his first hit with I Just Want To Be Your Everything. However, he didn’t adapt to fame as well as his brothers did. “Success was just torture for Andy. He never knew how to deal with it,” says David.
DRIFTING APART
His death in 1988 at age
30 from a heart ailment exacerbated by years of drug use was a tragedy his elder brothers would never recover from. “I lost my best friend when I lost Andy,” says Barry.
The family would suffer another blow in 2003, when Maurice died suddenly due to complications from a twisted intestine. By then, he had obtained sobriety and was a devoted family man.
Without Maurice, Robin and Barry drifted apart, but Barry reached out before Robin’s death from kidney failure in 2012. “We laughed about a lot of things, and we sort of made up. At least we were together,” recalls Barry.
‘They needed one another to do their best work’
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