The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  Ronnie returned home with a demo version of a recent Barry Gibb song safely locked away in his suitcase. The song was one of several which were eagerly recorded by other artists once it became known that The Bee Gees had reformed, and that release of Barry’s solo album The Kid’s No Good would be shelved.

  ‘One Bad Thing’ was a particularly popular choice, and Ronnie was fortunate that his visit to London had put him at the head of the queue. However, like all those that followed, the Festival single didn’t become the commercial success that it was anticipated it would be.

  There was often talk that Richard Starkey and Maurice would eventually work, as well as play, together, and Maurice finally made his mark on a (former) Beatle’s record. Included on Ringo Starr’s Sentimental Journey LP, a George Martin produced compilation of cover versions which Apple released in March, was the old Dixon-Henderson standard, ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, and Maurice hadn’t needed to be asked twice whether he would like to take responsibility for the song’s arrangement.

  Philips recording artist, and friend of the stars, Lou Reizner released his eponymous album in late 1970, and it contained the song that Samantha Sang had recorded the year before, the previously unreleased ‘The Day Your Eyes Meet Mine’, written jointly by Barry and Maurice. The album also included Barry’s ‘In The Morning (Morning Of My Life)’.

  Maurice and Billy Lawrie had recorded a lovely demo of their own composition, ‘Touch And Understand Love’, which somehow found its way to Nashville where it was recorded by Myrna March and released by Starday-King Records.

  Only provided with a limited distribution, it stood little chance of following up the chart success that Engelbert Humperdinck had achieved on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Sweetheart’ in September 1970, six months after The Bee Gees own version had been released as a B-side. Number 47 was its zenith in the States, but it fared a bit better in Britain, where it peaked at number 22.

  It also signalled the last occasion that a cover version of a Gibb song would enter the charts in Britain or America for the next five years, although there would be no shortage of attempts to do so.

  19

  LONELY DAYS

  “FOR THE PAST six months I have done no work except record making for myself and Lulu’s brother, Billy Lawrie,” Maurice said in March 1970. “During this time I travelled the world with Lulu.”

  Home again in England, Maurice worked with Billy as commercial jingle writers and performers for such products as Start-Rite shoes – with Lulu’s assistance on vocals – and Ultrabrite toothpaste. They also provided the music for a commercial for a package holidays company, which featured a glimpse of Hugh and Barbara Gibb waving from a balcony in Ibiza. Nowadays, this is a profitable area of the music business, and one where Maurice could probably be very successful, as his particular skills and talents seem ideally suited to that environment.

  In addition, Maurice began to work as a record producer for Tin Tin, teaming up with brother-in-law Billy. “They were always quite busy in the studio with bits and pieces,” Tom Kennedy recalled, “and I think some of them were quite lucrative for them. Billy was a fun character and probably very good for Maurice at the time, because Lulu was away a lot. He was very supportive of Maurice. Although Billy’s been quite successful in the music business, singing was not really his forte – the singer in that family was always Lulu.”

  Lulu was pleased with the alliance that had developed between her husband and brother because it helped to keep Maurice occupied. In those days, Maurice’s boredom was often relieved by spending vast sums of money. “Maurice literally showered me with presents,” she said. “ ‘Every week is an anniversary for us,’ he used to tell me. But he spoilt himself too, and perhaps that was part of the problem. He was always buying cars, clothes, jewellery and more cars, as well as cameras, tapes, records, guitars and gadgets. The house was positively polluted with them. When he was not on tour or in the studio, he spent his time spending money. If he became bored, he might go out and buy a Bentley; four weeks later he would buy an Aston Martin.”

  Maurice and Billy’s partnership had recently become official with the formation of their company, Moby. “Billy and I have worked on a number of things together and have even written some songs together,” he explained. “It seemed right to get the relationship onto a business footing and Moby seemed an ideal name.”

  The formation of the company seemed to give Maurice a new stability in his life. “Lu and I don’t like to be apart and the new company has helped me in that,” he said. “At one time I used to be charging about all over the country and so did Lu. Since we got married we have both settled down.

