The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “In Brook Street they had a small recording studio just next to where my office was,” she revealed, “and they used to pop in there all the time. Whenever they came into the office, it was always very lively. Barry was more withdrawn at times – probably because of problems in his personal life, but Robin had a very strange sense of humour, and it always took a while for the penny to drop and realise that he was actually joking. Maurice was always a sort of, very hands-on, practical joker.

  “I always thought Vince was the most genuine, he was down to earth and very sincere in everything. He and Dianne even sent me red roses at Christmas. They were always very considerate and always made me feel as though I wasn’t just a silly fan club secretary, not that any of them did anyway, but Vince was the one who considered me more as a friend rather than just an employee.

  “Colin I liked as well,” Julie continued, “though he was very quiet and had a dry sense of humour. A bit like Robin, you didn’t always know what he was thinking. He was very likeable and more down to earth than the others, maybe because he had been a star from a very early age. He was used to dealing with people, and I just felt that the scene with The Bee Gees hadn’t gone to his head because, being a drummer as well, he was always in the background, although I think he got as many fan letters as the brothers anyway. He was definitely more level headed, and I think that’s why he didn’t go off the rails. He was always very un-star like, he didn’t give the impression of being a superstar, which he was at the time; a bit bemused perhaps by the fact that he’d become a big pop star. Joanne, his future wife, was Brian Epstein’s personal assistant, and I got to know her, maybe more when she actually started work with Robert Stigwood. She was definitely sort of a high-flying woman then, and I felt that she was, like Molly, very strong and knew exactly where she was going, and she sort of led Colin all the way but obviously they have a very good relationship. I wasn’t really a friend of hers as such, because she was definitely in a higher league than me.

  “Barry was the most extrovert and you could see that he took charge of situations. He didn’t divulge a lot about himself, but he was definitely the one who you reckoned was in charge and who would have the last say on whatever was going to happen. He was very much aware that he was older and perhaps the most forward of the three but that was obviously what was needed and he did have the looks at the time as well which attracted the girls.

  “Maurice to me always played the part of a clown, always joking around. He enjoyed having jokes with you and it was him who instigated any little practical jokes. He was quite naïve and very immature in some ways, but he’d make a point of coming and making certain that he’d sent cards, and I’d always get a card from him. He was quite thoughtful in his ways. He often laughed and joked with me and read the letters – I think it highly amused him that someone should be that interested in him. A down to earth guy who liked a joke.”

  One Maurice prank was to cover Vince’s sheets with shaving soap and toothpaste while he slept. But sometimes Maurice would be on the receiving end too, as on the occasion when he was trapped in a hotel bathroom before an important interview with a New York deejay. He made the meeting with moments to spare, but it had taken a carpenter’s saw to free him.

  “Robin had a very warped sort of sense of humour,” Julie continued, “and he took his music very seriously. I remember that a fan gave Robin a little black Labrador puppy, but he couldn’t keep it and so my Mum and I took him. I’m sure he was half wolf – he nearly drove us round the bend – and in the end we had to give him to the dog home, and that was sad particularly because someone had originally spent a lot of money for this dog. When I went to Robin’s flat to pick up that dog, I think he was playing the cello at the time, and I was quite surprised and Molly was saying, ‘He’s really very good at it, he’s learning and he’s always trying to learn something new.’ I think Robin is the deepest of all of them, and I think that perhaps is the reason why sometimes he was unpopular. He wasn’t actually being unfriendly, but he couldn’t always communicate with people. He found it quite difficult, but when he did, and it took a while, then you realised that he was quite a funny guy as well, but that he just found it difficult. He didn’t seem like a 17 or 18 year old; he seemed far more mature than Maurice. No way would you have thought they were twins!

  “But none of them treated you as though you weren’t an important person,” Julie concluded. “With some of the stars I’d met before – there were a few who weren’t even particularly big stars who had only made a couple of records – it was always, ‘Oh, we are great and you are down there.’ ”

  The Bee Gees followed their début Top Of The Pops performance with a concert at Liverpool University on May 25 and then, on June 13, the group appeared again on television on ITV’s As You Like It.

