The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  One such journalist was Chas de Whalley of Record Mirror, whose ears were smarting after an attempt to get a quote from the brothers.

  As Angus pointed out, Kenny Everett’s sketch would appear in October of the following year.

  “Oh, Kenny’s brilliant, Kenny’s was the best without a doubt,” Maurice declared. “The best impression I’ve ever seen. He had me on the floor. I could not believe how good that was. We’ll miss him, he was a real good guy.”

  “It never offended me,” Barry commented in 1997. “I thought it was one of the best giggles I’ve ever seen. When you look at The Bee Gees, you don’t look at yourself. I guess you’re not objective about how you’re perceived, but he nailed us. Big hair, big teeth, medallions … The hair’s not so big now!”

  In November, 1993, The Bee Gees would take the opportunity for revenge on The Hee Bee Gee Bees, pretending to blow up the group after their performance of ‘Meaningless Songs’ on the Children In Need programme.

  “The producer … was, strangely enough, a Hee Bee Gee Bees fan,” Angus explained, “and it was his idea that we should bury the hatchet although, because of the unavailability of us and them, we had to record it on two different days so we were never actually in the studio at the same time.

  “I was invited to An Audience With [The Bee Gees] … but I thought that would probably be too near falling into a trap.”

  It was a mark of how well their single, ‘Meaningless Songs’, was done that Blue Weaver admitted to being taken in by the parody the first time he heard it. “I’d come home from America for a couple of days, and I was driving my wife in Chiswick, driving up to our house with the radio on, and I’m just humming along and she says, ‘This is great, I haven’t heard that one before, when did you do that?’ and at that point I suddenly listened and the chorus came in, and I’d been sub-consciously thinking it was us!

  “I hadn’t even thought anything about it,” Blue continued, “because I was driving, it was background music, and then when ‘Meaningless songs in very high voices’ came in, I stopped in the middle of the road and just couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘This isn’t us, this is a joke.’ It was absolutely brilliant, it fooled me. Honestly, I was going along, you know — just driving, not tuning in to anything specific, and just thinking of it as a Bee Gees track! It was great.”

  Angus was amused by Blue’s story, adding, “Well, that’s fantastic news because that means that one day we might actually end up on a compilation album of The Bee Gees. If the producer makes the same mistake, we could earn more money than we ever did from The Hee Bee Gee Bees. I think it’s an enormous compliment, although it’s more down to Phil Pope because he was the one who was responsible for the music, but I think he did a good job of making something sound as if it was by a particular artist. There was a sort of music copyright law where no more than three or four bars can be identical, so he was ruled by that and at the same time he made it sound like an original artist’s song.”

  Despite the incisive parody of The Hee Bee Gee Bees, Angus Deayton admitted, “I was a fan in the Seventies, as indeed, I’m sure everyone was when they sort of caught the mood of disco fever. I had Children of the World and Spirits Having Flown, but I did run a discotheque in the Seventies so I was sort of professionally obliged to have those sort of albums. Saturday Night Fever was a classic … In some respects, I probably should represent the opinions of Richard Curtis, who wrote the original lyrics, as well, because I know that he is much more conciliatory and much keener to make peace with them. I know that he picked one of their songs when he was on Desert Island Discs and hoped they knew there were no hard feelings.”

  *Born Marcella Levy in Detroit, Michigan, she went on to study and eventually teach drama at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles, while continuing as a songwriter for such artists as Chaka Khan and Al Jarreau. She moved to London in 1989, and, adopting her birthplace as her new surname, came to fame with Siobhan Fahey in the duo, Shakespear’s Sister, as Marcella Detroit, the name she uses to this date as a solo artist.

  *A chain of New York lunch counters.