  “Lu doesn’t do as much work as she did before she married me, and I don’t leave London as much as I used to. If she ever has to go away, I always try and be with her, but if I can’t make it I will always set my watch at the time it will be where Lu is performing. She does the same. If I’m in London and she’s in New York, my watch will show New York time and hers will show London time.

  “It’s not because of any silly little thing; just that it is easier then to phone each other. I might think I would like to phone Lu and look at my watch. If it was early in the morning I would remember not to.”

  Despite his wife’s celebrity status, Maurice claimed, “We have a happy working relationship – just like any ordinary working couple. Lu puts all the money she earns into an account, and I give her housekeeping and personal spending money each week.”

  Lulu revealed that Maurice was an old-fashioned husband in other ways as well. “He really is unbelievably possessive and sometimes he gets unduly annoyed,” she said.

  On one occasion, a shopping trip to Oxford Street nearly became an embarrassing scene. Maurice waited in the car while Lulu and Billy went off on their own to a shop. When Lulu took her brother’s arm to cross the street, she recalled that Maurice “reacted violently and jumped out of the car like Superman to drag us apart!”

  She thought at first that he was joking, but he was serious. “There are people looking,” he told her sternly, “and they don’t know Billy’s your brother. They’ll think you’re a harlot!”

  Lulu laughed as she related the story, adding, “Maybe he’s right. There are always people looking for something nasty to say.”

  Maurice admitted that Lulu was the driving force in their marriage. “She is determined and strong-minded, whereas I am placid,” he said. “I have never been pushing or jealous. My big asset, I suppose, is that I get on with people. I keep my mouth shut and stay in the background.”

  Lulu agreed that Maurice was “placid, easy-going, very nice to live with, generous, warm, affectionate,” but she claimed he could still fly into a temper. “Maurice stamps up and down the stairs and flings his clothes down to the bottom if he’s really roused. But usually if he gets annoyed, then it’s because I bring it out in him. I’m a bit of a bitch, and I can really needle him. I might fling a dirty old ashtray,” she admitted, “but I’d never aim to hit him. Two minutes later, I’ve forgotten everything, and we’re soon kissing and cuddling. I always say I’m sorry because I know what I’m like.”

  The couple had moved to a new home in Hampstead the previous August; quite a house for a couple barely out of their teens. “It’s like my mother said when she first saw our house,” Lulu laughed, putting on her thickest Glasgwegian accent, “ ‘Would you ever have believed it, hen? It’s like a mansion!’ It’s on three floors with two sitting rooms, six bedrooms, three with their own bathrooms, and the kitchen.”

  The couple immediately began adapting the house for their own use, converting one bedroom to a cinema, another to hold Lulu’s clothes, and Maurice converted an old air raid shelter into a home studio.

  “I can make as much noise as I like with Ringo as my next-door neighbour,” he said. “I’d never met him before. I introduced myself when I moved in and said, ‘Hi, neighbour!’ Now we’ve become great pals. He’s certainly mellowed a lot, I’d imagine. He’s
certainly one of the most likeable guys I’ve ever met. We’ve been having some great times together. As a matter of fact, I did the arrangement of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ on his Sentimental Journey LP.”

  Some of those “great times” Maurice refers to included the pair discussing, on an on-off basis for almost two years, the possibility of recording an avant garde album of electronic music. “It didn’t happen,” said Ringo, but one title called ‘Modulating Maurice’ does exist, although Maurice’s only contribution to this was random spoken words over Ringo’s instrumentation.

  Instead, they pursued one of Maurice’s other great loves, film-making. “[There] was a little movie, actually, that we were working on,” Ringo explained to Record Collector’s Ken Sharp. “It was like The Chase,” he continued. “We had one camera between us and we’d chase each other all round the area in Britain where we were both living at the time. We went into the studio and I just overdubbed all the sound effects from the movie Yellow

  Submarine.”