  Robin remembers that on one of their early television appearances, they shared the bill with a little known Japanese performance artist who became a household name that year. “Actually, it was funny because we’d met Yoko Ono … on a TV show that we were doing. She was doing this thing where she got out of a bag. That was her act. She got out of a bag. It was weird at the time. Pretty weird now, come to think of it!” he laughed.

  The group’s frenetic pace caused their mother more than a little inconvenience. Their rented house, although furnished, lacked both a washing machine and a tumble dryer. “I had to wash all their shirts in the bathtub,” Barbara recalled. “Oh, my aching back! I’d start after dinner and work until I finished at midnight. Then I had to get up early to contend with Andy’s mischief.”

  * * *

  Barry Gibb seemed elated with the five-man Bee Gees’ line-up, saying, “Vince is a brilliant guitarist, Colin is a brilliant drummer. I don’t think they’d ever leave the group, and I’d never think of replacing them with anyone else because I don’t think anyone else is as capable as these two guys are.”

  The group released their second single, ‘To Love Somebody’ in June. A fine ballad that has gone on to become one of the most recorded and played songs of The Bee Gees’ entire catalogue, for some reason it failed as a single. The instrumental introduction used for both verses was not repeated in subsequent versions, perhaps indicating that they were unsure of the best way to open the song, but the melody is strong with Barry’s vocal and Robin’s support in good form.

  According to Barry, “It was written for Otis Redding … in [early March] 1967 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. I was on my own and Robert Stigwood had brought me to New York to meet Nat Weiss and the people at NEMS, because they had signed the group. I’d never been to New York before so it was a great thrill for me. I met Otis Redding early in the evening, and Robert Stigwood had sort of suggested I write a song for Otis Redding, and I said I would try. I was inspired because I had just met him. That first flash you get – you meet somebody like that who you really admire and something happens. The rest of the evening I was alone and I sort of concocted most of it in that time. Of course, he died … later in a plane crash,* so he never recorded the song. But the song was then finished with Robin and Maurice.”

  “Everyone told us what a great record they thought it was,” Robin said. “Other groups all raved about it but for some reason people in Britain just did not seem to like it.”

  “I think the reason it didn’t do well here was because it’s a soul number,” Barry added. “Americans loved it, but it just wasn’t right for this country.”

  An enduring classic from their début album, ‘I Can’t See Nobody’, was wasted as the B-side of the single. Some may have felt Robin’s soulful vocal was an acquired taste, but it conveys the song’s emotional impact very well. As all three voices roll into that final chorus, and Bill Shepherd’s string arrangement pours it on, it’s a little masterpiece.

  Bee Gees’ 1st was released on July 14, 1967, and issued in both mono and stereo versions (in most markets), as was the common practice of the time. The mono version is not simply a reduction of the two stereo channels to one;
each song’s four-track master was remixed separately to mono and stereo. The mono version was important because it was the one heard on singles, AM radio, and jukeboxes; and because in Britain in 1967, mono still dominated the LP market.

  Ossie Byrne continued to encourage the use of the overdubbing techniques, which he had first employed with the group in 1966, to build up layers of vocals and to provide Maurice with an outlet as a multi-instrumentalist while Barry and Robin took the lead vocals.

  In addition to Barry on rhythm guitar, Robin probably on organ, and Maurice on bass, piano, harpsichord, mellotron, and you name it, the band for these sessions included Colin Petersen drumming on some of the songs, and Vince Melouney is quick to stress that he was involved in all of them, despite not officially joining as lead guitarist until after much of the recording of Bee Gees’ 1st had been completed.

  The arrangements are credited to Bill Shepherd and Phil Dennys, and it is tempting to assume the Dennys’ ones are the earliest, since Bill continued to work with the Gibb brothers till 1972, but this is conjecture. Four songs have no orchestral backing, which would be a rarity in the years to come.

