FEATURE
KEEPING THE
MUSIC ALIVE The second most successful songwriter in history (behind Sir Paul McCartney), Barry Gibb has a new album and a renewed appreciation for the Bee Gees music.
WORDS JANE MULKERRINS / THE TIMES / THE INTERVIEW PEOPLE A FULL 40 YEARS after the film Saturday Night Fever, whose soundtrack sent the Bee Gees stratospheric and cemented their place in the annals of pop, Glastonbury 2017 was, says Barry Gibb, ‘the greatest night of my life, no question’. Occupying Sunday’s ‘Legends’ slot on the Pyramid Stage, the then 70-yearold musician treated the audience to an anthemic roll call of Bee Gees classics – Tragedy, Stayin’ Alive and Night Fever. 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.”
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– Issue 83
Bittersweet doesn’t really begin to cover it though, for Gibb, now 74, is the last Bee Gee standing, the sole survivor of the flamboyantly apparelled trio. Maurice died in 2003, af ter complications in surgery led to a heart attack, and his twin brother, Robin, 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.” 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 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 himself 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. One day, he says, he was lying on the sofa when his wife 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’.” Taking her advice, he went back into the studio and wrote a solo album – In the Now – which was released in 2016. His latest album, Greenfields, is a collection of Bee Gees numbers performed by Gibb and a gaggle of major country stars. >>
