The story of Bee Gees

Born on an island, raised in Manchester

The Bee Gees story begins on the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. Barry Gibb was born in Douglas on the first of September 1946. His father Hugh was a drummer and bandleader who played the island's hotels, and his mother Barbara had sung with dance bands. Barry nearly did not survive infancy. Before he was two, he pulled a pot of hot tea off the table and was scalded so badly that he spent months in hospital, and he later said he had once been given about twenty minutes to live. Then, on the twenty second of December 1949, twins arrived. Robin was born first, and Maurice followed about thirty five minutes later. There was also an older sister, Lesley, and in 1958 a baby brother, Andy, would complete the family.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1955 the Gibbs moved back to Hugh's home district of Chorlton in Manchester. Money was tight, and the boys ran wild. Robin later admitted that as children he and his brothers got into petty burglary and even arson. But they also discovered that they could sing together. With two neighbourhood friends, Paul Frost and Kenny Horrocks, they formed a skiffle group called the Rattlesnakes, with Barry on guitar and the twins singing. They loved the Everly Brothers, Cliff Richard, Paul Anka and the Mills Brothers, and by listening closely they learned to add a third voice to the Everlys' two part harmony. That trick, three brothers singing as one, would become the sound of the Bee Gees.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first real performance came on the twenty eighth of December 1957 at the Gaumont cinema in Manchester, where local children were invited to mime to records between films. On the way there, the precious record broke, so the brothers had no choice but to sing live. The audience loved it, and the boys decided that singing was what they wanted to do. When Frost and Horrocks left in 1958, the brothers carried on under a new name, Wee Johnny Hayes and the Blue Cats, with Barry as Johnny Hayes, entering talent contests for under fifteens at a local club. By then Barry had a guitar from his father, and he had already begun making up songs of his own.[1] [2] [3]

The Australian apprenticeship

In August 1958 the whole family sailed from Southampton to Australia on the ship Fairsea, as part of an assisted migration scheme. They settled in Redcliffe, just north of Brisbane in Queensland. The boys soon found a way to earn pocket money. At the Redcliffe Speedway they sang for the crowd during the intervals of race meetings, often on the back of a truck driven around the track, and the spectators threw coins onto the track for them. Speedway promoter Bill Goode introduced them to a Brisbane radio presenter named Bill Gates, who played their songs on air. It was Gates who named them the BGs, which soon became Bee Gees.[1] [2] [3]

Through the early sixties the brothers played resorts, hotels and returned servicemen's clubs along the Queensland coast, a tough training ground where, as Barry later put it, people would fight at the tables and rain poured through the tin roof. Barry left school in 1961, and his songwriting caught the ear of Australian star Col Joye, who helped them land a record deal. In 1963 the family moved to Sydney, and the Bee Gees released their first single, The Battle of the Blue and the Grey, on Festival's Leedon label. Barry wrote every Bee Gees single for the next few years and sold songs to other Australian singers. In 1962 the group even opened for Chubby Checker at Sydney Stadium.[1] [2] [3]

The singles kept flopping, and by 1966 Festival was close to dropping them. Rescue came from two men. American songwriter Nat Kipner, newly in charge of a small label called Spin, took them on, and he introduced them to Ossie Byrne, a producer who had lost an eye serving in the war and ran a tiny studio behind a butcher's shop in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville. Byrne gave them almost unlimited studio time for months. They wrote and recorded furiously, and one of those songs, Spicks and Specks, written by Barry, became their first big Australian hit late in 1966.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Success had arrived too late to keep them in Australia. Frustrated, the brothers had already decided that the whole family should move back to England, where the Beatles had made British bands the centre of the pop world. Before leaving, their father Hugh sent demo tapes to Brian Epstein's company NEMS in London. In early January 1967 the Gibbs sailed for England with Ossie Byrne, singing on board to help pay their way. While they were at sea, Australia's leading pop paper Go Set named Spicks and Specks the best single of the year. When they arrived at Southampton, Barry later recalled, a band on the dock told them to go home, because nobody in England was signing groups any more.[1] [2] [3] [4]

