The Ultimate Biography of The Bee Gees

by Hector Cook

  “At 17 you’re very gullible,” he added. “When you meet your heroes for the first time and all of a sudden you’re having a drink with them — jeez!”

  At first, he considered himself a social drinker. “When I was married to Lulu, for six years we both drank. We didn’t have any responsibilities, we partied, we never ate at home and I could handle it okay, but I would always go off somewhere and be sick, I would never let her see me,” he admitted.

  “I crossed into alcoholism when I was about 25. Because I was drinking every day, I started to drink in the morning. I was starting to be sick in the morning, I was hugging the toilet every morning, you know and things like that. So I knew there was something wrong but I never once thought it was the drink. I always used to think it was something else, I’ve got a bug or I’ve got a virus, or something like that.”

  Although he was never physically abusive to the family, he admitted, “I was verbally abusive, very arrogant, obnoxious, belligerent, you know. Inconsiderate, it was all me, me, me, whatever I had to do. I was a loving dad and still am, but I was very selfish about everything. I would always put myself before my wife and my children, which is what the disease does to you.”

  After the excitement and challenge of the High Civilization tour of Europe, when the family had returned home to Miami, the tedium of everyday life quickly set in for Maurice. “I was bored. Absolutely bored stiff. And then I just drove to Walgreen’s, a supermarket place, and bought a bottle of brandy. And I had a month, just a complete binge,” he confessed.

  Although Yvonne immediately recognised the signs, Maurice was unwilling to acknowledge the extent of his problem. “I was in denial of my denial. I mean, it was that ridiculous,” he said. When she finally confronted him, he was indignant, as he would later confess to actress Lyn Redgrave on her Fighting Back television series in May, 1992.

  “I said, ‘You silly cow. How dare you?’, totally off guard, you know, defending myself… I went straight down to my studio, poured out a large brandy and I said, ‘How dare she,’ and drank it.”

  It was the start of a four-week binge unlike any he had ever experienced before. “I didn’t get drunk,” he confessed. “I didn’t get merry. I just got sicker and sicker. I just drank, trying to get normal again, because it would start off with those two drinks. Three drinks the next night. Four drinks the next night. All of a sudden, I’m running out. I have to go and get another bottle. I have to have back-up. And then it would be just straight brandy with just ice, and I’d have like four or five of those … I got very verbally violent.”

  Normally easy-going and sociable, alcohol had begun to make him aggressive towards his wife and children. “I would use anything for an argument,” he said. “I hit rock bottom so hard I couldn’t even function. I’d become arrogant … and called my family names I would never have dreamed of calling them if I hadn’t drunk. I hurt them so much. I was Jekyll and Hyde; the children didn’t know when Daddy was going to be all right. Yvonne would go shopping not knowing whether I’d be drunk or sober when she got back.”

  So blind was he to the effect his drinking had on the family, he claimed that nothing mattered to him at the time but the drink. He no longer cared that he was disturbing Yvonne, Adam and Samantha. “They were very upset,” he admitted. “See, as far as they were concerned, Daddy had lied to them all this time.”

  The binge culminated when he brandished a gun at the family he had begun to feel were just getting in his way.

  “I was like, ‘Oh my God’ … I couldn’t believe it,” recalled his son Adam, then 15 years old, “and then my mom said, ‘Go upstairs, get some clothes,’ and so, when we came downstairs that’s when he had the gun and I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s gonna shoot us.’ ”

  Maurice’s actions were completely out of character, although they had kept a gun in the house for years and he maintained that the gun was unloaded. He added, “Normally I didn’t even like guns.”

  It was too much for the family to cope with. “He’s been angry before … [but] he’s never really been a violent person. It’s always been verbally. But the kids were scared to death. That’s when I saw what it was doing to the kids. I said, ‘This is it.’ So I packed a bag, and we went up to Barry’s house, and I weren’t coming back,” Yvonne said with quiet conviction. “I were determined. This time I weren’t gonna come back, until he did something. And we stayed there all night.” It was apparent that her years in America had done little to diminish her broad Yorkshire dialect, which, to the uninitiated, appears grammatically incorrect.

