by Hector Cook
“This is it,” Robin added. “Take Gilbert O’Sullivan, for example. His record gets to the top of the American charts, and it hits the front page of just about every paper. We had … consecutive number ones and not a word is written about it. People in England don’t value their art. I mean, there’s no other group like us. We are always original and never use other people’s material. People should value it, but they don’t because they’re spoilt.
“We’re pop stars and now we’re content. All we want now is for people to realise that our music is a lastingly progressive thing.”
Describing the various styles of music they have written, Robin said, “Really, The Bee Gees’ songwriting is for The Bee Gees, and we sit down and think of other artists, but what we’re really writing is for us.”
“We don’t do it on purpose,” Barry added. “We just do it with someone else’s feel and it comes out on their album.”
“We recorded ‘Run To Me’ and Andy Williams cut it on his LP,” Robin continued. “If Andy Williams came up to us and said write me a song and we wrote ‘Run To Me’ for him, he probably wouldn’t have recorded it. But we recorded it and then he recorded it.”
Maurice dropped even more famous names. “I went [to Las Vegas] with Lulu when she was working at the Riviera Hotel. We arrived to find a note from Tom Jones asking us to join him for a drink across the road,” he said. “Well, we sat down at the table and I suddenly realised that the chap sitting next to me with the gorgeous Chinese girl was none other than Frank Sinatra. Tom introduced us, and we sat up chatting ’til about five in the morning. Eventually he recorded ‘First Of May’ and ‘Words’. I haven’t heard either of them yet though.” Nor has anyone, apparently.
The North American tour kicked off in Canada at the end of February with performances in Montreal and Toronto before moving south for 16 dates across the United States.
An interested observer on the tour was young Andy Gibb, who celebrated his fifteenth birthday on the road with his famous brothers. “He’s basically on this tour watching us and studying us so he knows what to do when he joins us, which will probably be in about a year,” Maurice said.
Just five days after their final date of the tour in Portland, Oregon, The Bee Gees were guest hosts of NBC’s Midnight Special, a popular late night music programme, which — in spite of its name — only appeared at midnight in the central time zone of the United States. There was a guest host each week, along with the show’s announcer, the gravelly-voiced deejay Robert Weston Smith, better known as Wolfman Jack, for a blend of music from the current top of the chart acts, plus some veteran rockers.
Their blend of music and lively repartee struck a chord with the audience, and the show reported its highest ratings ever. The show’s producers were understandably pleased, and The Bee Gees were asked back to host three more shows. No other act did as many guest host appearances.
“We did one, and I think it was a mark of their popularity … They got a great reaction the first time so they were invited back and back and back,” Tom recalled. “One thing that set them apart, they played live … as opposed to just lip-synching. It worked well, but I think in the end they stopped doing it because they were almost regulars — along with Wolfman Jack. They were good shows, and of course, they were done in Hollywood, which is a nice place to spend some time.”
On August 10, they hosted a “British Rock Revival” which teamed them up with, amongst others, fellow Mancunian Peter Noone, the former “Herman” of Herman’s Hermits, whose parents had been friends of Barbara and Hugh Gibb all those years ago. While The Bee Gees technically came after the original British Invasion, they performed an excellent Beatles medley of ‘If I Fell’, ‘I Need You’, ‘I’ll Be Back’ and ‘She Loves You’ with only Barry on guitar.
The Midnight Special performances are another example of the brothers’ inconsistencies in their memories of events; while they apparently loved doing the shows at the time, they now look back on it as an embarrassment and feel they were made to look foolish. “I don’t think being serious musicians and being in comedy really, really mixes,” says Robin.
“You can’t say at eight o’clock tonight, The Bee Gees will be funny,” Barry adds. “It just doesn’t work for us that way.”
The group were one of many who participated in a concert sponsored by a new Los Angeles radio station, KROQ to raise money for the United Free Clinics of Southern California which offered treatment for drug addiction. The headliner of the show was to be Sly Stone, who was flying in directly from a Madison Square Garden concert. As was so of ten the case with Sly Stone, the concert was fraught with problems from the very beginning, and a two and a half hour delay meant that Sly didn’t get on stage until after two in the morning. Los Angeles city codes prohibit the playing of live music after two but a special dispensation allowed him to stay on until 2.30 a.m. The time problem was the least of the LAPD’s concerns for the concert, with more than 400 drugs arrests made at the gig.
It was a memorable show for The Bee Gees, but not for reasons they care to remember. Yoko Ono had called the radio station to explain why she and John Lennon couldn’t be there in person and to give support to Free Clinics. Rather than saving the message until there was a change in acts, a deejay walked on stage and took over the mike to play it while The Bee Gees were actually in the middle of a song.
“KROQ — that was a fiasco!” Tom Kennedy recalled. “It was completely unprofessional. This deejay came out and literally had a Walkman and played this message from Yoko Ono. You couldn’t hear a thing.”
The group walked off in disgust but were persuaded to give it another try. “They did finish their songs,” Tom said, “but the whole show degenerated at that point, and as I was going through the tunnel with their equipment, the riot police were coming down. It was just so badly organised.”