London and the first wave of fame

Within days of reaching London the Gibbs got a call from Robert Stigwood, an Australian impresario who had just joined Epstein's NEMS and managed Cream. On the twenty fourth of February 1967 they passed a live audition and signed with him. Stigwood announced them as the most significant new talent of the year, and he spent heavily to promote them. Two Australian musicians joined the line up, drummer Colin Petersen, a former child film star, and guitarist Vince Melouney. Their first international single, New York Mining Disaster 1941, came out in April 1967. American promotional copies went to radio with plain labels, and some disc jockeys assumed it was the Beatles in disguise. It reached the top twenty in Britain and America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The hits came quickly. To Love Somebody, a soul ballad Barry and Robin wrote with Otis Redding in mind, reached the American top twenty, though Redding died in a plane crash before he could record it. In the summer of 1967 Petersen and Melouney faced deportation because of a visa error. Fans protested outside the Prime Minister's cottage and one young woman chained herself to Buckingham Palace, and Stigwood's publicity campaign helped keep them in the country. Then came Massachusetts, sung by Robin. The brothers had never been to Massachusetts, they simply liked the sound of the word. It became their first British number one, topped charts in many other countries and sold millions. On the night he died in August 1967, Brian Epstein told Maurice it would be a big hit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fame had a frightening side. On the fifth of November 1967 Robin and his girlfriend Molly Hullis were on a crowded train from Hastings to London when it derailed near Hither Green because of a broken rail. Forty nine people were killed and seventy eight injured. Robin and Molly survived, and they married the following year. The group kept working at a relentless pace. The ballad Words, written by Barry, became a hit in early 1968 and his solo showcase for the rest of his career. That spring they toured Germany and Switzerland, where fans crushed their car outside a hotel, and they played the Royal Albert Hall.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the summer of 1968 the Bee Gees had their second British number one, I've Gotta Get a Message to You, a song Robin described as the last plea of a man on death row, and their first American top ten hit. Robin's I Started a Joke, whose melody he said came to him from the drone of an aeroplane's engines, went to number six in America. But the strain was showing. On the twenty seventh of July 1968 Robin collapsed with nervous exhaustion, and their first American tour had to be postponed. In December, Vince Melouney left to play the bluesier music he loved. Barry later said amphetamines, fame and rivalry were pulling the three brothers apart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Odessa, the split and the long way back

The most ambitious record of their early years was Odessa, a double album that began life as a concept piece about a ship lost in 1899. It came out in early 1969 in a red flocked sleeve, and today many critics call it their finest sixties work. At the time it tore the group apart. Robin felt that Stigwood favoured Barry as the frontman, and when his song Lamplight was passed over for Barry's First of May as the single, Robin quit. He announced his solo career on the nineteenth of March 1969. His brothers and Stigwood threatened to sue him, and there were even rumours that his parents considered legal action because he was still a minor.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robin's first solo single, Saved by the Bell, reached number two in Britain. Barry and Maurice carried on with Colin Petersen, filming a television special and album called Cucumber Castle, and their single Don't Forget to Remember also reached number two. But in August 1969 Petersen was fired. He believed it was because he had asked hard questions about the group's finances and Stigwood's control of their recordings and publishing, and he later lost his royalties after a court case. On the first of December 1969, Barry and Maurice announced that the Bee Gees had split. Maurice married the Scottish singer Lulu that year, and began drinking heavily with friends like Ringo Starr.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The separation did not last. In mid 1970 Robin and Maurice began recording together again, and Barry said Robin phoned him on holiday in Spain to say let's do it again. On the twenty first of August 1970 the brothers announced they were reunited, with Geoff Bridgford on drums. At their first session back together they wrote Lonely Days and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart. Lonely Days went to number three in America, and How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, first offered to Andy Williams, became their first American number one in 1971. Barry later suggested the reunion suited Stigwood's business plans too, but Robin simply said that being on your own was no fun.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

After that high, the early seventies were hard. Bridgford left in 1972 and the three brothers carried on as a trio for the rest of their career. Their records sold poorly, and their manager's new label, RSO, rejected one of their albums. By 1974 they were playing small clubs and cabaret venues in northern England, including Batley Variety Club in West Yorkshire, and Barry later remembered one American show where they were billed second to a horse. He called those years hell, saying nothing on earth was worse than the pop wilderness. The hits they did have were ballads, and nobody seemed to want ballads anymore.[1] [2] [3]