  “The family all came to my home … and we isolated him … That’s another tactic I think you have to do, and he really needed to bottom out,” Barry said. “He needed to realise that everyone around him was no longer going to support what he was doing and smile about it. We just turned into a brick wall, and it really hurts to do that … to have to stand and say to somebody, ‘We’re isolating you; you no longer have our support. You no longer have a job.’ ”

  As well as frightening the family, the episode terrified Maurice. “You see, I didn’t have a blackout over that,” he said. “I remembered all of it, and that scared the hell out of me … I said ‘That’s not me. That’s just not me.’ … I just said ‘That’s it. I’ve gotta do something about this.’ … It was very emotional for me. I’d reached a bottom and I just couldn’t take it any more … I surrendered. I just gave up, I just didn’t like being that person. That was a completely alien person to me … Think of the worst word you could think of, but I became that monster.”

  When Yvonne came back after three days to pick up a few things from the house, Maurice broke down. “He was so sorry and it was the worst bottom that he’d ever had,” she recalled. He said, ‘I have to do something about this problem.’ And something inside of me knew, you know, he just cried and cried.”

  Maurice realised that it was something he could not do on his own and he went into detox for two days. On the couple’s sixteenth wedding anniversary, Yvonne sent him a card saying, “We’ve gone this far together. It can only get better.”

  For Maurice, it was a turning point; the realisation that he had come so close to losing his wife and family. Still, he said, “I had to come to the decision to do it for me. I couldn’t do it for Yvonne or the kids. I couldn’t do it for anybody else but me.”

  He believed that for him, like Andy, the main problem behind the addiction was a feeling of inadequacy. “My biggest defect of character, if you like, is unworthiness,” he explained. “I just didn’t feel worthy of what I was doing, or my contribution. It came from the boozing. This is what happens to your mind … with the disease of alcoholism … It’s very cunning, it sneaks up on you.”

  He entered the New Life rehabilitation programme, conducted by Dr Jules Trop, himself a recovering alcoholic. “I started first with a 28-day non-stop programme.”

  The follow-up programme, called ‘Transition’, aimed to put the patients into as nearly normal a lifestyle as possible, without drugs or alcohol. Maurice shared an apartment with three other men. “We learned to support ourselves; shopping, cooking and cleaning. In the afternoons, I was allowed to visit my wife and my kids.”

  The transitional period worked on the buddy system. “Whenever you need support, there is someone there for you,” Maurice said.

  When he came back home, there was still a period of adjustment for the family. “We were frightened he’d left all his support system there, you know,” Yvonne admitted, “coming home to us and sleeping at home. Each time he went to the studio, the kids were thinking, ‘He’s down there a long time,’ and ‘What’s he doing?’ But you see, we had to get used to that too, you know. We have to give him a little trust, although it was hard in the beginning.”

  “It’s a family disease,” Maurice explained. “It’s not just the person or the spouse who has it, it affects everybody. Tentacles reach out and touch everybody except for the person who has the problem, and in my case, it was my wife, my
children, my brothers, all the people around me it affected … Adam remembers from when he was three, hearing me shouting and yelling when I was drunk.”

  Undoing those effects didn’t happen overnight, but the family relationship was strengthened. “I couldn’t get back any trust from my wife and kids until I proved to them that I was an example, and that took a while.

  “The family have been through a lot with me. I didn’t know what love was really like until I married Yvonne. I never lost their love, but I had to win back their respect.”

  Part of the New Life Transitions programme involves treating the whole family. Both Adam and Samantha received guidance in dealing with an alcoholic parent, and Yvonne was not left out either. Maurice said, “There’s a lovely lady at Transitions who has a one-to-one with Yvonne each week just to chat things through. It means that, like me, she has someone to talk to who can guide her in different ways.

