26 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.”

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, after 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. >>

“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 70s, 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.

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 new 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, 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; 19 UK Top Ten singles (and 5 No. 1s) never translated into them becoming cool.

Did that bother him then, I ask, and does it bother him now?

“As a young mawn, 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.

“We didn’t have to learn about harmonies; it just happened organically.”

– Barry Gibb

“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,” he says.

“I can’t apologise for six [US] No. 1 records in a row.”

That’s a record 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, and Barry remembers standing on a Manchester street, at eight, telling his 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, telling his first girlfriend not to dump him. “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,” he says.

They started performing, as the Rattlesnakes, on the stage at their local cinema in Chorlton.

Off stage, however, 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 so the family decamped to Australia, where the trio spent seven years playing hotels and provincial RSL clubs.

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, the 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,” he says.

“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.

However, 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 new-found fame came new-found conflict, for which Barry 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 also 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’.”

However, 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 5 years in the wilderness, the Bee Gees were back.

Then, 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 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 would spend 18 weeks at No. 1 in the UK and become the biggest-selling soundtrack in history, since eclipsed only by The Bodyguard.

“It catapulted us to another level, immediately.”

However, Robin admits he didn’t trust the enormous success.

“Never did, never will,” he claims.

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.

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; and disco as a genre was suffering a very public death, with records physically blown up at a ‘disco demolition’ event in Chicago.

By that point, why not call it a day, retire?

But that, clearly, is not the Bee Gee way.

Barbra Streisand stepped in, 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 charttoppers 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 Sir 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, equably. “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.” Despite their success, Gibb 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.”

And these days, the stage features other family members too: his 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.”

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