Miami and the new sound

The turnaround began with a change of scenery. On the advice of Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun, Stigwood paired the brothers with soul producer Arif Mardin for the 1974 album Mr. Natural, and early in 1975 Eric Clapton suggested they do what he had done and record in Miami. They moved into the house Clapton had made famous, 461 Ocean Boulevard, and worked at Criteria Studios. When their first new songs were more slow ballads, Stigwood flew down for a confrontation and told them they were not listening to what was happening in music. Mardin pushed them toward the rhythm and blues they had always loved, and asked them to listen to artists like Stevie Wonder.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Every day the brothers drove to the studio across the Julia Tuttle Causeway, and the joints of the bridge made a rhythmic clatter under the car. That beat became Jive Talkin'. The song was first called Drive Talking, until Mardin explained that jive talking meant telling lies. Keyboard player Blue Weaver added a pulsing synthesiser bass line, one of the earliest in pop, and the single went to number one in America in 1975. On the same album Barry sang in falsetto for the first time, on Nights on Broadway, and that high voice soon became the group's trademark. The album Main Course relaunched the group, with a road band of guitarist Alan Kendall, drummer Dennis Bryon and Weaver.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1976 the Bee Gees lost Mardin. Stigwood had moved his RSO label away from Atlantic, and Atlantic would not let its producer follow, which Maurice said really broke them up. Barry took charge of production with Albhy Galuten and Criteria engineer Karl Richardson, a team that would soon make history. The first result was You Should Be Dancing, sung almost entirely in Barry's new falsetto, with Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills and Nash, recording down the hall, adding percussion. It went to number one in America and topped the dance chart for seven weeks. The album Children of the World followed, and so did a live album, Here at Last.[1] [2] [3]

Saturday Night Fever

In the spring of 1977 the Bee Gees were in France, recording at the Château d'Hérouville near Paris partly for tax reasons, when Stigwood called. He was making a low budget film about the New York disco scene, based on a magazine article, and he needed songs. The brothers played him what they had, including Night Fever, More Than a Woman and How Deep Is Your Love, and wrote more in a matter of days, famously while sitting on the château's staircase. None of them read or wrote music. They built songs in their heads and sang them to each other. The film's dance scenes had already been shot to other records, so the Bee Gees' songs were dropped in afterwards.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Stayin' Alive was finished at Criteria in Miami, and it came with a famous accident. Drummer Dennis Bryon had to leave the sessions when his mother died, and no replacement could be found. So Galuten and Richardson took two bars of drumming from the already recorded Night Fever, spliced them into a tape loop running around a microphone stand, and built the song on that. On the sleeve they jokingly credited a drummer called Bernard Lupe, who did not exist. The film was called Saturday Night until the brothers refused to rename their song. Stigwood gave in and retitled the movie Saturday Night Fever instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The film opened in December 1977, and the soundtrack became the biggest selling album in history up to that point, with more than forty million copies sold. It spent twenty four straight weeks at number one in America. How Deep Is Your Love, Stayin' Alive and Night Fever all went to number one, and Night Fever stayed there for eight weeks. On the Billboard chart of the twenty fifth of March 1978, five songs written by the Gibbs sat in the top ten at the same time. For thirty seven weeks from Christmas 1977, songs written by the brothers held the American top spot for twenty seven of them, including hits for their brother Andy, Yvonne Elliman and Frankie Valli's Grease.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The soundtrack won the Grammy for Album of the Year, one of five Grammys the Bee Gees collected for it. Their follow up, Spirits Having Flown, arrived early in 1979 and gave them three more American number ones, Too Much Heaven, Tragedy and Love You Inside Out. That made six in a row, equalling the Beatles. They wrote Too Much Heaven and Tragedy in a single afternoon, and Andy's Shadow Dancing that same evening. The royalties from Too Much Heaven went to UNICEF, and the song earned more than seven million dollars. The 1979 tour sold out across America. Barry remembered fans climbing his walls and death threats, and said he was grateful when it stopped.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Not everything Stigwood touched turned to gold. In 1978 the Bee Gees starred with Peter Frampton in his film of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a musical built from Beatles songs. Barry said they tried to talk their way out of it. Before release, Robin boasted that their version would make people forget the Beatles' original. Instead, critics savaged the film as a disjointed mess. Around the same time the Gibbs gave hits to others. Barry wrote Grease for Frankie Valli, and Barry and Robin wrote Emotion for their old friend Samantha Sang, with Barry singing backing vocals. Their younger brother Andy, produced by Barry, became the first solo artist whose first three singles all reached number one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Backlash and hits for other people

