The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “He said, ‘My dad is the lead cellist in the Symphony’ and we said, ‘Oh yeah, we believe you,’ “ Alderson laughed. “So he came in, put some strings in, and the whole thing just came alive. Then he put down a harmony track. It was incredible.”

  “It was superb — it was a good song, it really was,” Stringer insisted. “But then they said it was too long.”

  ‘To A Girl’ was recorded at Col Joye’s studio, where the group did all their rehearsing. Andy made his first television appearance, performing the song on The Ernie Sigley Show, and a live recording exists, but the record itself was never released. Six tracks from the demos which Andy recorded with Melody Fayre have survived. All original Andy Gibb compositions, they are ‘Flowing Rivers’, ‘Westfield Mansions’, ‘Words And Music’, ‘You’ve Got To Live Your Life’, ‘Mr. Mover’ and ‘Turn Me On’. Andy went on to re-record the first three, but the latter compositions exist only in their original form.

  The Melbourne Sun reported that “[Andy] has been compared in vocal tone to Neil Diamond and Perry Como” — which made a change to the usual Bee Gees comparisons.

  When interviewed, Andy said, “I’ve just finished a season on the Isle of Man but I only brought two of my current boys with me — lead guitarist John Alderson and drummer John Stringer. I’m looking for two others to make up a combo.”

  Yet another variation on the title of the song written by Maurice was mentioned. ‘My Father Is A Reb’ — described as “a catchy little number” would be recorded as a single by the group the following day, and once again the song was dropped. Andy added, “I hope this one will lead to a lot more. My father Hughie and the boys think I’m doing the best thing by recording it here. They reckon Australia is the best grooming ground in the world.

  “And I know Sydney so well, having lived here with the family for so long. I was just nine when we left to go back to the UK, but I’m no stranger to the music scene abroad. I started seriously in Spain about four years ago and despite my brothers’ success, I’ve been doing pretty well on my own.”

  The high life of the established rock group definitely appealed to all the lads, but it couldn’t last. When the time arrived for The Bee Gees to set off for the next leg of their tour, Stringer said, “Mrs Gibb called us in and said, ‘Right, boys, I’m afraid you can’t keep staying here,’ “ Stringer recalled, “and she said, ‘I have a nice place for you down in Newtown in Sydney.’ ”

  “When we got to Australia, we had this list of gigs, and one by one they fell away … Mainly, Mrs Gibb was sort of promoting Andy at the rate she wanted him to go at, sort of keeping him under her wing.

  “But our problem was we played literally a handful of performances and there was always this promise of more to come. You’re gonna back Paper Lace — it was all set, we were gonna back them on an Australian tour, and of course, they never came so that went down the Swanee.

  “It wasn’t just one thing that made us pack it in, it was lots of little things — it was a build up. We had low finance. We asked Mrs Gibb — we had a board meeting and asked, ‘Could we have a retainer?’ — just a little bit of money to help us with food and everything every week, and she said, ‘No, because the performances will be coming soon, and we’ve got lots of bookings for you.’ Well, of course, they never came. Then everything would go right again because we’d have a performance somewhere and it would go well … I remember that shopping precinct — that was a superb performance,” Stringer said.

  “I signed an autograph!” Alderson remembered. Both men insist that in those days, the band certainly didn’t have any groupies — or at least, none that they noticed. “Considering our roadie didn’t ‘road’, by the time we had finished packing all our gear up, everyone else had gone!” he added.

  The lads from the Isle of Man decided to try another tack with Barbara Gibb. “We used to spend hours and hours in the recording studio,” John Stringer said, “so we had a nag at that — we said we’re spending hours and hours a day but we’re not getting anything for this. Then everything would go right again because we’d have a performance somewhere and it would go well. That was great. Then it would go back to the old ways, you know, we’d be in the doldrums again.

  “There would be another period of where we weren’t doing anything, and all Andy wanted to do was lie on the beach. Of course, we lay on the beach with him, but the trouble with him was he didn’t need money because he had it all. You know, he obviously had money when he wanted it from his mum or whatever, but we had to keep dipping into our funds … and eventually we said, ‘What are we doing here?’

