by Hector Cook
The single was also released on the Ariola label in Germany, but it would take some time before that nation’s Bee Gees fans of the future would recognise this connection to their heroes. ‘I Am What I Am’ had previously been released by Ray Brown & The Whispers as the B-side to ‘Tennessee Waltz’ amidst much suspicion that the Gibbs featured on their version. However, while sharing the same title, Brown’s was a completely different song altogether and John Manners has since confirmed that the Gibbs most certainly did not participate on that version.
Neither did Barry, Robin and Maurice have time to write anything specifically for Mike Furber, but they were delighted with his choice of ‘Where Are You’ and ‘Second Hand People’, two tracks from their new album, for his latest Kommotion label single. Again the brothers’ vocals are clearly evident. Furber had first come to prominence in 1965 when he united with Brisbane band, The Bowery Boys, and they became well known in The Bee Gees’ old stomping ground of Surfers’ Paradise. However, it was Ivan Dayman, ironically a harsh critic of The Bee Gees, who set them on the road to fame when he signed them to a contract. Sadly, it was short lived and they only had two minor hits to show for their efforts, but ‘Where Are You’ wasn’t one of them. Indeed, by the time of its release, Mike had suffered a nervous breakdown, and in 1973 he was found dead, having committed suicide.
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The fact that the majority of these many releases went largely unnoticed by the Australian record-buying public matters little. It was more important that the Gibbs develop their songwriting, and there was no better way to do this than to write for and record with as many different artists and groups as they possibly could, thereby exposing themselves to styles of music that they would not otherwise have encountered. Perhaps one of the best barometers of the progress they made during the May, 1963 to December, 1966 period lies in an obscure LP released in Australia by Columbia, shortly after their departure. Orchestras are generally spoiled for choice when assembling titles for an album, usually selecting the better known hits of the day. It is therefore no surprise to find instrumental versions of ‘Spicks And Specks’ and ‘Coalman’ on The Johnny Hawker Orchestra’s Out Front collection of 12 tunes. More relevant, though, is that ‘Wine And Women’ and ‘Exit Stage Right’ were virtual unknowns to the general public, and their inclusion suggests that Johnny Hawker had a pretty good idea of the Gibbs’ potential in an era when melody remained the key to a writer’s success.
Many of the cover versions of Gibb material that were recorded during this early stage of their careers eventually appeared on a compilation CD in 1998 on the Spin label, and so successful was it that a second volume is being planned. The recordings were lovingly and painstakingly restored to their original condition on the instruction of the then Festival Records’ group deputy managing director, Warren Fahey. However, it appeared that the brothers were not in favour of his efforts. “I don’t think any artist anywhere wants to be reminded of their gawky period,” as Warren put it slightly untactfully.
Gawky or not, the release of this compact disc opened up an area of The Bee Gees’ career which had previously lain in the domain of the dedicated few collectors who knew what to look for, where to find it, and who were fortunate enough to be able to afford it. More importantly, it preserved some of the best examples of the fledgling Gibbs’ songwriting for the benefit of future generations. Indeed, there may be instances of the brothers’ involvement on other recordings that have not yet come to light, such was the extent of their energy and enthusiasm during this particular stage of their development.
7
BACK HOME
“THE VERY LAST month we were in Australia, our first single got to number one in Australia … and other strange places,” Barry said. “You can get locked into Australia because it has a great record market of its own. Anyone who has success in Australia doesn’t really have very much outside Australia because the links overseas are too distant. Our objective was to become known in other countries and the best place to do this was the US or England. At that time the British boom was at its fullest and we headed to England …”
Fading memories can play strange tricks, especially on pop musicians. Research reveals that ‘Spicks And Specks’ wasn’t a national number one in Australia simply because no official overall Australian chart existed until the early Seventies. Australia consists of six states and two territories. The most populated is New South Wales, followed by Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and finally Tasmania. There is no trace of ‘Spicks And Specks’ achieving top slot in any of the six states although, admittedly, it did top the hit parade in the charts of Go-Set magazine, which enjoyed national circulation. Its best placing in any state appears to have been number three, so to New Zealand goes the honour of being the first country to have a Bee Gees chart topper, Spin having also released it there.