  There were some strong Beatlesque features on the album. The most obvious is the lead guitar riff on ‘In My Own Time’ which is similar to The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ (1966), but a riff is not a melody, and the two songs are markedly different.

  “We started off with a mellotron and we used that on … ‘Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You’ … I had to rep eat that on stage, but I used an organ,” Maurice revealed.

  The three-part Gibb harmony was likewise compared to The Beatles, although Bee Gees fans familiar with the voices have not always agreed. Possibly it was not so much in the voices themselves as the application of harmony singing to rock music, where a single lead vocal with backing was more common.

  There is one way in which The Bee Gees have forever carried on The Beatles’ legacy, and that is the value they place on eclecticism. Like The Beatles, The Bee Gees freely combine elements of songwriting and arranging from any musical style they happen to have come across. The downside at times is that The Bee Gees’ wide-ranging styles do not fit well into the market categories used for radio play and consequently the charts, but they are keeping alive what could be reasonably called The Beatles’ tradition of all-inclusive pop music.

  While the album is very much a collection of diverse songs, it is well-paced with a mix of straight ballads and some looser pieces like the slightly chaotic ‘Red Chair Fade Away’ and ‘I Close My Eyes’; both Phil Dennys’ arrangements. By contrast, the most well-known songs are the straight pop ballads like ‘To Love Somebody’ and ‘I Can’t See Nobody’.

  Shortly before the album’s completion, Barry implied that Ossie Byrne and his production team were deserving of great credit, just for their patience alone. “We drive the producer and technicians mad. We have nothing worked out. We sit about and think upa subject, then write a song on the spot. We did the whole of the LP like this. It’s really the only way we can work – spontaneously, off the cuff.” Years later, he would add, “Ossie was a good producer. I think he was crazy to go back to Australia.”

  Driven mad perhaps, but nonetheless still retaining his sanity to this day, is one of those IBC technicians, Damon Lyon-Shaw who well remembers those sessions for First.

  “Just sensational,” is how he describes them. “As far as I was concerned, the combination of Barry Gibb’s weird tuning – not to mention how long he took to tune his guitar, and Colin Petersen’s phenomenal style of drumming was certainly unique at the time.” Vince’s guitar playing was not entirely his personal cup of tea although, conversely, he does go on to say, “but it fitted in so well.

  “The whole combination was so good, it was so simple. I mean they were very simple writers, I’m not saying that they’re not brilliant, but the lyrics were simple, the music was simple, they just had that knack of bringing out that commercial sort of stuff. At that stage they, the original Bee Gees to my mind, were just unique. It was just phenomenal.

  “To my mind The Bee Gees were [at their best] around the First album when they were all together as a unit, the five of them. Live they were sensational, they could play it live, and they sounded just like the albums. They used to just turn up. Barry could either tune his guitar, or if he didn’t, they went home! But if they got it together, they used to just have a rough idea a lot of the time. I mean I wasn’t privy to their writing process, but I think a lot of the time they just came in with an idea and it just matured in the studio. They had the money to do it then, I don’t think you could do it nowadays.”

  Contradicting Barry’s earlier praise of Ossie Byrne as a producer, Damon insists that he knew Ossie as well as anyone and offers a fresh perspective.

  “I did more stuff with Ossie Byrne without The Bee Gees than I did with The Bee Gees. Ossie had a knack of keeping quiet and letting people get on, and then he went adrift a bit and got some bands that weren’t quite so good, and it all sort of petered out from there really. I had a lot of time for Ossie, he was a nice chap.

  “The thing with someone like Ossie, he didn’t have much talent as a producer I have to say, but he had enough talent to see the band. He had this talent of keeping people together and making them productive, and when they threw him out they didn’t have anyone, they only had themselves. If they wanted to get lazy or do stupid things, they got on with it because there wasn’t anybody there to push them, whereas Ossie was their mentor or father figure in the early days. But [The Bee Gees] outgrew him very quickly sadly, because as I say he wasn’t a producer. They had enormous talents and obviously they could see things that he couldn’t see, so I can understand why he went.”