  “We got very serious heads on us all of a sudden, because we thought, we’re not playing anywhere, there’s no proper promise of backing any group on a tour of Australia or anywhere else, we’re not being paid a retainer, and it just got to a head and we thought we’ve got to make some money from somewhere.

  “I just thought about you and me queuing up to go on the dole,” Stringer said to Alderson. “We went on the dole because we didn’t have any work, so we thought we could legitimately go on the dole … Because we weren’t getting any money from Andy, and we thought, ‘We’re not breaking any laws — we’re not getting a retainer’ and we queued for hours and hours …

  “Just by chance, we were walking past Kentucky Fried Chicken and we went in to get some food, and this girl from behind the counter said, ‘Oh, are you boys from England?’ We said, ‘Well, we’re from the Isle of Man.’ She said, ‘Oh, I’m from Birmingham’ and one thing led to another and she said, ‘Well, they’re looking for staff here.’ ”

  John Stringer went on a training course to become an assistant manager, and John Alderson started several days later. The boys finally had a dependable source of income in Australia.

  “It wasn’t a case of making the money to go home in the first place,” Stringer said. “We liked the country, but I think we were starting to get homesick. We were stuck down thousands of miles from home, we’d got no proper plans made, and Andy kept disappearing off to do TV interviews and game shows — disappeared off to Melbourne for a week and never told us. We suddenly started to feel that we weren’t really part of it,” he said.

  “Time after time he wouldn’t show up for this and that, and what we considered to be the big break as far as we were concerned was this television spot,” Alderson revealed.

  “Yeah, so one of us went round to his sister’s house and asked, ‘Where’s Andy?’ “ Alderson continued, “and she said, ‘Oh, he’s gone out in the bush, hunting.’ This was about Tuesday and he was supposed to be there on Saturday, so we were to have rehearsals and that sort of thing. And he never came back — well, obviously he did come back sometime, but not before the show on Saturday, so we said, ‘That’s it.’ ”

  The lads who had left the Isle of Man with such big dreams returned to their homeland older and wiser. “I sold my drum kit down there in a shop in Sydney,” said Stringer, “just for a pittance, a bit more money to come home with. I had sold my car before we went … and gave [Barbara] £100 towards my fare.

  “When I came back to the Isle of Man and I was filling in my tax forms for that year, they did not believe how little I earned,” Alderson admitted. “They said, ‘You must have earned more — you couldn’t have lived on that,’ but it was true. They wouldn’t have it, but it was true.”

  Both men regret the loss of a friendship more than what might have been. “We were good friends — it was a social life as well as musical,” Stringer said. “We knew his ways — we’d grown up with him and knew his songs. We got on well personally and musically, and I would have loved to have been able to go around the world and play in halls … I would have liked to have gone on further.

  “I would have liked Andy to have come back here on holiday and come to see us and say, ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ That’s the type of recognition I would have liked — just to have him come back and say hello to me and go out for a pint with me … I’m not worried about
the fame because what we did, we went as far as we had done, and I’m sure if we had got a whole set of bookings … or gone on a tour somewhere, we’d have stayed together a lot longer than we did. Nobody could say how long it could have gone on.”

  John Stringer did run into Barbara Gibb when she returned to the island, although their chat was somewhat strained. “She said, ‘How are you, John? And what are you doing with yourself?’ and she said, ‘Andy’s doing very well for himself, but he does miss you and he’d certainly like to have you back as a drummer.’ … Half of me wanted to believe it and say that’s a nice gesture or thought. I just said to her, ‘The trouble is the fare of getting back to Australia again,’ and the conversation sort of petered out.”

  * * *

  With Stringer and Alderson back in the Isle of Man, Andy needed a new band behind him. Still managed by Col Joye and Kevin Jacobsen, he advertised for new band members.

  Jim Towers of the Cordon Blue Agency responded to the appeal for players. At that time, he represented a rock group called Zenta; a four man group consisting of Glen Greenhalgh on vocals, Rick Alford on lead guitar, Paddy Lelliott on bass and Trevor Norton on drums. Glen recalled, “We were working at the Stagecoach, a club in Sydney. Apparently, Andy had a band but he wasn’t too happy with them, and our agent at the time asked us to go and audition.”