  34

  TO BE OR NOT TO BEE GEE

  AFTER LIVING EYES, The Bee Gees as a group took the year off and concentrated on outside projects. Barry accepted the role of Lord Byron in a film of the same name to be shot in Italy, although by August, he would pull out of the picture when the producers requested a postponement which conflicted with his schedule. Robin turned his thoughts to a solo album, while Maurice appeared on American television as an interviewer for Good Morning America and playing himself on the long running soap opera, Guiding Light.

  An auction of Bing Crosby memorabilia caught Barry’s attention, and he made several purchases. “He never went to the auction — it was an over-the-phone bid by someone for him, and he bought a desk, some golf clubs, walking canes, bits and pieces. It was quite a nice desk, I’ll have to say — whether it was Bing Crosby’s, we may never know … Might have been his son’s or some distant relative’s who thought they’d get money for this,” Tom Kennedy chuckled.

  The Barry-Albhy-Karl team followed up the amazing success of the Streisand project with an album of songs by Dionne Warwick, best known for her many hits by Hal David and Burt Bacharach some years earlier. They took the same approach as they had done with Streisand: songwriting was again partly by the three Gibb brothers and partly by Barry and Albhy together, and again Barry played rhythm guitar and sings backing vocals along with the house band.

  According to Albhy, the original idea was not to be a Dionne Warwick solo album. “We were talking about people that we loved, singers,” he explained, “and I had this idea to do an album with three woman singers: Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick, and … the girl who worked with Earth, Wind & Fire all the time. She had a high voice. It would be three people in three different ranges, low medium and high. Barry was totally jazzed about writing it. You could have duets, three-way things; it would be a great writing stimulus. That’s what the original record was going to be. But once Barry got on the phone with Clive Davis, Clive was very persuasive, and he talked Barry, who can’t say no, into doing a Dionne Warwick record instead … which we did fine with. The Dionne Warwick record was great. It was the first record where we used some synclavier stuff.”

  The lead single, and title track of the LP was ‘Heartbreaker’, written by Barry, Robin and Maurice.

  For Maurice, the song’s title was particularly apt. “I cried my eyes out after we wrote it,” he recalled. “I drove home and thought, ‘We should be doing this one,’ and when she did it, it was brilliant. We sang on it, and it still became like a duet between The Bee Gees and Dionne Warwick.

  “That became her biggest single since ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’, which, when we were kids, we adored. Burt Bacharach & Hal David and John Lennon & Paul McCartney are probably the best songwriters I have ever heard in my life. Burt’s chords and Hal David’s lyrics and things, and it was just [that] the melodies that Burt was coming up with were dynamite. We were working with Dionne Warwick, she was like their instrument and doing a song that Burt Bacharach and Hal David usually only did, we felt really honoured. It was a great experience.”

  The other singles were ‘Yours’, a slower ballad with a plenty of emotion but less commercial, and ‘All The Love In The World’, a lighter pop tune neither of which were up to high standard of ‘Guilty’.

  During the recording of Heartbreaker, an old friend dropped in. “I was working down [in Miami] at the time and caught up with them,” Geoff Bridgeford said. “Barry asked me to come over as Steve Gadd was drumming and to come and check him out. So I did and we hung out together and it was cool. At the time, he had just received a new vehicle that had been built specially for him and was saying, ‘Geoff, this could have all been yours, man!’ But, you know, I have no regrets. I’m happy, and they are happy, so it all worked out.”

  Barry, Robin and Maurice wrote seven songs for the project. Two of those, ‘Broke
n Bottles’ and ‘Oceans And Rivers’, were turned down, and more songs were written by Barry with Albhy to make up the album. Once again, Barry’s falsetto proved a valuable instrument in writing and performing the demos of the songs, so much so that Clive Davis was still playing the Dionne Warwick demos five years later.

  Heartbreaker was released in October and gave Dionne a best selling LP. The title track topped the Australian singles charts for four consecutive weeks and was a Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching number two in Britain and number 10 in the States and Germany. The follow-up, ‘All The Love In The World’, reached number 10 in Britain but reached only number 50 in Germany.