“The thing about Australia is that it’s such a big country,” said Hugh. “There’s a lot of inter-state rivalry between cities like Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Brisbane is about 550 miles north of Sydney and Melbourne is right down south, so what hits in one place doesn’t necessarily go in another. You can have a number one in Sydney, that doesn’t mean a thing in Melbourne, or Perth, which is nearly 3,000 miles away. Really, each state is like being in a different country. There are 1,500 clubs in New South Wales [alone].”
Whatever the semantics, the record was undoubtedly a massive hit and its success brought with it an unexpected intrusion. Festival Records, claiming that the boys’ impending departure was in violation of the terms of their agreement, tried to prevent The Bee Gees from leaving Australia by bringing an injunction against them. Hugh has always maintained that he was served with the court documents at the ship’s gangway, but he treated Fred Marks’ parting gesture with the contempt he felt it deserved. In reality there was no such confrontation and Fred Marks professes never to have served a writ on anyone in his life. Indeed, the many friends he has made over the years describe him as an extremely mild-mannered gentleman for whom such action would be unthinkable. In fact, it was very much in Fred’s interests for the group to go on to be successful internationally as Festival’s revenue from their future Australian releases would be significantly higher than if they just remained successful solely in Australia. For their part, in spite of what was said then, the brothers bear Fred no ill will at all and greeted him with open arms on their last encounter.
At the time, Robin claimed to find the whole situation ironic. “Festival Records once said, ‘Change your name and move to Melbourne.’ Festival Records once said, ‘Forget it, fellas. If you can’t do it here, what makes you think you can do it anywhere else?’ And Festival Records, once said, ‘Quit, it’s finished.’ It hadn’t even started, and they said it’s finished!”
As Barry recalled it, Festival wanted the group to return to promote ‘Spicks And Specks’, “But we were already across the Indian Ocean,” he recalls. “There was no bitterness. We wanted to show everyone here [in Australia] that it could be done, but not in a nasty way; we needed to search out the opportunities and we did.”
One Australian record man – Normie Rowe’s manager who ran Sunshine Records, another Festival subsidiary – did offer disparaging remarks that irritated Barry intensely. “There was this bloke, Ivan Dayman, and he said, ‘If King Normie [Rowe] can’t make it in England, nobody else can,’ and that spurred us on because I thought that was the most senile remark I’d ever heard.”
“We were tired of being ignored,” Robin added. “A new Bee Gees record would come out, and the record people would take it round to the radio people, and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah, another Bee Gees song.’ We were still seen as a bunch of kids who played on Bandstand, while we were already full of ideas.”
For The Bee Gees, it was a time of “frustration mixed with ambition, I think, because we were a very ambitious pack of brothers really,” Barry said. “And all we could see was ahead, we would not look back at anything. W
e wanted to go ahead and try our luck in England. We even prepared ourselves to fail, completely. We didn’t have any money when we arrived in England.”
“Had we failed [to achieve success in Britain], we would have come back to Australia,” Robin said. “We went over there to find out whether we could or not. It wasn’t whether we were going to make it because we didn’t broadcast that at all. To anybody.”
“We didn’t do a ‘Look out Beatles, here come The Bee Gees, ’ ” Maurice added. “After 13 records in Australia and endless TV appearances, we decided to try our fortune in England. We had good managers and plenty of luck.”
Barbara Gibb was something of an amateur fortune-teller, and before the Gibb family left Australia, she consulted the cards. “She told us that before five months or five years or five something, we would have everything we wanted,” Barry recalled. “She also described Robert [Stigwood] long before we ever met him.”
