TEN QUESTIONS FOR BARRY GIBB

TEN QUESTIONS FOR BARRY GIBB
Mojo Magazine
February,1998


I've heard that Jimi Hendrix was a Bee Gees fan.
Barry: I don't think it was a matter of being a fan. We were friends, and we all came out of that same late '60's syndrome, and we got to know Jimi in London. He actually came to my 21st birthday party. We never discussed music. It was just friendship. I went with Ahmet Ertegun and Robert Stigwood to see Jimi in New York, outside in the park with The Rascals, in about 1968. I was backstage with them at that particular concert. That's a great memory.

What do you recall about writing Massachusetts?
Barry: It was the first time the group went to New York. We stayed at the St. Regis Hotel, and while our luggage was being moved in we wrote it sitting on a sofa, the three of us. It came from our first exposure to America, our first thoughts of writing a song about flower power, which the song is about-or it's basically anti-flower power. Don't go to San Francisco, come home for Chrissakes, ha ha.

Noel Gallagher loves a lot of your early songs. How do you feel about Oasis?
Barry: I like their work very much. They do some good stuff, but they've yet to really grow. They need to get past, basically insecurity between each other, and how crazy it is when you become famous for the first time and what it does to your head. I think they're about to get past that. What happens next? It's like Maurice once said in an interview, to the Gallaghers, "If you want to know what happens next, give us a call" (laughs). Because we've
basically been through the whole thing-fighting, drugs, the drink, all the scenarios you can imagine. We've done all that and still survived. I've got a feeling those guys will, too.

I like the lyrics of early songs like Harry Braff and The Earnest Of Being George-they were evocative without being locked into a literal meaning.
Barry: There was a lot of that in those days-psychedelia, the idea that if you wrote something, even if it sounded ridiculous, somebody would find its meaning. People used to ask if we took LSD. And we suddenly realised that that's what it really was about. People get carried away. It's like The Beatles and songs like Strawberry Fields, where people assume that it was drugs that concocted those songs- and we all know that some of it was-but I think there's a very rare gift that existed inside John Lennon, and also
inside Paul. I think it came from more than drugs or drink.

Your vocal on Lonely Days seems almost like a tribute to Lennon.
Barry: It's possible, yeah. We were very influenced by The Beatles, no question. A manager we had about five years back heard Lonely Days in a restaurant and he said to a friend, "That's one of my favourite Beatles songs." And he was managing us!

A few years back, you expressed a desire to produce McCartney-and he got miffed about it.
Barry: He's always under the wrong impression that we'd criticised one of his albums. The fact is, we'd never heard the album he was pissed off about. I'd heard one song, Hope Of Deliverance, which I thought was going to be a Number
1. Maurice and Robin had heard in and didn't think it was going to be. Anyway, some reporter was interviewing us that week and we'd only talked about this one song; Maurice or Robin said something like, "It would be great for McCartney to work with somebody who would really push him harder than he pushes himself." I thought that was a fair comment-not a criticism as such. I think Lennon was always more muscular than McCartney. He challenged Paul. I think that now Paul is so ingrained in our lives and in our souls that he's
of the belief that no-one else can push him. I just disagree with that belief. But I think the reporter told him we'd criticized his album, and he said something like, "Oh well, they can f**ck off then." We sent a little note saying that we were in fact probably the three biggest fans he's ever had, that we would never have criticized his work and still wouldn't, and he sent another note saying, "Well, you can still f**ck off," ha ha. So I just
thought, Never mind, these things happen. But I dearly wish that he knew the truth. I'v always loved Paul. If I ever bump into him again, I'll try to tell him, but I doubt that he'll listen.

Any truth to the story of Ginger Baker setting fire to a Bee Gees mastertape?
Barry: I've never heard that, ha ha. It wouldn't surprise me, knowing Ginger. I've heard of Ginger hanging Robert Stigwood out the window by his shoes, three or four stories up, demanding his money. One good story was the [Stigwood] Sgt. Pepper album-they shipped about two million, then found about a million of them by the side of the road! Those days you could go platinum based upon your shipping. They'd shipped all those albums, but with no demand. So someone dumped a million!