  “What we’re most proud of is that just about every record we made with all those people set some sort of record for that artist,” Barry marvelled. “It’s amazing. I think Dionne Warwick had the biggest album of her career in Europe with that album.”

  Dionne was not the only artist who would have a hit that year with a Gibb composition. Leo Sayer reached number 22 in the British charts with the Arif Mardin produced ‘Heart (Stop Beating In Time)’.

  Earlier in the year, it was reported that Maurice was being considered as a possible composer for a British television special of A Christmas Carol. In December, he took time out to fly to Los Angeles to discuss the film score he was composing with Jimmie Haskell for the movie Misunderstood, starring Gene Hackman. Jimmie was as much impressed by Maurice’s skill for mimicry as for his musical talent. “I was working with Maurice in his hotel room in Beverly Hills when he said, ‘Let’s order lunch to be brought up.’ He picked up the phone and ordered hamburgers in the most typical American accent I have ever heard. I had never before heard an Englishman/Australian ‘put on’ a USA accent, and Maurice did it so well that it bowled me over!”

  As it turned out, both projects were destined to go to other composers. “I think they get three or four people doing these things and just pick whichever one suits the films best,” Tom Kennedy explained.

  The Gibb family all came together for a triple christening for Maurice and Yvonne’s daughter, Samantha, and Barry and Lynda’s sons, Ashley and Travis. Barry and Lynda were Samantha’s godparents, while Maurice and Yvonne did the honours for Ashley, and Travis’s godparents were Lynda’s brother and sister-in-law, Tommy and Shirley Gray.

  * * *

  Since Molly filed for divorce, Robin’s life had been tumultuous, causing concern for his well-being within the family. “We hope in time things will work out all right for Robin, although he’s very, very unhappy about his personal life just now,” Barbara Gibb said. “You can’t blame him, can you?”

  It was around this time that Robin recruited his personal assistant, former policeman, Ken Graydon. “It was kind of funny actually,” he said. “I needed somebody to look after me when I came to London from America. This was where Ken stepped in, because I had been told to remove myself from the premises, as one does in a divorce, so I said, ‘Right, I’m off!’ Anyway, I was in a hotel in London, wondering what to do, because I’d never stayed in a hotel in England before, and suddenly there was a knock on the door and there’s Ken … and that was how we met and he looked after me at that time.”

  It was also around this time that one of Ken’s relations, an Irish artist called Dwina, came into the picture. “Ken is my cousin, and I hadn’t seen him for about 12 years so I called him up,” Dwina recalled.

  Ken told her his new employer’s name, but she said, “I didn’t know who Robin Gibb was. If he had said The Bee Gees, I’d have thought, ‘Wow!’ ”

  Ken mentioned that Robin was interested in meeting the actress Sarah Miles, who happened to be one of Dwina’s friends. She gave him Sarah’s phone number, and a meeting was arranged.

  “One night I had dinner with Sarah Miles, who was a friend of Dwina’s… I was sitting there in her apartment, and there was a picture on the television that Dwina had drawn, a great pen and ink drawing. I said, ‘Wonderful drawing, I like it,’ and she said, ‘It’s a friend of mine, that’s Dwina.’ ”

  While there was to be no relationship with the actress, Robin’s interest in his minder’s cousin was piqued. “Luckily, the date with Sarah didn’t work out romantically,” Dwina said. “Then I met him, and yes, it was all magic and stars. I was terribly excited because someone as creative as Robin appreciated my creativity … So he commissioned me to do some drawings, which I never finished — he paid me for them, but I never finished them and I shan’t finish them now.

  “I kept making them more and more detailed so I could keep seeing him,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to finish because I thought I’d never see him again. They’re still unfinished for the same reason.”

