by Hector Cook
“For the host of islanders who have been asking when the launch is to be, the news is that Andy Gibb and Melody Fayre are to give a one night charity concert in aid of the Carnane Children’s Ward of Ballamona Hospital at Rushen Abbey Ballroom [Ballasalla, Isle of Man] on Tuesday, June 4.”
Barry Gibb arrived on the island on Sunday and helped the group to compile a set list, which mixed Bee Gees’ standards with covers of other pop hits. This revealed that Andy’s influences included not only his brothers but also Leo Sayer, The Hollies and Elton John, amongst others. The final set list consisted of ‘Down The Road’, ‘Road To Alaska’, ‘The Show Must Go On’, ‘How Come’, ‘Last Song Together’, ‘I’ve Decided To Join The Air Force’, ‘Most Beautiful Girl’, ‘Rocket Man’, ‘Whisky’, ‘Words’, ‘Guitar Man’, ‘The Air That I Breathe’, ‘I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You’, introduction of the group, ‘Every Second, Every Minute’, ‘Goodbyes’ and ‘Down The Road’ with an encore of ‘Benny And The Jets’ ending with the scrawled instructions “GET OFF!”
Rehearsals the day before the big event were less than encouraging. John Stringer’s diary noted: “Everyone arrives late, Andy runs out of petrol. Practice list. Not very good. Too many mistakes.”
But on the day of the show, things looked more promising. The group, minus Jerry Callaghan, arrived at Rushen Abbey at 8.00 a.m. to set up their gear and rearrange the tables in the ballroom. John Stringer recalled that it took them three hours, but the finished result looked impressive. Andy, Alderson and Stringer returned in the afternoon to run through ‘Guitar Man’ and ‘Road To Alaska’ and “have chicken and chips there free!” as John Stringer duly noted.
Melody Fayre went on stage at 9.00 p.m. before an audience of about 400 people. In the audience was an entertainment manager from Manchester, who had come to check the new group out with a view to signing them for cabaret work in the North of England. Stringer observed that the gentleman in question shared the band members’ feelings about the red suits, adding that Melody Fayre were “not a cabaret group but a pop group and should be promoted as such.”
The small disappointment from not being signed by the manager couldn’t dim the excitement of playing in front of the one person whose opinion mattered the most. It was a proud time for Andy, performing before his idolised eldest brother.
“He was besotted with Barry — absolutely worshipped him,” Stringer recalled. “I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I just mean that he worshipped Barry, and therefore I think he was gonna be influenced from the word go by his elder brother. [His voice was] very like Barry Gibb. I suppose 50 per cent of it would be deliberate because he did idolise [him], he even copied the way Barry played his acoustic guitar.”
He also copied the way Barry tuned his guitar, but not always with the greatest success, according to his former Isle of Man bandmates. John Stringer recalled, “I can remember of an evening … before we’d go on, not to make too big a thing of it, but [John Alderson] would be getting [Andy’s] guitar in tune, because he’d think it was in tune, and John would be saying, ‘Well, hang on, it’s still not quite…’ and a few more strums, [John] would say, ‘That’s all right.’ ”
“He’d spend about an hour getting ready,” Alderson agreed, “then pick the guitar up and hit it, and I’d say, ‘Now tune it!’ ”
On June 13, the group rehearsed for two and a half hours at Hugh and Barbara’s home with Barry in attendance. The eldest Bee Gee told the young men that he enjoyed listening to them play, as they ran through their new numbers, including The Bee Gees’ ‘Heavy Breathing’.
“The first few days, I couldn’t believe it,” Stringer said. “I was actually talking to Barry Gibb, and then as he started watching us … and we’d go back to his house, or we’d actually call at his place … of an afternoon. This one day he showed us this new thing called a video. We’d call at his place socially and watch him strumming his guitar and when Maurice came over, they’d be having sing-songs together. We got to know them, I think, quite well.”