Since Saturday Night Fever, you've been known for your falsetto. Do you ever feel trapped by that?
Barry: No, I do it when I love it and I don't do it when I don't feel like it. The story is that during the recording of Nights On Broadway, Arif Mardin asked if any of us could go out there and scream ad libs-R&B style. I volunteered, and in doing so, sort of discovered that this voice was hidden back there. Then I started developing it. When I look back it's actually something I ought to be proud of. Brian Wilson, Frankie Valli and even Prince-they don't make any bones about it. The first rock'n'roll record I ever heard was Little Darlin' bt The Diamonds-that was falsetto. So in a way it's been an integral part of rock'n'roll. It's nice to be a falsetto that's well known.

What's the story behind the Clive Anderson chat show?
Barry: With the greatest respect in the world, we've never commented on that story. We don't want to. It was a very upsetting experience and the guy was really out to ridicule us if he could, and every remark he made was, in a sense, created to try to ridicule us. I had just about enough of it and walked off. And Maurice and Robin followed me. It was not a nice experience. That was it. We never commented when it happened. Apart from what I've just said, I don't want to say any more. The details were not pleasant.

What's next for you all?
Barry: I want us to go on making records. We're in our prime, believe it or not. I think vocally and mentally we've managed to stay intact, somehow. Two of us, Robin and I, don't smoke any more. I think that's made an enormous
difference to the strength of our throats and our muscles. I'm the eldest at 51, and if the Stones can drag themselves around once more, then there's a few more albums in us. As long as you're having fun, that's the key. The moment it becomes a grind, it's over.

http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

Robin Gibb And Barry Gibb In Douglas isle of Man (Outtake )

To watch video click on read more http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

Listen to Michael Ball -To love somebody 2019

Click on read more to listen http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

Barry Gibb interview 11/8/82

Click on read more to watch video

 ftg. producers Catherine Brabec & Kevin Stein interview Barry Gibb for When the Musics Over.


http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

Release song Bonnie Tyler seven waves away by (A.Gibb, B.Gibb, Emery, S.Gibb)

March 15 2019


Today Release of cd Bonnie Tyler Between the Earth and the Stars with the song
Seven Waves Away
Written by :
(A.Gibb, B.Gibb, Emery, S.Gibb)

you can hear it on spotify


https://open.spotify.com/album/0To38KDz9Bw5kcpzGX9Wio

http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

An audience with a Bee Gee - Robin Gibb

KIM KNIGHT    Nov 07 2010

Onstage he can still send a crowd wild. Offstage, Robin Gibb explains how performing helps fill a void, and reveals his peculiar sense of humour to Kim Knight. 

BACKSTAGE, AND the skinny roadies wear skinny black jeans and smoke skinny cigarettes. Security Guard #780 paces an empty corridor, outside an empty dressing room. In the bowels of the entertainment centre with the painted concrete block walls and trodden down carpet squares a radio plays: "All the lonely people..."

Yesterday Sydney, tomorrow Perth. But, if it's today, it must be Brisbane.

Fame: Robin, left, Barry and Maurice Gibb sold 200 million records as the Bee Gees.

Robin Gibb arrives 15 minutes before show time. Blink and miss the emaciated man in the neat suit and metal-plated shoes who slips – small, quiet, solo – from chauffeured car to guarded dressing room and waits for the spotlight.

In Brisbane, you can buy a full body fake tan for $25. Strangers call you "darling". International flights land on a runway built on top of a suburb formerly known as Cribb Island.

A guide to local place names records that, in the late 1950s, the children of an English migrant family from Cribb Island sold soft drinks at a local speedway, promoting themselves with a singing act. "They were well received."

They were the brothers Gibb – nine-year-old twins Robin and Maurice and elder brother Barry – dubbed the Bee Gees, after they made it to radio DJ Bill Gates' drive-time show. Over the next 50 years, the trio would sell 200 million records, chart more than 60 hit singles and produce six consecutive No1 songs in the United States.

"Robin," screams a man from the middle of the Brisbane crowd. "Will you have my baby?"