* * *
The Bee Gees’ return to Britain in April might have passed without much fanfare were it not for the fact that Lulu was waiting for Maurice with the news that she wanted to separate. She said later that she couldn’t bring herself to use the word “divorce,” but she knew that, for her, the marriage was over.
A friend to both, Clem Cattini was one of the first to hear the sad news. “I got a phone call at two o’clock in the morning, I was working with Lulu, and it was Maurice on the phone saying that him and Lulu had split up, and he was out of his mind. He was crying and all that, ‘What can I do?’ and all this. I’ll always remember, we were working at Southend. I was doing a week down there with Lulu, doing a cabaret thing down there, and he was really devastated. Unfortunately it was because of his drinking problem at the time.”
Once the tears had dried, a stunned Maurice claimed, “She slapped it on my lap after I had returned exhausted from a five-week tour of America. I did the manly and stupid thing of walking out and saying I was off to Ibiza. There was no one else involved.”
This was no sudden whim on Lulu’s part. It had been a long time coming. She wrote in her autobiography that although the marriage lasted just over four years, she believed after the first year, and was certain after 18 months, that she had made a mistake. They were attracted to one another but were completely and utterly unsuited to be married to one another. Yet she tried to make a go of it, refusing to admit to anyone that the marriage was rocky. She later described the situation as “mental torture”.
In the first year of the marriage, the constant clubbing and drinking seemed a fun, almost natural way of life for two bright young pop stars. Gradually, however, she began to see that Maurice’s drinking was out of control. A bottle of scotch in the afternoon before hitting the clubs in the evening had somehow become the norm, and Lulu finally realised that it could destroy them both.
The cosy house and five children of their dreams would never be, but although she knew it in her heart, Lulu found it difficult to admit it to herself, never mind anyone else. “Ours was not what my parents would have considered a ‘proper’ marri
age,” she wrote. “It was a showbiz dream gone wrong … It took me a long time to admit to myself that I had been trying to create something that was impossible, but it was when I thought about having a child, that it all came into perspective. I already had one, and his name was Maurice Gibb. I could not cope with another …”
By the end of 1972, she said that to all intents and purposes, the marriage was over. Still, she went on giving interviews which confirmed the myth that they were happily married, partly in an effort to convince herself that it was true.
The strain of living with the deception was affecting her nerves and when she burst into tears during a visit to her doctor, he recommended that she see a colleague who specialised in women’s emotional problems. The therapist listened as Lulu tried to describe the problems in their marriage as honestly as she could. For someone used to putting on a bright face for the public, it was an emotionally exhausting and painful experience.
“It was much more difficult to let it all out than it had been to bottle it all up, even though I was talking to a professional consultant,” she recalled. As she spoke, the therapist realised that Lulu already knew what she had to do, but Lulu was still hesitant to admit failure in the marriage and suggested that perhaps a trial separation would improve things.
“Only you can make that decision but after what you’ve told me, I don’t see the point. I think you know that yourself. You’re both still young,” Lulu recalled being told.
She protested that she was frightened to tell Maurice what they had discussed, so the counsellor offered to speak to him on her behalf. “That would be wonderful, but I don’t think he’ll ever come,” Lulu told her.
Going home to face Maurice took all the courage she could muster, but she managed to tell him that the marriage was over and begged him to see the consultant. His first reaction was to refuse, but eventually he agreed to speak to the woman, albeit grudgingly. “I’ll sort her out,” Lulu recalled him saying.
She said that she had learned not to rely on Maurice keeping his promises, but this time he did. He returned from the appointment in a bad mood, and she suspected he had been drinking. He then told Lulu that the doctor had said that there was something wrong with her, and that the couple should stay together.
It was then that Lulu realised that he would never recognise the truth of the situation. She said later that it was “an experience beyond my worst nightmare”. She carried on with her career in a daze, and her manager and close friend, Marian Massey, grew very concerned about her. Still the public and most of her close friends were stunned at the announcement which came when The Bee Gees returned from their American tour. Lulu said she finally convinced Maurice that the marriage was over, and after a “heart to heart” talk, they decided to separate. They agreed to keep the parting as amicable as possible, with a simple statement to the press that they had parted and nothing more.
It seemed like a betrayal when Maurice made tearful speeches to reporters about what a bombshell it had been and how much he wanted her back.
“I agree that I had not been honest with the press about my marriage, partly because I did not want to admit to myself that it was going wrong but also because I did not really regard it as their business. The actual announcement of the break-up therefore stunned even those closest to me,” Lulu said. “We had agreed to give no interviews, and although the press were camped outside the house, down the road and round the corner, I had said as little as possible, and I was very annoyed with Maurice. He had obviously had one too many in the airport VIP lounge, I thought.”
From his parents’ home in Spain, Maurice blamed Lulu’s career for the breakdown in their marriage, saying that he had flown there “to discuss the matter with my parents because I feel they are the wisest people to talk to.
“Of course, I would like a reconciliation,” he said. “I am very much in love with her. There has been a strain on our marriage for two years. I am afraid Lulu is not well. She has had to put up with a lot of pressure in her work and worries more about her career than she does about me.
