Beegeesi Want to Hold You in My Arms Again
I northward 1979, the Bees Gees authorised an illustrated biography. Information technology was called The Greatest, which was both slightly immodest and a pretty accurate representation of their commercial standing. In the preceding four years, they had had eight United states No i singles; helmed the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack – at the time, the biggest-selling soundtrack album in history – and written a succession of global hits for other artists: Samantha Sang's Emotion, Tavares'southward More Than a Woman, Yvonne Elliman's If I Can't Have You, Frankie Valli's Grease, not to mention three No 1s for younger brother Andy Gibb. Perhaps unexpectedly, and in evidence of a self-mocking sense of humour they would later be defendant of lacking when they came into contact with irreverent interviewers, the illustrations in the biography depicted the Gibb brothers as drawing animals. Robin was a red setter, while Maurice was a badger. Barry, the eldest and most hirsute of the three, was a lion.
As he walks into the entrance hall of a London hotel 34 years later, Barry Gibb still looks suitably leonine. His hair is gray and thinning at the front, simply, at 67, he would still definitely be described equally a man in possession of a mane: he'due south also in possession of a pair of sunglasses that no one except an enormously rich and successful rock star would wear indoors. Everything else, however, has changed. The Bee Gees no longer exist, because all his brothers take died: Andy – who Barry had suggested join the band later on his solo career began to fade – died in 1988, aged 30, after years of beverage and drug habit; Maurice in 2003 of a heart attack; and Robin last year from colorectal cancer, an illness Barry claims Robin tried to hide from him. "Nobody was telling me anything, so I showed a picture of Robin in the papers to my dr., considering he didn't look well. My md said: 'Get and see him, he's got maybe half-dozen months.' I thought, Jesus. That's all my brothers."
Barry currently finds himself in the middle of a world tour and discussing the possibility of a new solo album, his beginning since 2005's Guilty Too (a follow-up to his and Barbra Streisand'due south 12m-selling 1980 album Guilty). He is, he concedes, remarkably decorated for a homo who decided to retire a twelvemonth ago. "I idea, That's enough at present. My bones were creaking, my knees were hurting and with everything that had happened, I idea, maybe information technology'due south just fourth dimension to be Grandad and not worry nigh it whatever more than. Merely music has to exist played and I wanted to go along the music alive."
He was, he says, shattered not simply by Robin'due south decease, but the nagging thought that he wasn't on especially close terms with whatever of his brothers when they died: "That'south the one biggest regret, that we didn't speak, nosotros weren't really speaking very much to each other. We weren't beingness intimate in those concluding days of each of their lives."
He and Robin, in particular, had always had a fractious relationship. After Maurice died, they fabricated vague plans to work together – they appeared at a couple of gigs and on Strictly Come up Dancing – but the plans never really came to anything. "Robin would ring me upward and say: 'We've got to do this tribute to Queen show' or whatever, we've got to do this and that and I could tell by talking to him that information technology wasn't him that had had the idea nosotros should do this. I knew it was someone else, because I know Robin better than anyone else does. I knew he wasn't up to information technology. I'd noticed that when he was doing live shows, he'd started lowering all the keys he sang in, so that was some other sign for me: at that place's something incorrect, Rob, fifty-fifty if y'all're not telling me what it is." He sighs. "I just wanted to say to him: 'Why can't we let the Bee Gees … why can't nosotros sit down and bask what'due south happened? Why tin't the dream have come up truthful? Why practise we however have to chase this dream when it's actually come up truthful?' But him and Mo, they were only likewise restless."
The Bee Gees' total record sales are estimated at 220m. It seems odd that anybody that successful could feel that their dreams hadn't come true, but in his last years, Robin certainly gave that impression: storming out of an advent on, of all things, Radio 4'due south Front Row; lament at length in touchy interviews about the lack of respect afforded him and his brothers. The issue was, adequately obviously, the glaring disparity between the Bee Gees' commercial success and their critical standing. The music they made for themselves and others seems utterly enduring: as if to evidence the point, a few days before I meet Gibb, Kenny Rogers's operation of his 1983 Bee Gees-penned hit Islands in the Stream goes down such a storm at Glastonbury that he has to sing it twice. But in that location's still a tendency to regard the Bee Gees with a certain knowing smirk, to view them every bit a joke or an embarrassing guilty pleasure. You could see how this would brainstorm to wear on your fretfulness over time: 220m records sold and people are still less inclined to talk over your music than they were to snigger about the size of your teeth and how y'all dressed in the mid-70s.
Perhaps if y'all had come up with the songs the Bee Gees came up with for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack – the dizzying perfection of Stayin' Alive, the gorgeous elision of lyrical misery and musical bliss that is If I Tin't Have You – sold 40m copies of the resulting soundtrack and and so spent the next xx years existence called upon to defend yourself, every bit if you had washed something terribly wrong instead of releasing an era-defining, hugely successful album packed with complete pop songwriting, then probably you would become a fleck chippy too.
"I've got to a point in life where you've got to be philosophical near everything," says Barry, who, in fairness, has given every impression of beingness a chip chippy almost the Bee Gees' reputation in the by: it was him that led the grouping'south infamous mid-interview departure from Clive Anderson'due south chatshow in 1996. "So I don't care. Information technology doesn't matter. What matters is that you love the songs you did, y'all love them yourself."
Really? Because, if I were him, I think I'd be encarmine furious.