  Unlike many such ventures that the Gibbs have been involved in over the years, this one actually saw the light of day, appearing on a limited edition video in February, 1995 – the proceeds benefiting charitable causes.

  Lulu said that she and Maurice and Ringo and his wife Maureen became “an almost inseparable foursome”. The friendship was so close that they used to laughingly suggest building a bridge or a tunnel to connect the Gibb and the Starr homes.

  Ringo and Maureen, who married in 1965, seemed to have “a fabulously happy relationship,” according to Lulu. “They were so comfortable with each other and were my idea of the ideal couple … I realise now that I idealised their relationship because I was comparing it to mine with Maurice. They always appeared at ease whereas we operated in a state of constant tension.” It came as a great shock to her years later when the couple divorced.

  On February 18, 1970, Maurice opened in the stage musical, Sing A Rude Song, at the Greenwich Theatre. The musical was based on the life of the famous music hall performer, Marie Lloyd, played by Barbara Windsor, with Maurice starring as her third husband, the Irish jockey, Bernard Dillon. “I first saw the script in Robert Stigwood’s office,” Maurice recalled. “Robert asked if I would like to take it home and read it. Then the very next day, he asked me if I would like to play the part of Marie Lloyd’s third husband, Bernard Dillon.”

  “Maurice came in [to the show] in the first place simply because The Bee Gees had split up,” the musical’s co-writer and director, Ned Sherrin, explained, “and this was, I think, Stigwood’s therapy for keeping Maurice interested; giving him something to do while the break-up was going on. I don’t remember the ramifications of it, but I do remember that Maurice needed to be kept with something in his mind. So I think that was the main reason for Robert’s investing in it.”

  Sing A Rude Song was originally written for actress Millicent Martin, but an engagement at The Talk Of The Town prevented her from taking the role of Marie Lloyd. Georgia Brown was next considered but was similarly unavailable, according to Sherrin, “so hence Barbara [Windsor], who was very good.”

  Maurice professed, “I’ve always wanted to do a musical because it’s invaluable experience. I’ve always wanted to act to gain all-round show business experience.” From most reports, his vow that he “would never give up pop music because it’s in my blood. I will still always write and record – whether as a Bee Gee or under my own name,” was probably the wisest course to take.

  Sherrin diplomatically observed that Maurice was not, perhaps, a natural stage performer. “In retrospect, I think you could say that it wasn’t quite his métier,” and Maurice himself would in later years agree with that appraisal.

  At the time, however, Maurice was enthusiastic about the role. “I had never done any [stage] acting before,” he admitted, “but it presented a new challenge so I thought I’d have a go. I never believed acting on stage could be such hard work. The directors of the show, Robin Phillips and Ned Sherrin, gave me every help and I think I handled the part as well as I could.

  “The only thing I ever did fight for was a part in this musical show, although I was up against competition from more experienced artists. I shall be upset if I am no good, more so than I ever was at being described as ‘Barry’s brother’ or being mistaken for Robin.”

  The world of musical theatre proved to be an eye-opener for Maurice. “I used to think it was pretty hard work during all those hectic Bee Gees days,” he admitted. “But – no kidding – I didn’t know what hard work was then. Believe it or not, we have been rehearsing an average of 12 hours a day for the last three weeks or so in preparation for opening night.”

  “I always remember the first day of rehearsals,” Ned Sherrin said. “Everybody arrived and were changing from their shoes into their sneakers or whatever they were going to dance in. Maurice was still travelling with his road manager, who was there at his feet putting on his [shoes]! I think he quite enjoyed it because it was different and a whole new experience. It was quite an important [part] because he was playing the nasty third husband, but I think it was just therapy from Robert, and it was enough for that. I think the understudy had to go on once or twice and brought it much more to life.”

  The musical, written by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin with additional material by Alan Bennett and featuring music composed and arranged by Ron Grainer, did not exactly open to rave reviews. Pearson Phillips of the Daily Mail wrote, “Barbara Windsor tried hard, perhaps too hard. She just didn’t put across the simple magic that I am told ‘our Marie’ had. Ron Grainer’s music was not memorable – certainly no match for the old songwriters. Dennis Quilley had moments as Marie’s second husband, but pop singer Maurice Gibb was disappointing as her final, caddish one. There were some hilarious moments, particularly when she appeared before an LCC licensing committee. But mostly it all fell really short of a satisfactory tribute.”

