Confessions of a Bee Gees Fan

The other day I read this shocking story in the Sun: it seems that when Andy Gibb set off from Australia to find fame, fortune and a few crumbs from his brothers' American table, he left behind a wife and a baby due. Since then not a word. Young Andy duly found fame, fortune, and great slices of the Bee Gees' cake; young wife is still at home. She's suing now for a divorce: Andy's become a proper rock star so he goes around with proper rock stars' beautiful companions; young wives, babies due, aren't where it's at.

A common enough pop tale, what shook me was that a Gibb should behave like a cad. I mean, my whole world as a Bee Gees fan is based on self-pity. They aren't macho musclemen, they're the ones who get dumped on, by whole continents of female cads. When they married Lulu, for example, we Bee Gees fans knew it wouldn't last, and for all her snide tales afterwards of drugs and incompatabilities, we knew who was to blame for the divorce.

The essence of beegeeness, the reason why I love them so, is that they're so astonishingly unhip: everything they touch turns to slop. Of all the images they've accumulated over the years, the ones that stick most' touchingly in my mind are from a film they made called Cucumber Castle, in which they played medieval Bee Gees, dressed up in tights and smocks, singing their songs under castle walls, clumsy, silly, but without ever losing their basic beegee quality of earnest sincerity. It's the way they still are, as they turn their toothy profiles to the TV camera, eyes gleaming, perfect harmony, ridiculous. I can't wait to see the movie of Sgt. Pepper.

The essence of beegeeness...is that they're so astonishingly unhip.

The Bee Gees are losers in their songs and losers in their appearance and their success is partly based on the fact that they're the only pop stars no one's jealous of. But it has also been based on some very clever moves. The only real mistake they made in the whole of their career was going to Australia in the first place, in 1958. They left Manchester to become Aussie stars as young boys but that's no big deal. Everyone I've ever interviewed is big in Australia and while the Gibbs were swimming around this little pool, back home, in Manchester and Liverpool, everyone was becoming the Hollies, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Beatles. It was the British beat boom and the Bee Gees, a British beat group, weren't there to enjoy it.

By the time they did arrive, in 1967, beat had become pop, but hip pop, obsessively clever. The boys signed with another Aussie immigrant, Robert Stigwood, who explained to them what was what. Their resulting album is still one of the great artifacts of the British psychedelic era. The Bee Gees looked smart on the cover, certainly not hippies, but they were framed nonetheless by swirls and bursts of rainbow colors. The songs were melodic, light, with strings and Beatle harmonies, but the lyrics were "interesting"-"New York Mining Disaster 1941," "Crazed Fenton Kirk RA," "Red Chair Fade Away." There never was a mining disaster in New York in 1941 and the rest of the songs were quite incomprehensible, but I bought the record the same day as the Incredible String Band's first hippie offering and it was the Bee Gees' nasal tones and cosmic musing that I preferred.

Having established their, urn, credibility, the Bee Gees proceeded to make lots of money. It was the era of rock progress and so the Bee Gees became reactionaries. "I think I'm going back to Massachusetts," they sang. Their trip was back from San Francisco: they cast off the pyschedelic trappings, realized that the Beatles weren't singing any more silly love songs, and did it for them. These were the days of the big Bee Gee ballad (soon to be a part of every selfrespecting Vegas act's act), lushly orchestrated around Robin's ingratiating tremelo and his brothers' distinctive whinging harmonies. Bee Gee ballads were songs of a truly aweinspiring banality. My own favorite began "I started a joke, which set the whole world crying" and ended "I started to cry, which set the whole world laughing." Dunno about that, but it certainly set me laughing. Not even Bob Dylan could derive such cosmic effects from his personal problems.

In the end, though,.the laughing had to stop. The Bee Gees, like the Hollies, were riding out the remnants of the original beat boom, and as pop became rock their popularity began to peter out. In 1969 the band got personal differences and split. Robin went solo, Barry kept writing and Maurice became an actor. In 1970 they stopped having personal differences and reformed. But it was a nostalgic gesture and the new Bee Gees were ensnared in the British showbiz world of TV specials with Cilia Black cabaret. In 1973 the NME Book Of Rock commented that the "Bee Gees in many ways is a story of missed opportunities. At one point their commercial success looked as if it would carry them to the very top."

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Since that epitaph, they've never looked back. With as astute an ear (and manager) as ever for where the pop action was, in 1975 they emigrated once more—America this 'time and American slick white disco. What they realized, with a little help from Robert Stigwood and producer Arif Mardin, was that their pop virtues—strong melodies, self-pity, close harmony— were disco virtues too, Change the backing, add a little chunkineSs and they had hits again and for a newaudience—American pop fans, American TV specials, American cabaret.

At first I found this move unbritish and hard to take. These smooth sounds and anonymous lyrics weren't the maudlin Bee Gees that I knew and loved. But, slowly, I found myself hearing the weepy bits. It was "Nights On Broadway" that convinced me, the part where the boys go falsetto, and then, at least when nobody else was around, I found that my most played record of 1977 wasn't the Sex Pistols' Bollocks but the Bee Gees'—their double live album which not only has as clean a sound as any studio set, but also has a side with all their old hits at less than a minute each—the best way —and provides an instant synopsis of their career that proves that in all the moves, from psychedelia to ballad to disco, nothing has really changed.

And it won't in 1978. Disco fever is catching, the money's rolling in, but the Bee Gees themselves are as ordinary as ever. Their gifts, for melodies and sounds, are rare, but their lives are routine. I can't think of a single thing I'd want to ask them in interview. A few things to tell them maybe, like what a creep little Andy is, but mostly I'd just want to thank them: I'm grateful that the Bee Gees aren't a cheerful family like the Osmonds.