The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  The film made a star of the engaging little lad with fair hair and brown eyes, whose earnest delivery and wide-eyed innocence made him a scene stealer even from a veteran like Ralph Richardson. A year later he co-starred with Richard Attenborough in The Scamp and in 1958 with Max Bygraves in A Cry From The Streets. The latter film also starred another child star in the making called Dana Wilson, who became a good friend of Colin’s, and who went on to star in another big film of the day,

  The Shiralee, with Peter Finch.

  With three films in as many years, Colin’s busy schedule meant that his education was often disrupted, and by 1959, his mother decided that it was time to concentrate on school instead of acting. He had been tipped to play the lead in the film Tiger Bay, but the part was rewritten for a girl, giving Hayley Mills her first role. The loss of the part still rankled in 1967, when Colin listed it as the biggest disappointment of his career in a New Musical Express questionnaire.

  Although Colin, like the Gibb brothers, attended Humpybong State School, they didn’t remember each other in their schooldays. Colin studied piano for two years and trained as a jazz drummer for three, before joining Steve & The Board as their drummer in the early Sixties. From then on, The Bee Gees’ paths often crossed with his, and he played drums on some of their sessions.

  In 1966 Colin decided that Britain offered more scope for advancing his career. “When I decided to come to Britain, I stopped off in Sydney to see the Gibbs,” he recalled. “Barry asked me to be their drummer when they came over. I arrived and was interested in films.”

  When the Gibb brothers contacted him, he was sharing a flat in London with Bill Shepherd. True to Barry’s word, Colin was hired as their drummer, even being used at their famous audition for Robert Stigwood, and Bill, who had first worked with The Bee Gees in 1965, was brought in as their musical director and arranger.

  The band’s number was increased to five the following month with the addition of a new member, lead guitarist Vince Melouney.

  Vincent Melouney was born on August 18, 1945 in Sydney, Australia. In the late Fifties, a chance visit from a door-to-door guitar salesman sparked his interest, and after a few lessons, he decided to teach himself from then on. Vince began playing at school dances when he was 14 years old, forming his own group. He moved from band to band in Australia, playing with The Vibrators, Vince & Tony’s Two, The Vince Melouney Sect, Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs and latterly The Blue Jays. Most notable of these were Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, who were one of the top groups in Australia, with the hit singles ‘Poison Ivy’, ‘Mashed Potato’, ‘Sick ’n’ Tired’ and ‘Over The Rainbow’. Vince also worked as a session musician and had worked with the Gibbs on occasion.

  “I was like a thousand other Aussies,” he said. “I felt that the streets of Tin Pan Alley in London were paved with gold.” He worked hard to earn the money to emigrate to Britain, hoping for his big break.

  But stardom hadn’t come his way. He was sharing accommodation with The Easybeats and working in a nine-to-five job at Simca Motors in London which was breaking his heart. A casual conversation with one of his flatmates would bring about a dramatic change in his fortunes. “He said that The Bee Gees had arrived, so I got their number and rang them up. I spoke to Maurice and he said to come down as they were recording that day.

  “I didn’t even have a guitar at the time having hocked it to pay my fare over there. So I borrowed Harry Vanda’s of The Easybeats and went to the studio and started playing. The first track we recorded which I was on was ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’. Me using Harry’s guitar!” Melouney exclaimed, thrilled to have played Vanda’s Gibson.

  Originally hired for just the one session, Vince was invited back for more. It didn’t take long for the brothers to appreciate the value of securing his unquestionable talent on a full-time basis, and he jumped at the opportunity to go back to his first love, music. The band had exactly one afternoon to rehearse before their first London show, at The Cromwellian on Cromwell Road in South Kensington. It was an unpaid gig before an audience comprising mainly of music industry executives. An interested spectator was Atlantic Records chief, Ahmet Ertegun. “We killed ’em!” recalled Colin Petersen.