The youngest surviving Bee Gee takes the stage. A scatter of fans stand. They stretch their arms high and wide and throw their faces back. He sings. They roar.

Gibb, who turns 61 next month, once said, "to go forward, you've got to be unsatisfied".

During the 30-minute car trip back to his hotel after the Brisbane show (three encores, including "Stayin' Alive" and "Tragedy"), he explains what he meant.

"Any artist always feels a void within them. Composers, authors, painters, they constantly feel the more they're fulfilled, the more empty they are. They're constantly feeling they have to fill that void."

Because he knows he could stop this. Quit touring; quit performing the songs that were once the territory of three men, not one. Maurice died in 2003. Youngest brother Andy, who had a successful solo music career, died of myocarditis in 1988, aged 30. Barry lives in the United States. The surviving brothers – recently estimated to have a combined worth of $330 million – are, as Robin is quick to say in every interview, including this one, "the best of friends".

"Me and Barry, we do cherry pick. We've got the biggest song catalogue in the world alongside Lennon and McCartney... celebrating what we have achieved is important to us.

"Turn on any contemporary radio stations, and you'll hear us, or something we have written, alongside what is number one... it is a living catalogue... a lot of those R and B grooves are still relevant to today's music, they're still influencing people."

Gibb begins the New Zealand leg of his Bee Gees greatest hits world tour in Auckland tomorrow night, before heading to Wellington on Wednesday and Christchurch on Friday. Next week, he plays Beirut and, in December, South America. Local promoters flew the Sunday Star-Times and TV3 to Australia for face-to-face interviews after the Brisbane gig. No one is saying it, but a recent two-for-one ticket offer indicated sales here, at least, might have needed help.

Gibb last visited in 1999, performing with brothers Maurice and Barry, to an estimated 66,000 fans at Western Springs. The Bee Gees are a household name, but a solo Gibb, based on the reaction of Brisbane taxi drivers and hospitality staff, is not.

At a riverside steak bar before the Brisbane show, Nightline's David Farrier ordered a beef burger and waved the official show programme in front of the waitress. "Hot – or not?" he asked, pointing to a hairy, toothy, muscle-shirted, backlit picture of Robin Gibb, circa 1980-something. "Do you know who it is?" he pressed. "Ummm," she replied. "You?"

It's nearly midnight when I shake hands with the Bee Gee. German tour manager Rainer Hansel – a tall, straggly-haired Gandalf in obligatory skinny black pants – says this is the first time in at least seven years Gibb has done an interview post-show.

Gibb loosens his tie and says the music industry is "not like any other business".

"You're not rushing to retirement. It's just something you do, almost from birth. It's in your blood, it's not a job. If you are successful, that's just a by-product.

"When we were making our records, we never thought about [tribute] bands making a living out of being us, or of people covering our songs. To be among the top five most successful artists of all time is a great achievement, but you can't plan those things."

In fact, as a petulant 19-year-old, Robin Gibb chucked in the Bee Gees.

"I left – that's how the group broke up," he told the Auckland Star when he arrived in New Zealand in January, 1970. "I have absolutely no regrets. After 13 years, we came to the parting of the ways. I think I can say I graduated successfully."

FORTY YEARS ago, Auckland's Redwood Park soundshell was the venue of Gibb's inaugural solo show. Journalist Tony Potter reported the riotous weekend-long festival: Three security men stood at the front of the floodlit stage, in front of them some 10,000 people – some of them itching for trouble. Gibb had been on stage for just 29 minutes when it happened. A tomato and a hair brush missed him, but nearly clipped a viola player. He put his instrument away... fires were lit as the pop bands crashed on.

Gibb remembers the incident clearly. "They didn't want music at all. They just wanted to lash out. It was very, very dangerous. In those days, there was a reckless attitude, that you could stick artists in the middle of thousands of people. That, and drinking at the same time, don't go together."

There is no alcohol on this tour. Gibb claims to have completed 200 sit-ups this morning, and is, reportedly, a vegetarian (we never find out whether that is real or synthetic hair covering his normally bald pate).

"I don't like hurting living things. Just because they're not human, they're still life, and life has a right to life."

How long has he held those philosophies?

"About five minutes."