  His colleague John Pantry held a similar view. “Ossie was a nice guy. He didn’t know a great deal technically and initially relied heavily on the engineers. It wasn’t long before The Bee Gees knew as much as him and started doing sessions without him.” John also contributed an unexpected piece of information about Ossie. “He did a great trick with his glass eye, which he could pop out!”

  John thought equally highly of Bill Shepherd too whom he described as “a smashing guy. Really knew his stuff, an excellent arranger who helped shape their early sound.”

  The album’s sleeve design was the work of Klaus Voorman, the bass guitarist with Manfred Mann. A friend of The Beatles from their days in Hamburg, Voorman designed the cover of their Revolver album.

  The Beatles themselves were interested in the NEMS newcomers. “They wanted to come in on one of the boys’ earlier sessions,” Robert Stigwood recalled, “but I asked them not to because I didn’t think it would be particularly good.”

  The summer flew by with a two-week promotional visit to the United States. Before leaving, Colin reassured anxious fans that they would return. “We came to Britain because the scope in Australia was so small, but we don’t just regard it as a stepping stone to the States. Even if we make it there, we still regard ourselves as a British group.”

  The group found time to see some of the sights, but Hugh Gibb revealed that the trip was not without some minor drawbacks. “Robin is a very nervous person; for example, he hates lifts,” Hugh revealed. “He’d sooner walk up ten flights of stairs than use a lift. I think it’s claustrophobia as well as fear. When we went to America, he wouldn’t go up the Empire State Building. He tried three times but each time couldn’t make it. He hates planes. I think it’s fear again, but we travel so much he has to put up with them. But he’ll never go on these charter planes; he hates small planes, but he can just about stand the big jets. He always wears a St Christopher; all the boys do.”

  The Fourth of July was spent in New York talking to music journalist Nancy Lewis. Although they had joined the group in March, both Colin and Vince formally signed five-year contracts with Robert Stigwood and The Bee Gees that day. Like Brian Epstein, Stigwood shared a flair for the grandiose and the group was launched with an enormous all-day press par
ty on a yacht rented especially for the occasion. That little detail appears to have been omitted from conversation on the day, as all present were clearly left with the impression that it was Stigwood’s own vessel.

  Less impressed was Epstein himself as the following extract from Ray Coleman’s Brian Epstein: The Man Who Made The Beatles reveals:

  “Who are you going to charge it to?” asked [Nat] Weiss.

  “Bill it to my personal account,” Stigwood replied.

  Epstein phoned Weiss from London that night. He had heard of the extravaganza shindig. “Who is paying for this?” he asked tartly.

  “Oh Robert told me to charge it to his personal account,” Weiss answered. “Those were his words.”

  There was a silence before Epstein spoke icily. “Number one, he works for me,” Brian began. “You’re my partner. Number two, you’re going to have to pay for this. Number three, Robert owes me £10,000 on a personal loan already. Number four, when The Bee Gees have come to America and earned a million dollars, then they can take a yachting trip.” Then he hung up.

  This seems to imply that Brian Epstein wasn’t a Bee Gees fan. In fact, the opposite was true, and he also expressed his admiration for acts like Cream and Georgie Fame. But Epstein did resent Stigwood’s attempts to manoeuvre The Bee Gees into a status befitting his own major act. As Nat Weiss admitted, “[Brian] liked their music, and liked them personally, but when Robert described them as ‘the next Beatles’, Brian was furious.”

  The following day plans were announced for the first Bee Gees’ film project commissioned by NEMS Enterprises, entitled Lord Kitchener’s Little Drummer Boys. The screenplay was being written by Mike Pratt, a television scriptwriter. The film, to be filmed on location in Africa, was the story of five young men who enlist in the Army as musicians and are pressed into service in the Boer War. With Colin’s previous acting experience, it was suggested that he would take the starring role, whilst Barry, Robin and Maurice would compose the musical score.