  Barbara Windsor was amused by her co-star’s inexperience. “Maurice had never done theatre before,” she said, “and he wasn’t quite putting it across – he lacked grit or confidence or something.” The tale of how she attempted to overcome the problem has grown into something of a showbiz legend.

  “Maurice was a bit lifeless on stage,” Sherrin agreed, “so I said, ‘Oh come on, you’d better give him one, Barbara, and brighten him up a bit’. “Unfortunately, she did, and it had no effect; it didn’t get any better! He didn’t sound very convincing, I don’t think.”

  The musical proved to be exhausting work for Maurice, but he enjoyed the experience overall. “We had great fun working in the show. I’m definitely going to America to do a series of syndicated TV shows. It was very hard work in Sing A Rude Song, I used stagger through the door every night and Lu would say your bath is ready and I literally would fall into a hot bath! I used to be exhausted. Each evening I arrived home absolutely flaked out. We’ve already recorded the original cast album for release on Polydor.”

  Despite the lukewarm reviews from the critics, the show’s run at the Greenwich Theatre was an overwhelming success. “People couldn’t get in at the Greenwich, they were terribly keen to come,” Sherrin remembered. “We were playing to full houses all the time at Greenwich – it was absolutely packed. I don’t think we had a spare seat at Greenwich, but then there was this long hang about before it came to the West End.”

  During the show’s hiatus, the original cast album, which Maurice produced, was recorded for release in May, to coincide with the West End transfer to the Garrick Theatre on May 26.

  February also saw the release of Robin’s third solo single, ‘August October’. Possibly the most predictable song on the whole of his solo album, it again featured a very basic melody with simple lyrical content, and did little to demonstrate the range of musical ideas Robin was experimenting with elsewhere on the album.

  Robin said that he had intended to release it a month earlier, adding, “I have said before that I do not like to release tracks from an LP as a
single, but ‘August October’ was never intended to be on the album, and the principle I was against was of releasing a single from an LP which had been out so long that the particular track was already over-exposed. Robin’s Reign has only been out three weeks so that does not apply to this single.

  “It is not a deliberate single – I’m not trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes by releasing something commercial which I don’t believe in myself. It’s a very catchy, waltzy sort of song, and that is just the way it was intended to come out.

  “There is no question of my sacrificing quality for commerciality as has been suggested. I apply the same degrees of quality to everything I write, and my final analysis is that if the milkman can whistle it – that’s it!”

  Although Robin has since stated that he considered his first LP, recorded during September and October, to be unfinished, at the time, he claimed, “I’m completely happy with the album. The only regret is that it couldn’t have been longer.

  “All my songs are the product of my imagination. I write the words and music at the same time and keep them in my head. It’s always been a hobby of mine, and it’s just fortunate that I can turn it to good use. Songwriting is like an addiction to me; it gives me peace of mind, and my love for it is unlimited. I just can’t see that there will be a time when music will fall away.

  “You could be talking now and a phrase you use like ‘and now today’ or ‘my word’ or ‘you stole the show’ are titles right there. I don’t think about titles, but you could be talking and something will click right there. Then again, I never think of a song all the time. I may do a song and go back to it two days later. I feel my songs are deep enough to be of personal value, and although it takes a while, the public do accept it and get into it. And that’s not meant to sound big-headed.”

  Although Robin seemed happy with the way the album was received, it received a mixed response from fans. This may have been due to Robin’s distinctive voice – inescapable since he sings all of the lead, harmony, and backing vocals – and also his artistic approach, which ranges from the mundane to the genius. Unlike his more workmanlike brothers Barry and Maurice, Robin seems to rely on flashes of inspiration and is less able to turn such moments into fully realised songs.