About the Bee
Gees
"Incredible Highs and Lows" by
Nicholas James
When
Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb collected their Brit Award
for Outstanding Contribution to British Music in 1997,
they had reached a pinnacle of their long and
illustrious career. This career had effectively come
full circle, but they had now received something that
they had been striving for all their lives. Not record
sales, as big hits have been a feature of every era
in which they have written and performed. Not fame
either, as the
Bee Gees had been household names for thirty years at
the time. And certainly not wealth; their multiple talents
in song writing, producing and performing ensured that
they were amongst the wealthiest artists in the world.
No. What they achieved on that night was the adoration
and acclaim not only of musical critics, who had been
warming again to their music for almost a
decade by then, but the adoration and acclaim of their
peers.
And
since that evening back in 1997, they have managed to
retain and build upon that acclaim, taking their
rightful place as one of only a handful of artists who it can
truly be said have changed the face of popular music.
The Bee
Gees career is one of superlatives. By the time that the
untimely and unexpected death of
Maurice Gibb was
announced in January 2003, the Bee Gees could easily
boast the longest career of any mainstream recording
band, measured in terms of the longevity of their
hit-making, both for themselves and other artists. In
terms of record sales, they were credited as the fifth
best-selling artists of all time, behind only the
Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and Paul
McCartney. Their album
Saturday Night Fever is still the
best-selling soundtrack album of all time, and their
1998 album One Night Only is now ranked amongst the
best-selling live albums of all time.
But
their career didn't start at the top. The Bee Gees were
certainly no product of a television talent show, they
were a product of an unusually strong home-grown musical
talent, matched with an indomitable determination; three
boys who just wanted to be famous. By the
late 1950s, the young Manx-born brothers, Barry (born 1
September 1946) and twins Robin and Maurice (born 22
December 1949) were living in Australia, their family
having emigrated from their home country of Great
Britain. The brothers took any opportunity to perform
hits of the day, and it wasn't long before Barry started
writing his own songs. By the early 1960s, they had
landed themselves a recording contract with Australia's
Festival Records. Whilst this period of writing and
recording (which saw Robin and Maurice also start
composing songs) did not result in any major hits, it
demonstrated that the three brothers had an almost
uncanny ability to write songs that betrayed their young
age. Many established Australian recording artists of
the time recorded their songs, perhaps unaware that they
were written by teenagers. The brothers also discovered that they could harmonise with
startling results; the most famous three-part harmony
sound in musical history was born.
A
return to the United Kingdom in 1967 saw the Bee Gees
sign a recording contract with Polydor Records, a
company that they would stay with for almost their
entire careers. Their first mainstream album,
Bee Gees
1st, was an intelligent exploration of the sounds of the
period, and showed for the first time the brothers'
ability to create simple, powerful pop songs that were
musically grounded in some of the most eclectic and
perspicacious lyrics, melodies and production styles of
the era. These early songs work at many levels and still
strike home even now, several decades later. Their
haunting first British single, 'New York Mining Disaster
1941', illustrates this perfectly. The
brothers would never lose this ability, having a
seemingly endless hunger to explore new sounds and
styles, whilst at the same time cleverly punctuating the
songs with inescapably commercial melodies. This level
of
self-confidence and ability in song writing and presentation had
perhaps only before been seen at that time from their contemporaries, the
Beatles.
They
would develop their sounds and ideas throughout the
1960s in a string of hit albums:
Horizontal,
Idea and the sublime
Odessa. This
period featured many chart hits, with 'Massachusetts'
(from Horizontal) and
'I've Gotta Get a Message to You'
both becoming Number One hit singles. Other hits from
the period included 'To Love Somebody', 'Words' and 'First of
May'. But as the 1960s drew to a
close, there was trouble ahead.
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