Videos seem so commonplace now, but in 1974, these were amazing things. The boys would spend afternoons at the Gibb house, watching videos of Cucumber Castle and Hugh Gibb’s behind the scenes movies of The Bee Gees’ tours. “We used to go over there every night, and when The Bee Gees were over, they’d always end up with guitars, strumming and singing away,” Stringer recalled.
“Eventually we used to open the show with ‘Down The Road’ because it started with that drum beat, and then Andy would walk on stage,” John Stringer recalled.
In those days, Andy was far from the teen heart-throb he would become a few years down the line. “Andy was always very shy with girls, almost to the point of being silly at times,” Alderson said. “I don’t remember him going out with any girls at all.”
On June 15, Melody Fayre played a concert at a small club in Ramsey on the Isle of Man for the Buffalo Club charity. John Stringer recalls it as the strangest gig the band played. “We were playing for a charity do with a magician, and there was a very small triangular stage inside. It was a very small building anyway, so we put our gear up, did a sound check and played through a couple of numbers, then we went to the Chinese [restaurant] for a meal. When we came back, all our gear, every single last piece of it was on the pavement outside. The magician had a lot of big boxes to do the party tricks with, and of course, he had put all his equipment on the stage, and all ours had been relegated to the pavement. So, the minute he’d finished his tricks that night, we then had to lug all our gear back in which caused quite a bit of chaos.”
Eventually, all the gear was back in place, and the group once again were well received. In addition to their own set, they also backed local man, Bill Caine, on the Tom Jones’ hit, ‘Delilah’.
Melody Fayre’s first paid concert was held at Port St. Mary Town Hall on June 17. By this time, Andy’s friend from Ibiza, Tony Messina, had re-entered the picture as the group’s roadie. The Clerk for the Commissioner’s Office granted permission for the group to hold a “Disco Dance … subject to good order being maintained, the event finishing at 11.30 p.m. and any necessary clearing up being carried out afterwards.” It was obvious that the lads were not in it for the money — after paying for the hall and posters, the band members and Messina each collected the princely sum of £3.56!
On June 20 Melody Fayre went to Liverpool for one week, followed by a week in St. Helen’s before returning to Douglas, where on July 2, they began the summer season at the Peveril Hotel on Loch Promenade. The Peveril is no longer there, demolished to make room for a large office block, but in those days, it was a major step for the fledgling group: a residency at one of the largest hotels in Douglas. Particularly in later years, Andy would demonstrate the hereditary Gibb tendency to embellish the truth when it came to PR, claiming, “I spent a year there after living in Ibiza, one full year performing in a club for money. The profit at the gate, and what have you, we did pretty well there, made a bit of money …”
Posters failed to mention Melody Fayre, advertising only “Appearing Nightly: The Youngest Brother of The Famous BEE GEES, ANDY GIBB and his music: The Show For The Young At Heart”.
As it turned out, Andy didn’t appear nightly for the whole season. On August 12, Andy burned his face badly while using a sun lamp to try to compensate for the poor Manx weather. “He got the instructions and it said you were supposed to give it so many seconds the first time,” John Stringer recalled. “He said, ‘It doesn’t seem very long, that,’ and straight away he started upping the time. The next day, you could see his face was red, but he said, ‘I’m going to give it a bit more today — that doesn’t seem long enough.’ The next night he appeared at the Peveril and his face was blistering — there was liquid running down all over his face. They rushed him to hospital, and his mother was in a hell of a panic because, of course, he was a good-looking kid, wasn’t he? Obviously, for future fame, he had to keep his looks. And his face was blistered all over, and in fact we di
d one night without him — we played without him because he was too burnt … Even for several performances after, he had to have all this ointment or powder to hide all the blotches and that.”
By now the group were playing a 90-minute set each night, of ten to a stellar audience. ‘Run To Me’, ‘Road To Alaska’, ‘Words’, ‘Down The Road’, ‘New York Mining Disaster 1941’ and ‘I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You’ regularly featured in their set list, which could prove disconcerting for the band. “Maurice used to sit and watch if he was over, and Barry would come every night of the week when he was here. It was weird, playing Bee Gees songs with one of them sitting watching up in the balcony,” Stringer added.