The fall was as fast as the rise. By the end of 1979 disco was collapsing, and the Bee Gees became the face of everything its critics hated. In Chicago in July 1979, a radio host named Steve Dahl staged Disco Demolition Night at a baseball stadium, blowing up disco records in front of a crowd that rioted. Stations across America ran Bee Gee free weekends. After their run of hits ended, the group had just one more American top ten single, One, and that did not come until 1989. Barry said the backlash was devastating, and that with everyone calling them rubbish it was hard to believe they were any good.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The pressure also turned the brothers against their manager. In 1980 the Bee Gees sued Robert Stigwood, claiming he had held back royalties. The case was settled out of court and the two sides were eventually reconciled, but in the meantime the group recorded Living Eyes in 1981 without the team that had always promoted them, and it missed the top forty in Britain and America. The Gibbs' private lives were strained as well. Robin and Molly divorced after years apart, and in September 1983 Robin was sentenced to fourteen days in jail for speaking to the press about his marriage in breach of a court order.[1] [2] [3]

What radio would not play from the Bee Gees, it played happily from other singers. In 1980 Barry wrote or co-wrote every song on Barbra Streisand's album Guilty, produced it with Galuten and Richardson, and sang two duets with her. It became her biggest album, selling around fifteen million copies, and Woman in Love became her biggest single. Dionne Warwick's comeback hit Heartbreaker followed in 1982. In 1983 Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton took the brothers' Islands in the Stream, a song named after a Hemingway novel, to number one in America, and in 1986 Diana Ross topped the British chart with Chain Reaction. Barry said each of those hits sounded exactly like a Bee Gees song.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

There were courtroom battles too. In 1983 a Chicago clothing salesman and part time musician named Ronald Selle sued the brothers, claiming How Deep Is Your Love copied his song Let It End. He said he first noticed it when a teenage neighbour played the Bee Gees song loudly on a cassette. A jury found in his favour, but the judge overturned the verdict because Selle could not show the Bee Gees had ever had access to his song, and the appeals court agreed. Meanwhile the brothers tried solo work. Robin released three solo albums in the eighties, and Barry signed with MCA and released Now Voyager in 1984.[1] [2] [3]

Losing Andy, and a second comeback

The youngest Gibb brother never recovered from fame. Andy had huge hits as a teenager, but he developed a cocaine addiction that cost him his marriage, his relationship with actress Victoria Principal, and his jobs on Broadway and the television show Solid Gold. He went to the Betty Ford Center in 1985 and seemed to be getting better, and his brothers were helping him plan a new album. On the tenth of March 1988, five days after his thirtieth birthday, Andy died in hospital in Oxford of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart. British papers suggested an overdose, but the hospital said he died of natural causes, though doctors believed years of cocaine had weakened his heart.[1] [2] [3]

Before that loss came a comeback. In 1987 the Bee Gees signed with Warner Brothers, reunited with Arif Mardin and released E.S.P., their first album in six years. The single You Win Again, whose melody Barry said came to him in a dream, spent four weeks at number one in Britain, keeping George Michael's Faith off the top. It made the Bee Gees the first group with a British number one in the sixties, seventies and eighties. America still ignored it, and it stalled at number seventy five there. In 1989 the album One included Wish You Were Here, dedicated to Andy, and its title song finally returned them to the American top ten.[1] [2] [3]

Maurice had been drinking heavily since the seventies. By his own account John Lennon introduced him to scotch and coke, and Barry said Maurice sometimes had to feel his way along the wall to get on stage. Maurice later said his guilt over failing to reach Andy made his drinking worse. In 1991, after a month long binge, he pulled a gun on his wife Yvonne and their children. They fled to Barry's house and refused to return until he got help. Maurice went into rehab, and his brothers stood by him. He stayed sober for the rest of his life, and in 1992 he and Yvonne renewed their wedding vows.[1] [2] [3]