  Robin and Dwina soon discovered that in addition to sharing an interest in art and the unconventional, they also shared a birthday. Edwina Elizabeth Murphy was born on December 22, 1952, in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. When Robin first told her that his birthday was the same, “I thought he was just playing around, giving me a chat-up line,” she recalled. “But it was true and, what’s more, it’s the date of the winter solstice. With my interest in Druidism, I thought that was a good omen.”

  “I wasn’t actually looking for anybody to have a relationship with,” Robin said. “It was a pretty heavy period for me, but in the end, we were both won over.”

  For her part, Dwina claimed, “I was too busy working to give any thought to romance, living in brick dust in a house in south-east London while trying to do it up. I didn’t have a roof over my kitchen, and I was using the electric fire to cook three-course meals.”

  Robin asked her advice about properties he was thinking of buying, and she advised him to buy a small cottage they had seen, never anticipating that she would soon be sharing it with him. “I’d been a loner for about 10 years when I met Robin,” Dwina explained. “I’d had a little girl who was born prematurely and, sadly, she died … Not long after Robin and I met, we both knew we wanted a child together before actually being with each other. We felt ours would be good genes to put together. But the baby never came along until we started living together.”

  Just coming out of a failed marriage, Robin wanted to keep the relationship secret, and the couple succeeded in keeping all but their closest friends and family in the dark.

  * * *

  Following all the accusations and denials of the previous two years, Robin and Molly’s marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce near the end of 1982. In May of the following year, Robin shared some of his heartbreak with readers of the Scottish Daily Express in an exclusive interview with Garth Pearce, the paper’s show business writer.

  Refuting Molly’s claims that the break-up in the relationship was caused by long periods away from home, he stated, “It was nothing to do with me being away on tour all the time. She was having an affair with a New York lawyer and it took me a long time to find out.

  “She began staying in our New York home when I wasn’t there,” Robin continued. “I thought she was falling in love with America, when all the time she was falling in love with a lawyer down the road! I was distraught to learn the truth, I really was. I honestly believe she was in love with this man. Once a wife falls in love with someone else, you can do nothing about it. Marriage is out of the window.”

  Robin went on to reveal that a considerable financial burden had been placed on him over and above any emotional ones. Clearly hurt by the whole business, he explained that the money aspect was only part of his unhappiness, claiming to have seen his children Spencer and Melissa only once during a three-year period. “I have had to pay out at least £1 million, but there were other things, too, that destroyed me emotionally.”

  He clearly couldn’t understand why it had to be such a messy divorce. After all, he said, “She was still the mother of my children, despite everything.”

  The article pictured Robin with his new love, Dwina Waterfield, described by the Express as an ‘erotic artist’. Also known as Dwina Brown in connection w
ith her acting and modelling career, she used her real name, Dwina Murphy, for her writing activities.

  Concluding on a happier note, and with one eye firmly on the future, Robin confirmed that despite the traumatic experience of his parting of the ways with Molly, “I have not been put off marriage.”

  Sadly, that was not the end of the matter. None too pleased at Robin’s assertions, Molly instructed her (other) lawyers to sue Robin for breaching certain confidential aspects of their settlement. A writ was served as Robin was appearing on a breakfast television programme, “Rather unnecessarily, I might add,” he observed.

  On the eve of The Bee Gees’ scheduled Verona concert, Robin hired a plane to appear in court on September 9, 1983. Despite his contention that it was just “an emotional outburst,” he was found guilty of breaking a court order not to discuss his former marriage with the press, but when he was sentenced to two weeks in jail by Judge Phelan, Molly Gibb broke down, saying, “I didn’t want that.”

  A stunned Robin left the courtroom, although he was relieved to note, “I didn’t go into the cells at all … I went outside and I was waiting in the hallway, and one of the police officers said, ‘We have to go out and arrest people to get sentences like this.’ But that’s just everyday life, these things happen,” he added philosophically.

  Lord Justice Ackner, sitting with Lord Justice O’Connor, overturned the sentence a few hours later but added that Judge Phelan had been right to regard the singer’s breach of a court order made the previous July as serious.