Monocled Alchemist

By Barry Gibb | The most fabulous Bee Gee of them all tells the story, from the beginning, of the group whose success has astonished the pop world

Article published in RAVE magazine, February 1968

The Bee Gees’ Life Story! | Talking to the brothers Gibb is like talking to one. They might just as well be triplets, for their minds are a trinity, three in one and one in three. Barry is the oldest, but he by no means dictates to the younger twins, Robin and Maurice.

The Bee Gees‘ story really begins on September 1st, 1947 at Douglas, Isle Of Man, when one Barry Gibb made his entrance. Two years later, on December 22nd, Robin and Maurice followed. Maurice swears he remembers the occasion well!

From Douglas the Gibb family moved to the less-than-palatial back-streets of Manchester, not thirty miles from the Beatles, and it was here that the brothers discovered their interest in music. Here Barry (assisted by his younger dynamic duo) unfolds a tale of rags to riches, a heart-warming saga of poverty overcome (and other film-makers’ clichés).

“It all began in 1956. I was on my bike going down Buckingham Road, Manchester (Chorlton-cum-Hardy really). A boy called Paul Frost, another called Kenny Horrocks and another called Nicholas were running after me with the twins.

We were joking about kids miming to records at the local theatre before the matinee started on Saturday morning. The kids used to mime to Elvis Presley records with plastic guitars. I suggested that we did it with an Everly Brothers’ song. It was just nearing Christmas. We asked the manager of the theatre and he said yes. We decided to do it the week after Christmas.

The Bee Gees’ Life Story!

For Christmas the twins got toy banjos, I got a real Spanish guitar and our sister got the Everly Brothers‘ record ‘Wake Up Little Susie’.

“The great day came round and all of us, including Kenny and Paul, went down to the theatre at ten o’clock. I was clutching the record. We were going up the steps outside when I dropped the record and smashed it.

We said ‘What are we going to do now? No record, no miming,’ One of us said, ‘If we haven’t got the record then we’ll really sing!’ The thought was unimaginable! “Anyway we did, and it was awful. The manager gave us a shilling each and told us to come back next week.

The next time we got ourselves more organised. Us three brothers did the singing while the other two moved about clapping their hands. We did songs like ‘I Love You Baby’, ‘Diana’ and ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and found ourselves harmonising naturally. We got our picture in the Manchester Evening News the following week! There it was, a picture of Wee Johnny Hayes And The Blue Cats (we’d changed it from the Rattle-snakes!).

Small Fame

“We played in and around Manchester for about a year. We were known well there, but nowhere else. We started writing our own songs. The first one was called ‘Turtle Dove’, the next ‘Let Me Love You’. By the time we left England we’d written about fifty songs, but we forget about those now!

“At the end of 1958 we left for Brisbane, Australia. We sang on the ship and called ourselves the Gibb Brothers. When we got to Australia we played at a speedway stadium for the pennies people threw to us. While we were singing between races a driver noticed us who was a very good friend of Brisbane’s number one disc-jockey, Bill Gates.

“At about this time we decided to change our name to the B-Gs, be-cause initials were ‘in’, like dj. A year later, about nine years ago, we changed to Bee Gees. It was because of Barry Gibb, Bill Gates and a fellow called Bill Good, who all shared the same initials.

“Bill Gates liked our singing and recorded ‘Let Me Love You’, which he bashed across the air in Brisbane and which became very popular. People kept requesting it and wondering where it could be bought, which was funny because there was only that one copy that Bill had made himself. He played it every day on the programme.

Hard Times

“All we wanted to do was sing. We’d never had any other job. We used to organise little concert parties for our friends. Times were pretty hard then because our dad was a photographer, travelling around the country.

“All the while our recordings were being played over the air and quite a demand started. Soon the local television studios started ‘phoning and saying, ‘Loved that song. Will you come and do it on the show?’

We were on all the local television shows and were eventually given our own show called ‘The Bee Gees’ Half Hour’, which later ran to an hour a week! We used to do all this Monkees-type comedy stuff, with special guests each week.