“Our marriage was called the happiest in show business. But there is no business like show business. It has ruined a lot of marriages.
“She sometimes considers that I am getting in her way and what she really needs is a good rest. The last thing she told me was that she was going on holiday to Marrakesh in Morocco. I would adore it if she would change her mind and come here. I would love Lulu to fly out here on the next plane. If she did, we would probably go straight to bed, then go to the local and get drunk.”
Lulu threw herself into her work, although it was reported that she appeared to be under a great deal of strain at her concert at Preston’s Guild Hall that evening. Before launching into the Bill Withers song, ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, she announced, “This is my favourite song. It is for all girls who are sad tonight when their man goes away for too long.”
Although she didn’t allow personal problems to interfere with her scheduled performances, Lulu resented Maurice’s allegations that her career was responsible for the failure of the marriage and issued her own statement to the press: “The reasons [for the break-up] are private and personal, but it has nothing to do with my work.
“For the past two years there has been a terrific strain on our marriage. It’s really very private — the way two people act together. But personal problems are the worst. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Maurice’s reported remark, that if she were to join him in Ibiza, they would probably go to bed and then get drunk, seemed to emphasise how far the couple had grown apart. “This is typical of Maurice,” she said. “I have repeatedly pointed out to him that this is an immature way of settling our problems.”
It was the only time she spoke in public of the break-up of their marriage, apart from saying that it was “too personal to discuss in public,” telling even a close journalist friend, “I’m trying very hard to find a way to be happy, but I can’t talk about the marriage. Not just to you. To anyone.”
She steadfastly continued to refuse to discuss the problems the couple had been going through until she bared her soul in her 1985 biography. By 1999, she had managed to find a way to simplify what must have seemed complex emotions at the time. “He was as cute as a button, but we were too young,” she admitted. “Splitting up was awful. We weren’t fighting, but I still became distraught.”
Maurice revealed that he himself had threatened to leave Lulu during blazing arguments, but as he said later, “Men say those things all the time but never mean it the next day. When a woman says it, boy, does she mean it!
“I don’t know if a baby would have helped, but Lulu does not want children at the moment,” he added.
He continued to profess his undying love for her, seemingly to anyone who would listen. Lulu’s annoyed response to a persistent reporter asking her about this was, “I certainly don’t hate him.”
Looking back, she said of that terse response, “I think I used to put up a tough exterior … Actually, Maurice’s line was, ‘I love you, Lu, more than life.’ Would you rather I had said that I love him, and it would have been like, ‘Ooh, they both love each other and can’t be together.’ ”
Lulu said that her father was not completely surprised at the end of the marriage, but for her mother, it was traumatic. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she adored Maurice and wanted to believe that the fairy-tale marriage was true, and Lulu didn’t want to distress her with the explanations of what had gone wrong. Hugh and Barbara Gibb seemed to be equally incredulous and upset by the whole affair but remained supportive of both Maurice and Lulu.
Maurice eventually adjusted to life on his own by fully committing himself to The Bee Gees’ latest project. “We’re still tossing ideas around,” he said. “But we all have this feeling that the next album is going to be very special and very good. We’d like to be at the top in Britain again. Although we still mean a lot in America, it isn’t the same.
“At least I have plenty of time to write now. The trouble is I get so lonely sometimes,” he added gloomily.
Later, he would complain, “It was all over the papers, Lulu being their darling. I was the mean, miserable old bastard who treated her like shit, you know? And belted her about now and again. Believe you me, she had a great right hook.”
With the age and maturity that they lacked when they were married, Lulu and Maurice have managed to put the problems of the past behind them, and Lulu has remained on good terms with all the Gibb family.
* * *
Despite the disappointing reception of Life In A Tin Can, plans went ahead for the second album, the whimsically titled A Kick In The Head Is Worth Eight In The Pants. Recorded at the Record Plant on 3rd Street in West Hollywood, LA, its running order was known as early as December 4, 1972.
This was the first and only time that renowned musical arranger Jimmie Haskell would work with the group, although he would also be involved in solo projects of both Barry and Maurice in time to come. The word “arranger” hardly does credit to a man who is a legend within the music industry and who is equally well known as a conductor and a composer of film scores. In addition to winning three Grammys as Best Arranger of the Year, Jimmie has been involved in more than 100 Gold and Platinum CDs and records, and has worked with artists as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, B.B. King, Simon & Garfunkel, Foreigner, Damn Yankees, and mostly recently Sheryl Crow, to name but a few.
As Jimmie himself explains, it is clear that rapport developed quickly between himself and the brothers. “They put me at ease immediately with their calm, laid-back manner, and yet they did move rather quickly and accomplished a great deal of meaningful music, as opposed to some groups who spend many hours and even days accomplishing what The Bee Gees do in a very few hours. They were writing songs so fast that one of the songs they had me arrange had no lyrics! They told me, ‘Just call this the “La La Song”,’ because they sang the melody to me singing La La La, (etc) instead of lyrics. After we completed the orchestra recordings they completed a lyric and sang to the recording, and it turned out great.”