The nineties brought recognition. Barry was struggling with severe arthritis and back trouble, but in 1997 the Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and they received the Brit award for outstanding contribution to music. On the fourteenth of November 1997 they played the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, billed as One Night Only because it was meant to be their last show. The crowd reaction changed Barry's mind, and the concert grew into a world tour that drew fifty six thousand people to Wembley Stadium and ended in Sydney in March 1999. Their final album of new songs, This Is Where I Came In, followed in 2001.[1] [2] [3]

The deaths of Maurice and Robin

On the twelfth of January 2003, Maurice Gibb died at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. He was fifty three. He had been rushed in with severe stomach pain, suffered a cardiac arrest, and then underwent emergency surgery. The medical examiner found that a congenital twisting of his small intestine had cut off its blood supply. Barry and Robin publicly questioned whether the surgeons had made mistakes, saying the sequence of events made no sense to them. About two hundred people, including Michael Jackson, attended his funeral in Miami Beach. At first the surviving brothers said they would keep the name alive, but they soon decided the Bee Gees had been three brothers, and retired it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The honours kept arriving. A month after Maurice's death, Barry and Robin accepted the Grammy Legend Award with Maurice's son Adam, in a tearful ceremony. All three brothers had been named Commanders of the British Empire in the New Year Honours announced at the end of 2001, and in 2004 Adam collected his father's award at Buckingham Palace. Barry and Robin did not perform together in public again until a charity concert in Miami in February 2006. In September 2009 Robin announced that the two of them would work together again as the Bee Gees, and they sang on Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars that autumn.[1] [2] [3]

Robin's health failed soon after. In 2010 he collapsed with stomach pains on stage in Belgium and needed emergency surgery. In 2011 he was diagnosed with cancer, and later with cancer in his liver. His last stage appearance was a charity concert for injured soldiers at the London Palladium in February 2012. He had written The Titanic Requiem with his son Robin John for the hundredth anniversary of the sinking, but he was too ill to attend its premiere that April. He fell into a coma after catching pneumonia, woke briefly, and died on the twentieth of May 2012, aged sixty two. His family said the final cause was kidney failure.[1] [2] [3]

Robin was buried near his home in Thame, Oxfordshire. His private life drew headlines afterwards. He and his second wife Dwina had an open marriage, and he had a daughter in 2008 with the couple's former housekeeper, Claire Yang. At the funeral, Barry spoke about their decades of conflict. Even at the very end, he said, the two of them had found things to fight about, and none of it meant anything now. He urged the mourners to get rid of any conflict in their own lives. Barry later admitted that his biggest regret was that he had not been close to any of his brothers when they died.[1] [2] [3]

The last brother

After Robin's death Barry thought about retiring for good. He said his wife Linda told him he could not just sit there and die with everybody else, and Paul McCartney asked him what else he was going to do. In 2013 he unveiled a statue of the Bee Gees in Redcliffe, the Queensland town where they grew up, and began touring under his own name with his son Stephen and Maurice's daughter Samantha. In December 2013 he surprised viewers of Saturday Night Live by appearing in The Barry Gibb Talk Show, the long running sketch in which Jimmy Fallon played him and Justin Timberlake played Robin. Barry said his mission now was to keep the music alive.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2016 Barry joined Coldplay at the Glastonbury festival to sing To Love Somebody and Stayin' Alive, and a year later he played the festival's Sunday afternoon legends slot himself. In 2016 he released In the Now, written with his sons, and in June 2018 he was knighted at Buckingham Palace. He said that if it was not for his brothers he would not be there. In December 2020 director Frank Marshall's documentary The Bee Gees, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, won strong reviews. Then in January 2021 came Greenfields, country versions of Bee Gees songs sung with Dolly Parton, Keith Urban and others, which went to number one in Britain and Australia.[1] [2] [3] [4]

More honours followed. In 2022 Barry was made an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia, the country's highest honour, and in December 2023 he became a Kennedy Center Honoree in Washington. A feature film about the brothers has been in development at Paramount for years, with Barry as an executive producer. Kenneth Branagh was announced as director in 2021, and in 2024 Deadline reported that Ridley Scott was in talks to take over. In November 2024 two former Bee Gees drummers died within four days of each other. Dennis Bryon, who played on Saturday Night Fever, died at seventy five, and Colin Petersen, from the sixties line up, died at seventy eight.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