  A meeting was arranged and took place at Rick and Glen’s tiny two-bedroom apartment in Auburn, Sydney, and although Glen says that they never really auditioned, when it was finished, the group was hired as Andy’s live band.

  The Jacobsen brothers continued to manage Andy. “Col Joye and Kevin Jacobsen, they were around all the time. They were his managers when he was here. As far as [Zenta] were concerned, they didn’t have much to do with us at all, because we came under Cordon Bleu, with Jim Towers, but as far as Andy was concerned, they were totally behind Andy. They got him a car and everything.”

  After rehearsals together, Andy and the group began playing small club dates, shopping centres — anywhere they could get a gig. Zenta would usually play a few sets on their own, then Andy would come on and play with them.

  On the first show that Zenta ever performed with Andy, Paddy Lelliott fell victim to two flat tyres on his way to the gig. It was time for Zenta to go on for their first set, before the set with Andy, and there was no sign of the bass player. “We were all in a panic,” Trevor recalled. “We were all saying, ‘Where’s Paddy? What are we going to do?’

  “Andy said, ‘It’s all right, man. I’ll play bass from the side of the stage, behind the curtain. No one will see me.’ Glen, Rick and myself said, ‘Can you play bass?’ Andy said he could, but added that he hoped Paddy got there before the start of the next set. We all thought that the audience would wonder who is playing the bass — where’s it coming from? Don’t forget this is 1975 not 2000.”

  In the end, it all turned out fine — for everyone apart from Paddy. “He arrived just at the end of that first set, and he had to put up with one huge verbal from me — he has never forgotten it,” Trevor added.

  As in Andy’s Isle of Man days, the set list changed almost on a nightly basis, although Glen said, “We always started out with ‘Nights On Broadway’ and ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’ was always in the middle and then it was all mixed up …”

  “He had ‘Words And Music’ towards the end there,” Trevor added, “and ‘Westfield Mansions’ … The set would always change … There’d be ‘Winds Of Change’ and ‘Words’.”

  Zenta didn’t record with him, however. “He used session musicians,” Trevor explained.

  Glen added, “We were in the studio with him when he was recording at times, but that was it.”

  Drummer Trevor Norton recalled that one evening during rehearsals, Joye and Jacobsen dropped in and told Andy that he needed to write another song. “Andy went to the toilet and 10 minutes later came back and said, ‘Here it is — it’s called “Words And Music”!’ “ The speed in which the song was composed might have been impressive, if it weren’t for the fact that he had demoed the song with John Stringer and John Alderson months before.

  At any rate, Col and Kevin were sufficiently impressed with the song this time around to choose it to be Andy’s début single in Australia.

  Perhaps Alderson’s and Stringer’s defection acted as the jolt Andy needed to get his career back on track; at any rate, the young men from Zenta all remember him as a true professional. “With Andy, he was always on time, very professional,” Glen Greenhalgh recalled, “and many a time he was there before us.”

  Australia was indeed proving the hard training ground that his brothers had experienced. “One afternoon around four o’clock I got a call in Sydney,” Andy recalled, “[saying] ‘Would you please come to Adelaide tonight?’ So we drive 1100 miles across Australia and about 500 miles outside of Adelaide, we stop to do a little concert in a town … that was literally in the outback, in the bush country. These were like kids who had never seen a group before. They were very starved for talent of any kind and that was a memorable show we did there, a great response we got from them. Anyway, we leave [the town], we get to Adelaide, arrive at the gig there and find out they’ve never even heard of us. We drove 1100 miles, and we weren’t even booked to play the place. Those are the little things you have to put up with in Australia, if you are struggling along,” he laughed.

  On August 18, 1975, their big break came when they opened for the British glam-rock group, The Sweet, on the opening date of their Col Joye promoted Australian tour at Horden Pavilion in Sydney. It was a high profile gig, and capitalising on The Bee Gees’ connection, Zenta were backed by a small orchestra.

