![]() ![]() It mattered little that Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of their first American distributor, Atlantic Records, was bowled away by their "most beautiful voices, unlike anything I had ever heard: beautiful clarity and a lot of feeling. As their first hits began to stack up in the mid-to-late 1960s, Barry was undoubtedly cast as the pin-up leader of the group, even though Robin was just as prolific a writer and often the lead singer. Robin was only 16 at the time - although it didn't take long for the rivalry to coalesce into something more troubling. There was no doubt who was in charge here - not least because the band was then called Barry Gibb and The Bee Gees. It was somehow telling that, after their family - brothers Andy, Robin and Maurice and sister Lesley - emigrated from Manchester to Australia in the late 1950s, their first Australian record was somewhat pointedly called The Bee Gees Sing And Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs. Thankfully, the intense fraternal rivalry which characterised the power struggle in the band had dissipated by Robin's death but, in a way, it was crucial to their success: Robin believed it actually spurred Barry on in their glory years. Robin and I love each other, we still love making music together."Īll of which makes Barry Gibb's status as the last remaining Bee Gee - Robin's twin brother Maurice died in 2003 - all the more sad. "We couldn't do a job when someone else was in the room. "Other people can't get in there, it's our own little world," he said of their songwriting process. the hits kept coming.īut as Barry said himself in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2009, none of this would have been possible without his little brother Robin, who died this week. ![]() Jive Talkin', How Deep Is Your Love, Stayin' Alive, Night Fever. Barry began singing in his distinctive falsetto and, combining disco's funky, dance-floor-orientated sounds with the emotional poise of their classic pop songwriting, they produced the biggest-selling album of the time within just two years. we needed something new," he once told The New Yorker.Įven Barry could not have foreseen the sheer magnitude of what he and brothers Maurice and Robin would achieve with their change of direction. "We were fairly dead in the water at that point. The Bee Gees hadn't had a top 20 album in six years, and just one single had tickled the higher reaches of the charts. Though he could always look back on chart toppers such as Massachusetts and How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, the magic seemed to be running out. In early 1975, Barry Gibb, songwriter extraordinaire for The Bee Gees, was worried. ![]()
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