Having heard that The Seekers had worked their way to England on a ship called Fairsky, the same ship on which Colin Petersen had left for England, Hugh had approached the Italian shipping line Sitmar, with whom they had first travelled to Australia in 1958, and made them an offer: The Bee Gees would entertain the ship’s passengers in return for free passage for himself and the boys. The deal was done, and on January 3, 1967, the Gibb family (minus Lesley, who stayed behind in Australia with her husband Keith), accompanied by their Australian producer Ossie Byrne, boarded the SS Fairsky, setting sail for what they hoped would be the start of a fresh career.
Things got off to a strange start when, on the first day aboard, Hugh went to the ship’s purser to establish the boys’ performance schedule and discovered that the bewildered man had no idea that The Bee Gees were on board or were supposed to be performing. Other entertainment had already been booked, but a compromise was finally reached whereby the group would perform a 20-minute set on a few evenings of the voyage.
They had set sail by the time that news filtered through that ‘Spicks And Specks’ had reached pole position in Sydney. “We found out on the boat that it was number one and we just couldn’t believe it,” Barry said. “We hadn’t been able to get a solid hit record in that country since the moment we arrived [in] ’58.
“Nothing had happened to us,” he continued, his frustration obvious. “We’d done a lot of club work, a lot of experience.” He did concede that the experience was invaluable though. “That’s the one thing Australia has done for us. We worked a lot of stages, did a lot of shows, never really made hits, [but] it made us into, I think, a good band.”
The first port of call was a brief stop at Thursday Island. The boys took the opportunity to send postcards to Sydney deejays, many of whom didn’t know the group had left. The message was short. “We’re on our way to England.”
On January 7, The Bee Gees gave their first performance of the voyage home, commencing at 11.30 p.m. As the ship was full of young Australians who were familiar with the group, they got a fantastic reception. It was a far cry from the voyage from England, when three little boys had to sneak out in their pyjamas to sing their songs perched on the anchor. Now they really were a group. They were still performing their nightclub act of original material with occasional covers of hits like ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’ and ‘Twist And Shout’ and the odd bit of comedy thrown in.
One interested onlooker was fellow-passenger David Browning, who described their daily performances as, “Partly rehearsal, but partly entertainment for the boat. The thing that used to be sung more than anything else by them was ‘Yellow Submarine’, which was a great laugh! They used to sing that a lot.”
Other family members joined in too. “I know that their father was on drums,” recalled David, “and there was the wife of one of the chaps, a slim blonde girl, and she once did an act with them, but I didn’t see much of her. It was a bit of a magical disappearing act, sort of thing from a wardrobe or something like that.” It is often said that life imitates art: this particular part of the act would soon be reprised, for real.
Mysterious poems began to appear on the notice-board of the day’s activities. Intrigued passengers would gather each day to read the latest work of the phantom poet of the Fairsky. Watching from the distance as they speculated on the poet’s identity was the phantom himself, Robin Gibb, who composed the nonsense poems on a portable typewriter in his cabin.
Barry and Robin also wrote a complete book of short stories during the five-week voyage. The book, which they planned to publish under the title On The Other Hand, was one of many proposed Bee Gees’ projects which would be shelved along the way.
The Fairsky docked at Southampton on the evening of Monday, February 6, 1967. As Maurice explained, “We were there for the night, and everyone was going to be disembarking the next day, so we decided to go off for the night and go round to find our first good fish and chip shop.”
Barry continued the story. “We met this group who were all dressed like The Beatles were in A Hard Day’s Night with the black cloaks, you know, and all that business. And they said, you know, ‘Go back, go back. Groups are out.’ That was the statement which is pretty amazing, considering that groups still do all right, you know! ‘Groups are out, go back.’ So we didn’t, but that was the message …”
The events of the following morning remained in Andy Gibb’s memories for different reasons. As he recalled, “I went running down the gangplank, nine years old … and I left at five months old so I’d never even seen [England]. I was running down there and kissed the ground … and my brothers all kissed the ground. After a few months, we wondered why, but we did it.”