  With the group now numbering five, and accompanied by Dick Ashby, they set out for their first British concert at the Palace Theatre back in their old hometown of Manchester, opening for Gerry & The Pacemakers and Fats Domino.

  A few days later, April 1, 1967 saw The Bee Gees playing the first of six nights at London’s Saville Theatre, once again opening for Gerry & The Pacemakers and Fats Domino. The group were something less than a resounding success with the rock’n’roll audience.

  “All they wanted was Fats Domino,” Barry said. “They were all Teddy Boys* and hated us. Robin got an egg thrown at him that hit him right in the chest.” In the best show business tradition, Dick Ashby remembers that Robin manfully “carried on with this thing dripping down him.”

  It would be another nine months before they would exorcise the ghosts of that concert when they returned to the Saville Theatre in triumph.

  With Ossie Byrne in Australia, The Bee Gees had begun to experiment with their music. One of the group’s biggest frustrations in those days was the lack of time and money that their record company was willing to invest in their recordings, so for them, it was another dream come true when Robert Stigwood gave them free rein in the Polydor studios which they would often use when nobody else was about.

  “We found out what we really wanted to hear was strings,” Barry said, “and we couldn’t really get that in Australia. So when we got to England we knew we wanted to hear our music with an orchestra behind it. When we got a manager situation going with Robert Stigwood he asked us what we wanted to do with our music and we asked him for an orchestra. We always loved orchestras and, being in Australia, we were pretty starved of that. Tommy Tycho** was about the limit of where you could go and we couldn’t have afforded him anyway. So I think it was the starvation over those years that had us use orchestras with such enthusiasm when we finally had a manager and record company prepared to pay for them.”

  More than 30 years later, Barry reflected, “We knew for quite a while before we could do anything about it, that there was only one way for us and that was out. The only way was to go to one of the hubs, like London or Los Angeles, and try your luck there. We believed we were as good as any international group and, if you’re going to believe something like that, you have to do something about it. We thought we could make better records than we were hearing, and that wasn’t necessarily true at first, but we did do Bee Gees 1st which I would always regard as our most inventive album – within our first year in England … and we did make a world-class album, so I think our point was proven.”

  The group’s first British album was recorded in a fairly short time, between March 7 and April 21. A first album often amounts to the best of the artist’s work to date, as demonstrated by their first Australian album, and The Bee Gees could have been forgiven for starting their international career off with a bang by reworking some of the many dozens of songs they’d done in Australia, especially the demos from 1966 that had not even been released there. But they did not do so. Instead, with the exception of ‘I Can’t See Nobody’ which dated back to a ballroom in Brisbane, they used exclusively new songs from just the past few months, which made this supposedly first album all the more impressive. “We can write a song about almost anything, to order,” claimed an enthusiastic Barry. “We write all the time. I suppose we finish about four or five songs a week on average but a lot of the material we write is thrown away.”

  Their first official sessions included the original demo of ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’ and other rehearsals at Polydor’s studios, although the final recording proper is credited solely to IBC Studios, which Robert Stigwood had used for clients as far back as 1962. IBC (owned by the television company, Independent Broadcasting Corporation) had four-track recording equipment b
y the time The Bee Gees came to it and was regarded as a first-class facility. It was very much on a par with EMI’s Abbey Road, as The Beatles were still using four-track then too. It would be another year at least, before both studios could offer their clients eight-track facilities.

  Robert Stigwood spared no expense to announce the release of the first new Bee Gees single. “The most significant new musical talent of 1967” proclaimed the full page advertisement for ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’.

  It was both an unlikely title and subject for a pop single – two miners trapped, hoping to be saved, yet fearing that the rescuers may have given up on them – but the pop-folk ballad served to display their harmony singing against a simple arrangement of guitars. The song is immediately accessible, yet certain details remain elusive, and this combination makes for a good choice as a single. As far as any song can serve as an example of the group’s style, their UK début conveyed exactly what they were about – the harmony singing, the solid melody, the quirky lyrics. It also highlighted a shift in their attitude towards their writing.