  The group opened with The Bee Gees’ ‘Nights On Broadway’ and followed it with a Bread song, ‘Down On My Knees’. Harry Nilsson’s ‘Down’, ‘Edge Of The Universe’, ‘How Can You Mend A Broken Heart’, ‘Road To Alaska’, ‘Words And Music’, ‘Westfield Mansions’ and ‘Madman In The Night’ completed the set list. The latter three songs were all Andy Gibb originals, later recorded for inclusion in his first album.

  Andy’s versatility proved challenging for the group at times, and The Sweet concert was a case in point, when the group played ‘Madman In The Night’ for the first time. “You’d go to the job to play,” Glen explained, “then he’d pop up all of a sudden and say, ‘We’re doing this tonight.’ You know, you’d be standing there like a stunned mullet, like, ‘We’re doing what?’ But we’d handle it, and I think that’s what he liked about us, that we all sort of got together. The classic was that ‘Madman In The Night’, I couldn’t believe that. I still talk about that to this day, here we are in front of 5,000 people and our Andy’s written a song about half an hour before we went on … and he just said, ‘This is the way it goes.’ ”

  After the show, Andy got his first taste of what stardom would be like. “There were about 200 girls waiting for me at the back door after the concert, and when I came out, they were all over me,” he exclaimed. “Their hands were feeling me everywhere … and I do mean everywhere. My manager saved me. He pushed me through the crowd into a car to escape them. They would have had all my clothes off if he hadn’t helped me!”

  The romantic ballad ‘Words And Music’ was finally released in November, 1975, with the rocker ‘Westfield Mansions’ as the B-side. It was slow to take off but did receive airplay, and boosted by a Sunday evening performance on the top-rated TV show, Countdown, managed to reach number 26 on the Queensland charts. But there were the inevitable comparisons to his older brothers to contend with.

  “We weren’t all that close for a start,” Andy protested. “They were much older than me; I was just a little kid who hung around. When Maurice married Lulu, I became quite friendly with her younger sister, and she told me she had the same problems. Barry has told me I’m 100 per cent better than he was at my age, so that’s pretty encouraging.”

  The positive response to their concerts and club work led to the group being hired a
s support act for The Bay City Rollers five-day tour of Australia beginning with two shows in Melbourne on December 12.

  The tour programme noted, “Barry [Gibb] predicts Andy will become an international recording star and believes his distinctive sound will be among Australia’s future international hits. A good-looking boy with the obvious Gibb flair for entertainment, Andy is no doubt destined to be a star in his own right. He is at present writing more songs for an album and of course, being a Gibb, Andy writes all his own material.”

  Zenta opened the show for the next three nights in Canberra, Sydney and Newcastle. Andy later referred to the experience as “hell” — opening the concert for thousands of screaming Bay City Rollers fans who only wanted to see their idols. He got an unplanned reprieve at the last show of the tour. Zenta’s truck broke down on the way from Newcastle to Brisbane, and the group were stranded. There was a mad rush to get a substitute support band for the Rollers at the last minute. If the tour promoter, Garry Van Egmond, can be believed, the management for the boys in tartan were probably secretly relieved. He recalled getting Andy on the bill as support. “After three nights,” Garry explained, “the Rollers’ management came up to me and said, ‘You’ve got to get him off, mate. He’s no good.’ Of course, what they were saying was he was too good for their boys. He had a great voice.” By a strange coincidence, they got their request.

  Another episode that stands out in their memories was a trip back to Sydney after a gig in Brisbane. At that time, Paddy Lelliott was away from the group, replaced by a young man named David Furby. “Typical Andy at the time,” Glen laughed. “We were coming back from Queensland, and Dave Furby … had just bought a guitar in Brisbane and we’re coming back and we ran out of petrol. Andy said, ‘I’ll go and get the petrol.’ Andy Gibb, you know, just walk down the road and get the petrol! … He said to Dave Furby, ‘You better put the guitar underneath the car to protect it from the heat.’ He said, ‘Yeah, all right.’ The truck had been in front of us with all our gear and all that. So Dave put it under the car, Andy comes back with the petrol, puts the petrol in the car, starts the car up and runs over the guitar. Unbelievable! You’ve never seen anything like it in your life. Furby never spoke to us all the way back to Sydney …”