As of 2026, Barry is the only surviving Gibb brother, and estimates of the Bee Gees' record sales range from about one hundred and twenty million to two hundred and fifty million. When they entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the citation said only Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks and Paul McCartney had outsold them. At least two and a half thousand artists have recorded their songs, from Nina Simone and Al Green to Destiny's Child. Stayin' Alive is even used to teach people the rhythm of chest compressions for CPR. Barry once said the music had soaked so deeply into the culture that he did not think it would ever be forgotten.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Bee Gees

Barry Gibb and Robin Gibb. The two main voices of the Bee Gees were close and competitive all their lives. Robin sang the early hits, but Barry's looks and later his falsetto made him the frontman, and Robin's resentment led to his walkout in 1969. After Maurice died they disagreed over whether to carry on as the Bee Gees. Barry said at Robin's funeral that they had fought right up to the end, and that none of it mattered now.[1] [2] [3]

Robin Gibb and Maurice Gibb. The twins were born thirty five minutes apart on the Isle of Man and spent their whole lives making music together. When Robin quit in 1969 he and Maurice were the first to reunite, recording together in June 1970. After Maurice died in 2003, Robin told Mojo he could not accept it and imagined his twin was alive somewhere else. Barry said losing Maurice was the greatest pain of Robin's last ten years.[1] [2]

Maurice Gibb and Lulu. Maurice met the Scottish singer Lulu in 1967 through Colin Petersen, and they married on the eighteenth of February 1969, when both were stars. Lulu later said going unsteady described them better than going steady. The marriage was fuelled by parties, and both of them drank. They separated in 1973 and divorced, childless, in 1975. Maurice then married Yvonne Spenceley, who stayed with him through his recovery from alcoholism until his death.[1] [2]

Barry Gibb and Linda Gray. Barry met Linda Gray, a former Miss Edinburgh, while taping Top of the Pops in London. After his brief first marriage to Maureen Bates ended, he married Linda on his twenty fourth birthday, the first of September 1970. They raised five children in Miami. Barry credits her with keeping drugs out of their home, and after Robin's death, with pushing him off the couch and back into music.[1] [2] [3]

Bee Gees and Robert Stigwood. The Australian impresario signed the brothers in February 1967 and managed them for well over a decade, owning their label RSO, their recordings and much of their publishing. He pushed them toward the dance sound of Main Course and commissioned the Saturday Night Fever songs. In 1980 they sued him over royalties, but the case was settled and they reconciled. Barry said he wrote To Love Somebody for Stigwood personally.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Barry Gibb and Andy Gibb. Barry was twelve years older than Andy, gave him his first guitar and wrote or co-wrote most of his hits, including his first three American number ones. Barry said the two of them were almost like twins, with the same voice and interests. After Andy died in 1988 Barry called it the saddest moment of his life, and years later he still felt guilty for pushing his little brother into show business.[1] [2]

Maurice Gibb and John Lennon. Maurice was a devoted Beatles fan and copied Paul McCartney's bass playing. When Stigwood introduced him to John Lennon at the Speakeasy club in 1967, Lennon's reply was so cocky that Maurice told him where to go, and Lennon liked him for it. Lennon introduced him to scotch and coke, the drink that fuelled years of alcoholism, and Maurice later played a guitar Lennon had given him on a Bee Gees song.[1] [2]

Bee Gees and Arif Mardin. The Atlantic Records producer took over the Bee Gees when their career had stalled and steered them from lush ballads to rhythm and blues on Mr. Natural and Main Course. Maurice said Mardin shoved them off the ballad track and onto the road to hits. When Stigwood moved his label away from Atlantic in 1976 they lost him, but Mardin returned to produce their 1987 comeback album E.S.P.[1] [2] [3]

Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand. Streisand asked Barry to write for her in 1980, and he ended up writing the whole album Guilty, producing it and singing two duets with her. Barry said he was terrified when the offer came, but the record sold around fifteen million copies and became her biggest. They teamed up again for the sequel, Guilty Pleasures, in 2005, and Barry has called working with her special.[1] [2] [3]