Alderson and Stringer both recall that Hugh Gibb would occasionally have a go at the drums, sitting in on a song or two. “He was very much a swing drummer,” John Stringer said.
For the young group, it was becoming apparent that although they could find steady work on the island, the future prospects there were limited. They were beginning to see the potential was there, and Hugh and Barry Gibb began to encourage them to consider moving on to The Bee Gees old training ground.
For Andy, there was a feeling of predestination. “At the end of that year, Barry and my Dad said ‘Australia’,” he recalled. “Barry and my father suggested that I go out there … and try to become a big name there like [The Bee Gees] originally did. They reckon Australia is the hardest training ground in the world. Barry told me if I could make a start [there] I would be all right anywhere.
“So they controlled it even from that point, so that even before I had any single [released] at all, they were guiding it, and they were planning for the future. They were planning for me to eventually come back to America, for Barry to produce me at the right age and to sign with RSO. So, therefore, even when I was very, very young they told me basically how they had it all worked out and I let them do it.
“I was too young to break in on the American or English scene,” he added. “I didn’t have the experience. I mean, with all due respect to the Australians, it is a great training ground because you can be the biggest name in Australia and without outside help you will not get heard outside of Australia — that’s just the way it is. So, you can make a lot of mistakes there, and there are also very tough audiences there. You can become the biggest name in Australia and never get heard until you leave to do something elsewhere.”
“It was an opportunity not to be missed,” John Stringer said. “Once we realised that, hang on a minute, this fella’s the brother of the Bee Gees, and he’s not got a half bad voice. Once we started getting the practising together and the playing together, we sounded good. We thought we did sound good, we could go somewhere. And The Bee Gees used to come and watch us and they’d say, ‘Yeah, you sound all right.’ ”
Plans were made, and Jerry Callaghan left the group when he was told he would not be required for the trip to Australia. The final few nights at the Peveril were played as a trio, although one evening, a honeymooning tourist played bass for the second half of the set. On September 9, Melody Fayre played their sixty-ninth and final gig on the Isle of Man, and John Stringer, John Alderson and Tony Messina set off for Australia with Andy.
“John and I went down with so much promise,” John Stringer said sadly. “We both knew it was a gamble, and we both had a limited amount of savings. We thought, ‘This is a gamble, this is a one-off, to go to Australia and set up where The Bee Gees became famous.’ ”
They weren’t alone in that feeling. “I think my whole youth was kind of a risk in a way, a big gamble,” Andy confessed. “I didn’t have any education to fall back on if things didn’t work out. I can hold my own conversationally, I think, with just about anybody because travelling has educated me an awful lot but, getting down to degrees or having qualifications, if I didn’t make it in singing or didn’t make it in show business, I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.”
The adventure began before the boys ever left Britain. “Before we went out to Australia, we stayed a night at the Skyline Hotel in London,” Stringer recalled. “When you go to the bar, there’s little stools to sit on but they’re submerged in water, so you’re actually sitting at the bar and you’re up to your waist. It was beautiful and hot — there were all tropical trees all around, little bridges over the different pools. We were drinking Harvey Wall-bangers … [John Alderson] went to bed and Tony went to bed, and Andy came up with this incredible idea. I must have been drunk or gullible because I went along with it.
“ ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Australia is such and such a time now and we are at this time. If we go to sleep now, we’re going to be tired when we get to Australia. If we stay up all night, we’ll be wide awake.’ This is honestly a true story. So me and him, we stayed up all night — and what a job that was, trying to keep your eyes open. The next morning, we were absolutely knackered, and on the plane — obviously, there’s a bit of excitement so you wake up again, then you doze again, but when we got to Australia, we absolutely went out for the bloody count, me and Andy. We just couldn’t wake up at all! It’s a true story — not all true stories are funny!” he added.