  “The old concept of writing about love and romance as the basis of every pop song has changed,” Barry told a music press naturally curious about the new kids on the block. “We still do write romance songs, but most of our writing is about contemporary things, situations, people. The Beatles have started to write about subjects not connected with love. We do too. ‘New York Mining Disaster’ is about some people trapped in a mine.”

  Robin Gibb recalled the events of that long night spent recording with Carlos. “It was written at Polydor Records on a staircase … It was in the dark and it was echoey and we had this strange inspiration to write this song about a mining disaster that occurred in New York in the year 1941. I suppose, you know, because it was the atmosphere … It was right in the middle of the offices of Polydor at the very time. But the lights were out anyway. There was in fact a mining disaster in New York but it wasn’t in 1941 …” Actually, unbeknownst to Robin, there was a mining disaster in 1941 which took place in McIntire, Pennsylvania, in which six people were killed.

  “We couldn’t see each other,” Barry added. “We made it up, we were just sitting in the dark and that was where the idea sprang from. So, what would it be like trapped in say a mine, for instance, and you can’t see each other. Can we write something about that? Well, we were very tragic orientated, and in those days we wrote a lot of tragic songs … It was written about the time of the Aberfan mining disaster* so it’s a little bit gory but it still works today. People still love to hear it and people still ask us to play it.”

  This differed from their normal writing style which Maurice was happy to detail. “We arrive at the studio and begin. No sitting round a table and talking. It comes there or not at all. I usually use a piano to help with the ‘sound’ of the whole number. I don’t have anything to do with the lyrics; pure music is my line.”

  The single’s extra-lyrical title, while adding an interesting touch, caused minor sales problems since people who’d heard and liked the song might have found it hard to identify in the shops. The Atco release in the United States was rather long-windedly labelled ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941 (Have You Seen My Wife, Mr Jones?)’ in an attempt to overcome this, but Robin explained, “At the same token … as it was our first single [outside Australia], we wanted something to draw attention as well. So a title like that was not to be dismissed, you know. I mean, Matt Monro could not have recorded this song!”

  Maybe Matt Monro couldn’t have recorded it, but what about The Beatles? The group were dogged for some time by the idea that they were imitating the Fab Four, for which some responsibility may lie with the action reportedly taken by Atlantic Records in the United States. Legend has it that white label copies of the disc were circulated amongst radio stations without any clues as to the identity of the group, although none have ever been discovered, thus raising doubts as to their existence in the first place. However, Ahmet Ertegun himself kept the story alive by suggesting, “You know what … I wouldn’t put it past our promotion department. They might have done that, with just a few radio stations, like that, to create a ‘wonder who they are’ [scenario]. The reason to do that would be to get airplay. The reason you’ve never seen one would be they are probably in some radio station, and eventually they would discard them.” Curiously though, as if to raise further doubts, at this point Ahmet began singing, “I started a joke …”

  Adding credibility to the tale, Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler confirmed that the action was one of his trademarks. “I resorted to the old tricks,” he wrote, “sending out white label acetates to deejays and programme directors, hyping the market with advance copies of singles.”

  “[‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’] was a total rip-off of The Beatles,” conceded Maurice. “We were so influenced by them. In fact it started a mystery [in the USA] about us, because they started playing [it] and saying, ‘They’re this new group from England that begins with a B and finishes with an s’ so they all said, ‘Ah, it’s The Beatles, not naming it, they’re doing that trick again.’ The disc jockey would play it and play it and play it and, ‘Guess who it is?’ and people would guess, and they wouldn’t get the answer. I heard [the idea] came actually from Ahmet Ertegun … and Jerry Wexler. To us it was an honour, to actually think we were as good as The Beatles.”