"Well," he says, "there's part of me, a footling function of me that goes: Jesus, human, you fucking write something like that, I'll sit back and listen. But the greater part of me is … I only don't care any more than. I don't feel I've got to say: 'Dammit, this was adept.' People are entitled to their stance."
The popular view is that Sabbatum Night Fever's vast success did for the Bee Gees' credibility: you but tin't be that pop and remain absurd. But the truth is the Bee Gees were never really cool as such, possibly because, from the moment in 1966 when they arrived dorsum in Britain from Australia (where their family unit had emigrated in 1958 at the suggestion of a Manchester policeman, who feared that 12-year-old Barry's abort for shoplifting and Robin's burgeoning interest in arson were merely the opening acts of a lengthy criminal career), they were simply too weird to be absurd.
They had served a weird musical apprenticeship in Commonwealth of australia, three boyish brothers singing in hotels and Returned Servicemen'southward Clubs between dog acts and jugglers: "We saw things. People sitting at tables having fights without standing up. We'd exist singing and water would exist pouring in through the galvanised steel roof. It was like Crocodile Dundee."
They sounded weird, particularly Robin: he sang in a baroque, strangulated quaver that gave the disconcerting impression he was nigh to outburst into tears. And their songwriting was weird. Despite this, while still in their teens, they were writing mod-day standards, big ballads that got covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Al Green: To Love Somebody solitary has been covered by such a vast and peculiar array of artists the list seems faintly comical. It's probably the only song in history to accept constitute its way into the oeuvres of both Ronan Keating and Joe Strummer, via Tom Jones, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, Lee "Scratch" Perry and Dusty Springfield.
On the other, nevertheless, their first three albums are packed with majestically skewed bizarre pop songs that didn't really fit with the prevalent trend for psychedelia, but did audio like the products of off-kilter imaginations being allowed to run anarchism: Lemons Never Forget, I Have Decided to Join the Airforce, The Earnest of Being George. Listening to the latter, yous might accept come up to the determination that the Bee Gees were enthusiastic consumers of acid, but Barry says not, or at least not exactly: "We never saw LSD, heroin, any of those things. Discovered grass, though. Fantastic. I loved it. Information technology opened up your mind. Magic mushrooms volition do that too. But yous get through magic mushrooms. Y'all don't do them all the fourth dimension. It opens your brain up and I know what I need to know at present. Then that didn't become a addiction; it was experience. There were enough of amphetamines effectually, Dexedrine and things like that, which all three of us loved, although I call up Maurice was more than inclined towards a scotch. When he married Lulu, he got to drink with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton and all these people that she knew. His world opened upwardly completely; he was for ever the extrovert."
Despite their success, by the time of 1969's Odessa, a double album on which their unique vision of pop music reached ever-more rococo heights, the tensions betwixt Barry and Robin had reached "critical mass" and the ring bankrupt up. "There was this deep, emotional competition between three brothers that had found themselves to be famous and didn't sympathise it. The Dexedrine and the various habits, we'd all met the women nosotros were going to marry, our personal lives had become very, very different. At that indicate, Robin was adequately uncontrollable. I tin't become into any detail, just uncontrollable. Maurice was already at the bad finish of drinking. The fighting got worse and worse. Robin and I were arguing through the press. You can only await back on it right at present and get, wow, we were so naive."
The brothers reformed a twelvemonth afterwards, although without much enthusiasm – their manager Robert Stigwood wanted to float his company on the stock market and thought its value would be inflated if the Gibbs were working together once more – and limped through the early on 70s before moving to Miami at Eric Clapton's proposition: they rented 461 Ocean Boulevard, the firm later which the guitarist had named his 1974 album. For all his apparent equanimity about the band'due south critical reputation, Barry conspicuously has a complicated relationship with the songs that made them more than famous than ever: when I mention Stayin' Alive, he brings upwards the ad campaign that suggested singing the song while administering CPR to go along the correct rhythm and mutters: "Something good comes out of everything."
The backlash later Saturday Night Fever was almost as dramatic as its success. "None of us really knew how to deal with information technology – wow, this is so unfair, all of those emotions. Having an ego was out of the window. Christ, if everyone else was calling you crap, how could you call up of yourself every bit any adept? It was devastating. But my son had just been built-in, I had so many things to fall back on. OK, if anybody'due south going to tear us apart, and so I'll focus inwards on my family."
That said, if the backlash temporarily stalled the Bee Gees' ain career, it had no touch on whatsoever on their power to write hits, albeit for other people: Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rodgers and Dolly Parton, Dionne Warwick's Heartbreaker, Diana Ross's Chain Reaction (he says he has "never even heard" Have That'southward Back For Skilful, a vocal that a longstanding industry rumour insisted he was secretly responsible for). "Well, you're e'er throwing shit at the wall," he shrugs. "That's your mentality. You just write a bunch of songs and hope that people like them."
He says he thinks he's going to start making records again. He's enjoying existence on bout: being a solo artist never really appealed to him. "I just didn't relish it, considering of my brothers, because I loved being with them, nosotros were a unit of measurement, we were glued together." But now he doesn't really accept a choice. "I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life," he says, a little unexpectedly. "I've got seven grandchildren. I get to re-live watching Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. I spend a lot of hours being happy about what happened to us, considering it may never have happened, whatsoever of those hits. We could still accept been playing clubs in Queensland. So I've always managed to feel, somehow, that we ought to appreciate what'southward happened. The dream came true," he smiles. "And it'south OK."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/18/barry-gibb-bee-gees-music-alive
0 Response to "Beegeesi Want to Hold You in My Arms Again"
إرسال تعليق