They arrived a few days before The Bee Gees’ 1974 Australian tour and were there to greet the band on their arrival at the Sydney airport. “We stayed the first week or ten days in this town house — the best hotel you could stay in, on the same floor as The Bee Gees,” Stringer continued. “We felt important because we were on exactly the same footing as The Bee Gees. We went everywhere with them. I mean, when they went to the concerts in the evening, we joined in the entourage. They had a [limousine] for us as well, and we thought, ‘This is tremendous.’ ”
After The Bee Gees’ concerts, the lads would return with them to the hotel. “We sat there … on the floor,” Alderson recalled, “and they were just singing around us, with Barry on the guitar, and I just sort of sat there in awe.”
“It was lovely to be party to that … to just sit and watch, famous people just jamming,” Stringer added. “They were always jamming. They used to have some right sing-songs.”
Their own accommodation at the deluxe Sydney hotel was as lavish as The Bee Gees’. “This double suite was hired for us,” John Alderson remembered, “and they brought in a camp bed. There was quite a heated argument as to who should have to sleep on this camp bed.”
Tony Messina eventually drew the short straw. “There were more of us than there were of him, so he ended up on the camp bed. He used to come in every night and sort of throw himself on it — ‘Aaahh…’ We couldn’t help noticing this. Now down the sides of the camp bed were a row of springs so I took them out,” he continued.
“And I kept watch!” his co-conspirator added.
“So he came in and threw himself on this bed and hit the deck,” Alderson went on. “We thought, ‘This is good fun!’ so we didn’t let it rest.”
From then on, the hapless Messina was the brunt of many a prank. “We always would sort of seize on an opportunity that if he came in cold or he was tired, we’d let him sleep and we’d warm him up,” Alderson said. “He came in one night and said, ‘Jeez, it’s cold out there!’ … so we told him, ‘Oh, you should get some sleep, Tony.’ So we put the central heating on full, then we thought, ‘Well, maybe he’s not hot enough,’ so we put some blankets on him … We thought he’d wake up fairly quickly, but he slept like a pig!”
Ever solicitous, they noted that poor Tony was sweating and losing a lot of salt so they helpfully poured salt on his head. Then there was the matter of Messina’s favourite tipple, Southern Comfort. “We diluted it … but not with water!” he confessed. All in a day’s work for musicians on the road!
They agree that their main problem with Messina was his influence on Andy. “This was one reason we didn’t particularly like Tony because he was his crutch, really …”
They remember going with Andy to see The Exorcist and sleeping with the lights on for days afterwards. Andy’s sister Lesley provided J
ohn Stringer with a little light reading after that experience. “She got me all these books — proper Roman Catholic books about cases of exorcisms — and she said, ‘You take those and read them.’ And I remember reading all those blooming things because I was so scared by the film,” he laughed.
On other occasions, Andy would suggest seeing a film in the afternoon, and John Stringer would happily accompany him. They would watch that, come out and Andy would suggest another film. Stringer, pleading poverty, would demur, but Andy would insist and then offer to pay. On one such day, they saw four films. “He was very juvenile in some of the things he did… He’d been shielded, he’d been looked after, decisions had been made for him.”
The Bee Gees’ old friends, Col Joye and his brother Kevin Jacobsen, represented the young group, and there were plans for recording a single and album for Col Joye’s ATA label. They shared in Andy’s dreams for stardom and recognition as a songwriter and performer in his own right, not just as “The Bee Gees’ Little Brother”.
“He used to write the words — I mean, he had words up in his head for everything,” Stringer said, “but when it came down to sitting down and swapping ideas, it was very much a mutual collective thing.”
“His chord knowledge was a bit limited so we slotted a few chords in,” Alderson added.
There was one song that both consider the highlight of their work with Andy, but sadly neither has a copy of the finished studio version.
“ ‘To A Girl’, that’s right,” John Stringer agreed. “[Maurice] came in on that. God, we did some work on that song. We spent days and days and days getting it right.”
“I couldn’t get my track right — I kept getting a buzz,” Alderson added.
Stringer continued, “The bass guitarist we had down in Australia was a Dutch fella, and his dad played in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.”