The Gibb family had only about £200 between them and after making their way to London they spent their first few nights in what Maurice unkindly describes as “a crummy hotel in Hampstead”. As Barry recalls, “I had two pounds and ten shillings to my name.”
They wasted no time in contacting their Australian friend, Colin Petersen, who was already in London and who helped the family find a semi-detached house. “I had a letter from Hugh Gibb,” he explained, “and sorted out somewhere for them to stay and stored their equipment in my flat.” Colin’s help proved invaluable. “We [disembarked] on a Tuesday and by Friday we’d moved into a furnished house in Hendon,” Hugh Gibb confirmed.
The underground journey to Colin’s flat was memorable for some bemused passengers. Maurice was carrying a sitar purchased in India on a stop-over on the journey back from Australia. Quickly realising that he was no budding George Harrison, it was one of the first things he sold on returning to Britain.
On their first Monday in London, Barry and his dad travelled by tube to see Eddie Jarrett, of the Lew Grade Organisation, who was managing The Seekers at the time. “He painted a very black picture about the possibility of touring but offered to put us into clubs to keep the boys working,” said Hugh.
Dejected, Barry and Hugh returned to the semi-detached house in Hendon, where Barbara was waiting with the news that a “Mr Stickweed” had been ringing all day. While in Australia Hugh had sent acetates of their records to Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s NEMS office in London. He in turn had passed them on to Robert Stigwood who worked with him at that time. “We didn’t know at the time that Brian didn’t handle that side of the business,” Barry explained, “and that [the discs] were passed to Robert Stigwood instead. He played them and liked them. He had our date of arrival in England and tried for days to contact us but couldn’t find us. We tried every agency in the book but none of them wanted to know. At last Robert contacted us.”
“I don’t know how he got that telephone number because I didn’t tell him,” Hugh said. “We only moved into the house on Friday and on Monday he was ringing all day.” For years, Hugh’s question remained unanswered, but in 1999, the missing piece of the jigsaw was discovered.
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In 1965 The Deutsche Grammophon Company created a new subsidiary in London called Polydor UK Ltd, appointing 35-year-old Roland Rennie as its fir
st Managing Director. It was during a previous employment with EMI that he had first encountered Robert Stigwood, a relationship which would serve both well in Roland’s new job.
One of EMI’s subsidiaries was a company called Top Rank which itself had previously founded the “Rank Co-operative”. This had originally been set upon behalf of all the small record companies around the world so that they could combat the monopoly of Decca and EMI, giving them a fighting chance to acquire American repertoire for their various companies. When EMI bought Top Rank, the co-operative folded and Roland, then of EMI, travelled the world meeting all the various company heads. One of these was Fred Marks.
In late 1966 Roland was approached by an Australian music publisher, one of the titles on offer being ‘Spicks And Specks’. Noting that The Bee Gees were a Festival act, Roland immediately contacted Fred and acquired the rights to it with a view to issuing it as a Polydor single. It was already in the process of being pressed when, according to Roland, “Totally out of the blue, [Barry Gibb] came into my office one day. He virtually came off the street, as I remember. He was a very together young man, it was incredible at his age to come in and talk about a record deal – he was very impressive.”
Alan Bates, Polydor’s marketing manager, remembered that this was the first time he had ever heard of The Bee Gees. He was shown an acetate, probably one of the ones sent to NEMS by Hugh. “I know that the acetate came via Roland – where he got it from, I couldn’t say,” Alan explained. “There was a white label and on it; it just said ‘Spicks And Specks’ and ‘Bee Gees’. I didn’t know what to make of it – the way that ‘Bee Gees’ was spelled on the thing, it wasn’t obvious to me which one of those two was the title and which was the group. I actually thought that the band was called ‘Spicks And Specks’. That just shows that they were completely unknown.”