I always see my brothers in my dreams, then wake to realise they’re not here now
The last surviving Bee Gee speaks movingly on his lost siblings, pain at being branded a disco lightweight and joy at topping the charts again
THE whole world misses The Bee Gees. Barry Gibb simply misses his brothers. “I see them in my dreams all the time,” he says. “It’s always clear, and they’re always smiling. Then I’ll wake up and realise that they’re not here any more. I used to feel that we might sit around in our eighties and laugh about all of it, but I was wrong.”
The oldest Gibb sibling, Barry will never get used to being the last Bee Gee standing. Twins Maurice and Robin died in 2003 and 2012 respectively, while his youngest brother,Andy, died tragically young in 1988.
“It’s a tough one, but I had to get to work,” says Barry. “Action will kill depression, so I had to get back to action.” He sighs down the line from his Miami home: “No choice.”
The solution, as ever, has been to keep making music. At 74, Barry has just enjoyed his first ever British number one solo album.
On Greenfields, he reimagines classic Bee Gees tracks in a country style, with guests including Sheryl Crow, Olivia Newton-John and Alison Krauss. Songs such as Words, How Deep Is Your Love and To Love Somebody are back at the top of the charts.
It is the latest step in a remarkable latecareer renaissance. Bee Gees stock has never been higher. A recent Sky Arts documentary featured everyone from Noel Gallagher to Justin Timberlake eulogising their music.
In the past, critics sneered at their disco hits and falsetto vocals; comics such as Kenny Everett mocked their appearance. Now they are rightfully revered as one of the greatest groups of all time.
Barry noticed a change in the air in 2017, when he played a triumphant set in the Sunday evening legends slot at Glastonbury.
The Bee Gees sold 200 million records and had nine number one singles. Barry has written 16 chart-toppers as a composer and was knighted in 2018. Yet he describes his appearance at Pilton Farm “as the highlight of my life as a musician. I have never gotten Glastonbury out of my system.You don’t get past that. You want to do it again. And then you want to do it again”.
It felt like a vindication of everything the Bee Gees had been through. “I don’t have any idea why it worked out that way, but there were 130,000 people, a lot of them kids, wearing disco jackets and all that stuff. I thought I’d gotten past that, but it was such an incredible experience, I’ll never forget it.”
AH, the ‘D’ word. The Bee Gees were a band of many phases. They started out in the 1960s as Beatles acolytes, became masters of emotional orchestral pop, and then briefly hit the doldrums. It is the disco era, however, with which they are most closely associated, and it seems not always happily.
“Disco was just a word,” says Barry. “It was black R&B music. We wanted to make happy records for a while. We were going to get dropped by Atlantic Records if we didn’t kick it up a bit! That was the truth of it.”
It led to the Bee Gees writing and recording the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Released in November 1977, the double album was a phenomenon, selling 40 million copies, staying at number one for 24 weeks, and spawning six hit singles, including Stayin’ Alive, More Than A Woman, How Deep Is Your Love and Night Fever.
But what should have been a career high was soured by a vicious public backlash. In July 1979, a mob was invited to a Chicago baseball stadium to watch disco records being destroyed. The Bee Gees became representative of a reviled art form. Suddenly, they couldn’t get a song on the radio.
“It just became a madhouse,” he says. “We were much better off writing for other people in the end than battling this system.”
For a while, the lack of respect made Barry a prickly figure, defensive of the legacy of the band. Many of us recall him and his siblings walking off during a TV interview with Clive Anderson in 1997, having been ridiculed once too often. “When people started criticising us, what else do you do?” he says. “You put up your fists.”
He seems much more sanguine these days. “I hope so. I’m a 74-year-old man, so if I don’t learn anything by this point I’ll never learn anything at all. Openness makes me happy, and being defensive makes me sad. That has passed. It’s done. I have no complaints about any of it. You don’t remember the bad times, you remember the great times.”
In the 1980s the Bee Gees kept a low profile, writing and producing hits for Barbra Streisand (Guilty), Diana Ross (Chain Reaction), Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (Islands In The Stream) and Dionne Warwick (Heartbreaker). They also worked with Michael Jackson and became friends.
“When the [1984] Victory tour came to Florida he stayed at our home for a week, because he didn’t want to be in a hotel. We have a room, even now, that is the Michael Jackson room. He had issues, of course. That kind of fame, it’s disruptive. You can’t handle
that.” Fame threw the Gibb brothers off track, too. Maurice became an alcoholic. Andy died at 30 of a heart attack brought on by cocaine addiction, and Robin was also fond of drugs. Barry somehow kept his feet on the ground.
He and his wife Linda celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last September having met on Top Of The Pops in 1969. A former Miss Edinburgh from the Scottish seaside town of Musselburgh, Linda was an occasional hostess on the show. “We were number one with Massachusetts, and she didn’t know who we were! We saw each other across the studio and that was it,” he says. “We had a cuddle in Doctor Who’s phone box – and frankly, time stood still!” The couple have five children – Stephen, Ashley, Travis, Michael and Alexandra – aged from 29 to 47.
The sibling dynamic wasn’t always so rosy though. The Bee Gees split up for a
year in 1969, and there were several periods thereafter where tensions were high, right up to the end. The division of labour within the band was a frequent battleground.
“It was like The Beatles,” says Barry. “If you came in with the idea, then you got to sing it, because that’s where the spontaneity is. If I brought in To Love Somebody, I sang it. Robin brought in Massachusetts, and he sang it. Maurice wasn’t a serious lead singer, but he was the best harmony singer we could have wanted, and a brilliant musician. You had a team, and everyone had to be good at something.
“Whatever the conflicts were, they were not constant.They just popped up every now and again. My brothers, bless them, might have had issues with me, but they never told me. They went home and told everybody else in their family.
“If they had said, ‘Barry, I have an issue, I want to sing more, I want to do more…’ but they never did. That’s what I regret. There were issues, but they were invisible.”
In any case, breaking up long term was never really an option.
“When you are brothers, that’s not how it works.We dust ourselves off and we go back to the studio. If one thing didn’t work, you would try something else.”
Barry laughs: “Maybe we just got addicted to having hit records.”
HE HOPES Robin and Maurice would have enjoyed the success of Greenfields, which helps keep their legacy alive. “The album is for my brothers, and I hope there’s more,” he says.
“My thing has always been about great songs. That’s what does it for me. That’s my mission.”
Is he still writing? “I collect ideas and thoughts, things people say, situations I witness. I don’t write things down, because if I don’t remember them they aren’t any good.” He’s hoping to get back to performing just as soon as it’s possible.
“Fingers crossed, I believe one day myself and all of the artists on the album will be together on one stage. Like anyone who loves to perform, I miss it desperately, but for now we just have to wait.”
You sense he will accept whatever fate brings with equanimity. Barry Gibb seems, at last, to be at peace not just with his band of brothers, but with himself.
“It’s a time now to simply tell the truth and not try to keep things under cover or be defensive. I miss my brothers, and I’m happy to tell the truth. Whatever the truth is, it’s my truth.”