  Two years later, while in Australia, Maurice would retract his initial remark. He told ‘Molly’ Meldrum that, while “stuck in a corner with George, Ringo and Eric Clapton” at a party, George had owned up to buying a copy of ‘Mining Disaster’ “because it sounded so much like [The Beatles], it was untrue.” Maurice’s response to George was that “it was unintentional” to which George was said to have replied, “I knew that, I admire your work.”

  It’s important to recognise that at this time, nearly all pop and rock bands were strongly influenced by The Beatles, whose every remark was picked up by the music press and made into the new trend of the hour. “If you sounded like The Beatles and also could write a hit single, then the hype of the machine would go into action, and your company would make sure people thought you sounded like The Beatles or thought you were The Beatles,” Barry explained. “And that sold you. Attracted attention to you.”

  “It was good for us because … everyone thought it was The Beatles under a different name,” Robin added. “And all the deejays on radio stations in the US picked it up immediately thinking it was The Beatles, and it was a hit on that basis. It established us in those early years. It helped our following record which was nothing like The Beatles.”

  Still, it rankled when Disc & Music Echo reported “widespread rumours” that ’New York Mining Disaster’ had been written by Lennon & McCartney. “Rubbish!” Robin retorted. “We’ve always written our own songs. I’ve been writing since I was ten – before Lennon and McCartney were even on stage. People can say what they like. If they don’t believe us, they can ask The Beatles.”

  The single went on to achieve number 12 in Britain and number 14 in the American charts, a more than respectable showing for a new group.

  The success of ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’ owes a lot more to the perseverance of Robert Stigwood than he has previously been given credit for. “We had quite a hard time at getting The Bee Gees played,” conceded Polydor’s Alan Bates. “We weren’t all totally convinced that Stigwood was picking the right song to plug … but at the end of the day, he was a very forceful character. All of these guys were – Chas Chandler [manager of Jimi Hendrix] was the same, Kit Lambert [manager of The Who] was the same. They all argued their case with passion, you know, they lived it, they were like that.”

  In addition to finishing work on the album, the boys found time to record their first BBC session at the Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Avenue, London, with producer Bill Bebb. They naturally performed the single, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’ and also gave listeners a preview of what the album had to offer with ‘In My Own Ti
me’, ‘One Minute Woman’ and ‘Cucumber Castle’. When the BBC Light Programme’s Saturday Club presented by Brian Matthew was broadcast on April 22, it was noted that there were “rave reviews from the audition panel”.

  Barry, Robin, Maurice, Colin and Vince made their first British TV appearance on Top Of The Pops performing ‘New York Mining Disaster’ on May 11 and were rather awe-struck at the company they were keeping.

  “Jimmy Savile was on it,” Maurice recalled. “That was amazing because … we’d seen pictures of him in The Beatles fan club book so we thought we were really there! That show had Lulu, us, The Move and the Stones doing ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’. You have to remember this was really before the superstar was invented so you were all in it together.”

  Scottish singer Lulu performed, ‘The Boat That I Row’, and a smitten Maurice was quick to make her acquaintance in the BBC canteen, although the relationship wouldn’t develop for quite some time.

  “I thought they were all rather flash then,” Lulu recalled.

  “And I thought, what do I say to this big pop star?” Maurice added.

  By now the brothers had been introduced to someone who thought of herself as anything but a big star. Julie Barrett, who worked in the same NEMS office as Molly Hullis, had requested that she be allowed to run an official Bee Gees fan club, which would begin that July.

  “My first memories are of the twins,” she recalled, “who were enjoying the success of it all, becoming very excited, and I found them to be what I called ‘normal’ at the time. Having a lot of acts go through the press office, there were some that really were above themselves, and you were lucky if they spoke to you.”

  In her privileged position as their fan club secretary, Julie got to see the group in a completely different working environment than others who worked with them, and is therefore uniquely positioned to comment on their individual personalities at that time.