Barry Gibb and Michael Jackson. Barry and Michael Jackson became close friends. Jackson was godfather to one of Barry's sons, stayed at his Miami house, co-wrote with him and attended Maurice's funeral in 2003. Barry said they would sit around writing songs and drinking wine, and that Jackson lived upstairs for a while before his trial. Barry also told the Guardian he once had to politely ask Jackson to leave because he could not get any work done.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robin Gibb and Dwina Gibb. Robin married the artist and writer Dwina Murphy in 1985, and they had a son, Robin John. Dwina, a self described druid, said they had an open marriage built on a certain kind of freedom. Robin began a long affair with their housekeeper, Claire Yang, in 2001 and had a daughter with her in 2008. Dwina said afterwards that despite it all, she and Robin were always dedicated to each other.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Bee Gees

• Barry's unusual guitar sound comes from an open tuning a neighbour taught him when he was about nine. After getting a guitar for his ninth birthday, Barry learned an open tuning from a neighbour who had come back from Hawaii, and he never changed. Maurice said that mixing Barry's tuning with his own conventional one gave early hits like New York Mining Disaster 1941 a sound other players struggled to copy.[1]
• The ship that took the Gibbs to Australia in 1958 also carried Kylie Minogue's parents. The Gibb family sailed from Southampton on the Fairsea in August 1958 under an assisted migration scheme. Also on board were the future parents of Kylie Minogue and Red Symons, later guitarist in the Australian band Skyhooks.[1]
• In 1962 the young Bee Gees were chosen as a support act for Chubby Checker at Sydney Stadium. Long before they were famous abroad, the brothers were picked to open for the American twist star Chubby Checker when he played Sydney Stadium in 1962.[1]
• Ossie Byrne, who produced their first hits, ran his studio from behind a butcher's shop. Byrne lost an eye serving in the war, then built a small studio in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville. He gave the Bee Gees almost unlimited free studio time in 1966. When he died in 1983, they dedicated their 1987 album E.S.P. to him.[1]
• Colin Petersen was a child film star in Britain before he ever joined the Bee Gees. As a nine year old he starred in the film Smiley with Sir Ralph Richardson, and in 1957 he was voted one of the biggest stars at the British box office. His mother ended his acting career so he could focus on school.[1]
• Vince Melouney's Such a Shame is the only song on a Bee Gees album not written by a Gibb. The guitarist wrote and sang Such a Shame on the British version of the 1968 album Idea. In America it was replaced by I've Gotta Get a Message to You.[1] [2]
• Massachusetts was the second record ever played on BBC Radio 1. When the station launched in 1967, the first record played was The Move's Flowers in the Rain and the second was the Bee Gees' Massachusetts. It later became the first number one by a non Japanese artist on Japan's Oricon chart.[1]
• Massachusetts was originally meant for the Australian group the Seekers. The brothers could not get the song to the Seekers, so they recorded it themselves. When the Seekers' singer Judith Durham later learned this from Maurice, her group recorded it in 2003 as a tribute after his death.[1]
• A fan chained herself to Buckingham Palace to stop two Bee Gees being deported. In August 1967, when Colin Petersen and Vince Melouney faced deportation over visa errors, fans protested at the Prime Minister's cottage and one fan handcuffed herself to the palace. The two musicians were allowed to stay.[1] [2]
• Robin said I Started a Joke was inspired by the drone of an aeroplane's engines. Robin said the melody came to him aboard a four engine propeller plane, where the droning began to sound like a church choir. He then playfully admitted that parts of his colourful account were made up.[1]
• In 1968 Barry was fined twenty five pounds after chasing a stalker with an unlicensed pistol. Barry was arrested in London for confronting a stalker at his front door with an unlicensed thirty eight. The judge fined him and joked that the only other thing Barry had done wrong was wear a white suit to court.[1]
• Maurice once sang on a record that fans mistook for a lost Beatles song. With a studio group called the Fut, Maurice sang Have You Heard the Word in an impression of John Lennon. Beatles fans took it for an unreleased Beatles track, and in 1985 Yoko Ono tried to register it as a Lennon composition.[1]
• Jive Talkin' began life with the working title Drive Talking. The rhythm came from the sound of their car crossing the Julia Tuttle Causeway to Criteria Studios. Arif Mardin then explained that jive talking meant telling lies, so the brothers reshaped the lyric around that idea.[1] [2]