  “I still go regularly to meetings at the Centre and keep in touch with the people I’ve met there,” he added, “especially the family therapist, who helped my family enormously and who has become my big buddy. I owe a lot to him and my other friends in Alcoholics Anonymous. Without them, I probably wouldn’t be here today.

  “My children can at last see Daddy in a good light. He’s sensible, not stupid or incoherent. He’s not falling over, he’s not angry. Anger was the worst thing that used to happen to me.”

  “He likes to do more things with us now and he’s really easy going,” Adam said. “He’s not really agitated easily. The drink was always talking, it was never really him. He was really under there. The real person that was inside all these years is finally out.”

  Although he had been able to stop drinking, he recognised that it was by no means a cure; that a recovering addict is never fully recovered. “There’s no graduation in this,” he said. “You don’t graduate at all. There’s no big medal at the end of the day … It’s an ongoing process.”

  When he went back to the studio, he found that Barry and Robin had been waiting for him. “They didn’t write a single note while I was in treatment and it’s been beautiful,” Maurice enthused. “The album’s turning out great. It’s nice to go in the next day and know that you don’t have to replace the part that you did the day before, and I can see it with my brothers as well, they see the change in me. They’re just glad to see that I did something about it, and they were totally supportive.”

  On February 23, 1992, their son Adam’s sixteenth birthday, the family had cause for celebration. With Samantha as maid of honour and Adam as best man, Maurice and Yvonne renewed their wedding vows before a Justice of the Peace in the garden of their Miami home. It was a joyous re-affirmation of the love which had triumphed over the problems of the past.

  His family and his new friends from the New Life Treatment Center were there to join in the happy occasion. “We had a huge party with no alcohol at all and everyone still managed to have a great time. It was to signify the start of a new lease on life.”

  In May, The Bee Gees would also make a new start. Their contract with Warner Brothers had concluded, and the group once again signed with Polydor Records.

  * * *

  On June 21, 1992, more than 300 white-robed Druids gathered on Hampstead Heath to celebrate the summer solstice and elected Dwina Murphy Gibb their patroness.

  “I am a member of the Order Of Ovates And Druids,” Dwina explained, “and their chief is a wonderful man called Philip Carr-Gamm. He decided that women should take up a higher profile within the order and that I was suitable to act as their patroness — the first woman to do so for 300 years. It is a wonderful honour.

  “I was overwhelmed by the ceremony. It was the first time that Druids from Ireland, France, Scotland and Wales all came together. It was a very moving moment.”

  Dwina’s interest in Druidry began when she was a nine-year-old girl living in the tiny village of Kilkeery in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. “When I was about nine,” she recalled, “I started to have very vivid dreams about nature and natural life forces. Since then I have studied just about every religion — from Tibetan Buddhism through to Hinduism and Christianity — and I ended up with Druidism, which to me feels like coming home. I read several books and knew instinctively it was right. I never had any difficulty following it, and I officially joined the Druids at 16.”

  To mark her new position, Dwina decided to have the tennis courts at The Prebendal bulldozed to make way for her own stone circle. “Stonehenge is the main solar temple, but there are others,” she explained. “I plan to build a special stone calendar aligned with the winter solstice at our Oxfordshire home.

  “When it is completed, I will be able to tell what time of year it is just by looking at which stone the sun is shining on. That’s what Stonehenge was partly used for. Then we will have a ceremony to inaugurate it.”

  Dwina added seriously, “It will be a natural extension to the religious history of the house — and it will be of far more use than a tennis court.”

  * * *

  On August 24, 1992, Florida witnessed the onslaught of Hurricane Andrew, the costliest hurricane in the history of the US. A category four hurricane*, it would go on to cause an estimated $26 billion worth of damage, destroying thousands of homes and damaging many more. It also claimed more than 60 lives either directly or indirectly. Dade County (of which Miami is a part) was hardest hit.