Gibb's sense of humour is – peculiar.

An example. He says he doesn't recall much about living in Brisbane. Nothing formative happened to him here?

"I wasn't raped or anything..." He laughs – and there's more – but the conversation is moving quickly, to a story about another time he was here, in the cockpit of a jumbo jet bound for Tokyo, when he found out the international runway had been built on top of his old street.

How did he react?

"I told him to take me to Cuba. That's why I was in the cockpit. I was hijacking the plane."

Gibb makes the papers with charities and causes. He is a major donor to Britain's Bomber Command aircrew war memorial. He has spoken out against a 530-home development in Thame, Oxfordshire, where he lives, saying an influx of residents would stretch community health resources.

But he also has a reputation for eccentricity. And, last year, media had a field day with news he had fathered a child with his 33-year-old housekeeper (who, at the time, lived with Gibb and his bisexual druidic wife, Dwina). Back then, a "friend" told the Daily Mail: "He's a very odd man." In July, the Guardian asked him for his most embarrassing moment. He said, "my whole life, but I wouldn't change it".

The fans don't care. Ashburton-born Chris Middleton was at the Brisbane gig with her husband, Jim. He saw the Bee Gees back in the 1960s. The music, he says, "brings back old memories".

Robin. Robin. They chant him on to the stage, a crowd of around 4000, old enough to remember that to hustle is to dance, and that John Travolta was once white (suit) hot. It was the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that sent the Bee Gees stratospheric. Gibb hung up on Radio New Zealand's Kathryn Ryan in July when she asked him about life after disco. Tonight, there is no escaping the songs from what he simply refers to as "that film".

"We love you Robin," says the man in the crowd. "I love me too," says Robin.

"Sometimes I talk a little bit too much to the crowd," he says later. "There's a fine line when they talk back... you don't let them get too cocky. Particularly females with a guy, who happen to like you a lot, he's going to say something to offset that."

How deep is their love? A 1981 headline sums it up: Brain damaged girl, 11, recovers after visit from the Bee Gees.

Gibb doesn't remember the alleged incident, but he does appear to take the historic Weekly World News clipping seriously.

"I do know kids have been brought out of comas, actually, with my voice ... music and sound can do that. Certain vibrations can affect the brain."

Popular songs, says Gibb, are the new hymns. "People are getting married to our songs, and they use them at funerals." American paramedics, he says, sing "Stayin' Alive" in their heads, while they administer CPR. "They trialled 2000 songs and `Stayin' Alive' is the one, that, if you think of, you never fall below 103 beats when you're doing that."

Does he know what the runner-up was? "`The Day We Went to Bangor' ... No, I think it was `Tie A Yellow Ribbon' ... `Have You Ever Been Mellow'?" Oh. He's joking. Again.

Thirty minutes on Brisbane's byways, and our Audience with Robin Gibb is drawing to an end. If fame has a precarious fragility, in a world where we secretly like it when the mighty fall, Gibb appears oblivious.

"I'm used to being known, and people knowing me. I've known nothing else, pretty much since I was a teenager. When you've got a catalogue like ours that you can hear on the radio anywhere you go in the world any time, it's there and it can't be taken away. You can't take away what's already been done and achieved."

In 1999, Gibb was, apparently, so famous, that he made New Zealand headlines for walking into The Warehouse and buying a $12.95 portable alarm clock.

"I don't know. I can't remember. Buying an alarm clock? It might be possible that I wanted a wake-up call. You can't count on those wake-up calls. You think they're always going to forget, it defeats the point, you stay awake all night wondering if they're going to forget.

"Without a doubt, I am one of those people that worry all the time that if I stop worrying everything will go wrong. As long as I'm worried about it and keep thinking about it – I think it's obsessiveness actually, it started as a kid, [it] comes with being attention deficient disorder.

"You have to keep thinking about the one thing over and over again, in order that if you keep thinking about it, it's in control, it's in check."

What does he worry about the most?

"I think it's probably – I don't know – obviously the inevitable. And after that everything's a bonus, I suppose."

 http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/

Click on read more to watch video


http://beegeesfanfever.blogspot.com/