• Stephen Stills played percussion on You Should Be Dancing. Stills was recording down the hall at Criteria Studios with Neil Young in 1976 and added percussion to the Bee Gees' first falsetto chart topper.[1]
• The drummer credited on Stayin' Alive, Bernard Lupe, never existed. Dennis Bryon had to leave the sessions when his mother died, so the producers looped two bars of his drumming from Night Fever. They credited the fictional Bernard Lupe, and for a while people tried to hire him.[1] [2]
• The string intro of Night Fever grew out of Blue Weaver playing Theme from A Summer Place. Weaver was trying out a disco version of Percy Faith's old hit on a string synthesiser when Barry walked in, heard it, and told him that what he was playing was actually something new.[1] [2]
• Too Much Heaven stacks twenty seven separate vocal tracks. The song has nine layers of three part harmony, eighteen sung by Barry alone and nine by all three brothers together. All of its publishing royalties went to UNICEF.[1] [2]
• The explosion in Tragedy is Barry blowing air into a microphone. Co-producer Karl Richardson said they mixed Barry's voice going into a dynamic microphone with low notes held on a grand piano, passed through a new effects box, to create the blast.[1]
• The Bee Gees' Living Eyes was the first compact disc ever played in public. The 1981 album was used when the BBC programme Tomorrow's World showed the new CD format to viewers.[1]
• Robin sang a song for Oscar the Grouch on the 1978 album Sesame Street Fever. At the peak of Fever mania, Robin sang the title track, a song called Trash for Oscar the Grouch, and chatted with Cookie Monster at the start of C Is for Cookie.[1]
• Barry once bought Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash's old home in Tennessee. He bought the Hendersonville house in 2006, planning a songwriting retreat, but it burned down in April 2007 during renovation. He later built a new house there and sold the property in 2014.[1]
• Barry said the melody of You Win Again came to him in a dream. Maurice then created the song's pounding drum machine sounds in his garage. The 1987 single kept George Michael's Faith from reaching number one in Britain.[1]
• As a young director, Ridley Scott was once lined up to make a medieval film starring the Bee Gees. According to Deadline, Stigwood put Scott on a film called Castle Accident starring the three brothers. It never happened, and nearly fifty years later Scott was reported to be in talks to direct their biopic.[1]
• Barry says he met John Lennon's back rather than his face. At London's Speakeasy club in 1967, Pete Townshend introduced Barry to Lennon, who said hello without bothering to turn around.[1] [2]
• Barry says Maurice owned one Rolls Royce, not the six he claimed. In archive footage Maurice boasted of owning six Rolls Royces by the age of twenty one. Barry told the Guardian his brother was the master of exaggeration.[1]
• With Greenfields in 2021 Barry became the oldest artist to top Australia's album chart. He was seventy four when his album of Bee Gees songs recast as country duets reached number one on the ARIA chart.[1] [2]
• Nat Kipner, their first Australian label boss, handed back their contract when they left for England. Kipner said the brothers asked him to come to Britain, but he had a business in Australia, so he gave them their contract back. He later joked that it was one of the dumb things he had done.[1] [2]
• Two of the Bee Gees' former drummers died four days apart in November 2024. Dennis Bryon, drummer on Saturday Night Fever, died in Nashville on the fourteenth of November 2024, and Colin Petersen of the sixties line up died on the eighteenth.[1] [2]
• Stayin' Alive is used to teach the correct rhythm for CPR chest compressions. At about one hundred and three beats per minute, the song sits in the recommended range. The American Heart Association used it in a training campaign, and Barry said something good comes out of everything.[1] [2]
• In the late nineties the Bee Gees walked out halfway through a British chat show interview. After host Clive Anderson made repeated digs at them and their music on his BBC show, the brothers got up and left. The Guardian says Barry led the walkout.[1] [2]
• Before Fever, the Bee Gees' father Hugh still ran their stage lights. Rolling Stone reported in 1977 that the family atmosphere at Stigwood's company was so strong that Hugh Gibb was still handling the group's lighting.[1]
• The Gibbs once wrote three future number one hits in a single day. During a break from filming Sgt. Pepper, the brothers wrote Too Much Heaven and Tragedy in an afternoon, then Andy's Shadow Dancing that evening. All three reached number one in America.[1] [2] [3]
• When Robin died, his son played I Started a Joke on his phone and laid it on his chest. Robin John Gibb said it was the first moment he broke down, and that the song and its lyrics felt perfect for that moment.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.