Dad thought up the idea of the show (he was managing us then, until we left Australia). We were in such demand, but after a year or so the child welfare people stepped in and had our show reduced to once a month. Naturally it lost ground and was eventually killed.

First Break

“We moved to a place called Surfers’ Paradise, which is an Australian-style Honolulu, an incredible place where it’s hot all the time. We worked in a night-club there for eighteen months. I was about fourteen and the twins were twelve.

While we were playing, a guy from Sydney came up and said we were great and that we’d make a fortune working in the Sydney clubs. So off we went. “In Sydney we met this fellow called Col Joy, who was a very big cat, a huge teenage idol at the time.

He’d apparently seen us working in the club at Surfers’ Paradise. We were shivering like leaves because he was such a big star! He took us to Festival Records, and the same day we signed a five year contract with them and made our first record!

“We were managed by Col’s brother Kevin Jacobson, who also managed Col. He was a very big and well-known manager at the time. We played in clubs and on television shows, and even did a pantomime. ‘The Battle Of The Blue And Grey’ was our first disc, but the flip-side, ‘Three Kisses Of Love’, got more plays than any other and went to about number three in the Charts.

The Bee Gees’ Life Story!

Col was always number one! Then all of a sudden, bang! The Beatles started happening! It changed our whole attitude towards show business. Col fell flat as a tack. Nothing happened to him after the Beatles arrived!

“We were in Tasmania when their record ‘Love Me Do’ was released. It never got a scrap of air play, but we loved it. The flip-side, ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, did get lots of plays. We thought ‘The Beatles! What a stupid name!’

“People were playing our records and the Beatles’ and found that we sounded very similar, so we were banned right off the air! If Australia gets someone good from overseas they’d rather push their own artistes out. Everywhere we went we saw notices saying we were ‘Australia’s Beatles!’

“There was only one dj., called John Laws, who would stick up for us and play our records. He said that although we sounded ‘Beatley’, we had been there before the Beatles. But the public just didn’t want to know. We had a very bad time. Every show we did they shouted ‘Get off Beane imitators!’

We couldn’t wait to get back to England again! We thought, if they’re going to slam us in the face, we’d rather get out. “Before we left one of our records did go up the Charts. ‘Spicks And Specks’ got to number one, and we thought that then was the time to go. We didn’t want to tell anybody, we just wanted to leave. And we left.

We got all sorts of letters asking us to go back, but we said we’d rather flop here than in Australia.

To England!

“Previously we’d sent copies of our records over to Brian Epstein. We didn’t know at the time that Brian didn’t handle that side of the business. They were passed to Robert Stigwood instead. He played them and liked them. He had our date of arrival in England and tried for days to contact us, but couldn’t find us.

We tried every agency in the book but none of them wanted to know. At last Robert contacted us and on the Friday of our first week in England we signed a contract with NEMS and Robert Stigwood, who we are now with. Robert’s an Australian, but we’d never even heard of him when we were there. It was purely coincidental.

When we asked him where he came from and he said ‘Adelaide’ we said ‘Adelaide’s beautiful,’ After we’d signed the contract and had a glass of champagne we said ‘Adelaide stinks!”

From that day the partnership of Robert Stigwood and the Bee Gees has been phenomenally successful. Having been a three-piece so long, the Gibb brothers decided to broaden their sound by bringing in with them two of their old friends—Colin Petersen, a former child star in “Smiley” and “Cry From The Streets”, and guitarist Vince Melouney.

New members

Both Col and Vince had come independently to England, and were trying, with a marked lack of success, to make an impression. Both were extremely pleased to get calls from the Bee Gees suggesting that they join the group.

And so their story goes on, with each new release a triumph for them. The Bee Gees have already been in show business longer than most of the stars in the Top Ten put together. They’ve done everything from television to panto and are still working, working, working for greater success than they have now.

“We haven’t made it even now,” they say. “The only way to get to the top is to work day and night.”

They’ll make it!

The Bee Gees previously in RAVE talking to Alan Freeman.