  The Bee Gees’ Middle Ear Studio and the Gibbs’ homes all escaped the hurricane’s devastation with minor damage, but they realised that many were not so fortunate. For some time, Robin and Dwina had been making regular visits to the Miccosukee Indian Reservation in the Everglades, calling on 90-year-old Lillie Tigertail and her tribe. “They are wonderful people but very wary of outsiders,” Dwina said.

  After the hurricane ended, Robin and Dwina learned that the reservation where their new friends lived had been ravaged by the storm. With the couple’s nine-year-old son Robin John, Dwina made a television appeal for donations for the tribe to be made to a special bank account. The Bee Gees were the first contributors to the account, and Linda and Yvonne gave their support to Dwina.

  Next, the couple organised a relief operation. Along with Robin John and Robin’s two children from his first marriage, Spencer and Melissa, they began to help in the clean-up, and enlisted the aid of friends to help with the reconstruction. “The Miccosukee live in trailers which have been totally destroyed,” Dwina explained, “so we’ve gathered together some friends to help — they need manpower to rebuild their homes. We were very lucky with just the odd tree blown down. But the Indians were not, and we are going to make it up to them.”

  On September 26, The Bee Gees were among the artists who performed at the Hurricane Andrew Relief Concert at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami. It was their first concert in their adopted home town in 13 years. They played a 40-minute set with Barry’s eldest son, Stephen, playing guitar with the group. Although they were eager to help out, the concert was not altogether a pleasant experience for them.

  Maurice described the atmosphere before the show. “I mean nobody said hello to anybody backstage, it was very unfriendly,” he said. “We were supposed to go to the press tent after the show and we said no, we’ll go home. We did this for Miami. We didn’t do this for publicity.”

  “We were hyped and we were angry because we were never given the chance to check our sound,” Barry explained.

  “Anyway it was a good show,” Robin added.

  “Look you’ve got to at least say one thing. Everybody’s heart was in the right place,” Barry conceded, “and if you were in Miami when that hurricane struck. The following days was like the whole city had lost somebody in the family. It was a very grievous situation. You were actually on the verge of tears for about three days following it.”

  The Bee Gees also opened Middle Ear Studios to the public for a week, as a way of thanking all the fans who supported the Hurricane Andrew Relief Concert.

  * * *<
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  Barry and David English still hadn’t given up on those cricket-playing rabbits, The Bunburys. In 1992, The Bunbury Tails CD was finally released, a compilation of tracks by various artists, including the previously issued singles of ‘We’re The Bunburys’ and ‘Fight’ and new songs by The Bee Gees, Elton John, No Hat Moon, and newcomer Kelli Wolfe. David English co-wrote lyrics on most of them.

  The new Bee Gees song, ‘Bunbury Afternoon’, has a happily loping beat, and lyrics celebrating all things English, sunny afternoons and cricket on the village green. Unlike ‘We’re The Bunburys’, also credited to The Bee Gees on the CD, ‘Bunbury Afternoon’ clearly has all three brothers singing and Robin takes a line or two. It probably dates from 1986, before the ‘E.S.P’ reunion.

  No Hat Moon were a group who just happened to be in the right place at the right time when Barry and David came to David Mackay’s studio, The Factory, in the garden of his Woldingham, Surrey home. Consisting of Paul Carman on bass, Peter King on guitars and Sheryl and Sheila Parker on vocals, the group didn’t actually do any concerts, concentrating instead on studio work only. They had worked previously with David Mackay.

  “I think we were doing backing vocals for an album [by] Cilla Black,” Peter King explained. “We were recording this stuff and it was coming to the end of it, and Dave said, ‘Why don’t you hang on until tomorrow and they’ll be here?’ … So we waited and they turned up too, I think they were sounding out the place … but I’m not sure. We played them a bit of [our] stuff…

  “They’d written this tune, called ‘Seasons’ and Barry just suggested that we have a go at it. Barry was strumming along and singing it so we just got together, did a few guitars and built it up. We went away and did the vocal arrangements up at the house, and they got on with the track and then we just came back and did it then. When we left, I think Barry stayed until it was mixed.”