The Bee Gees once made waves in the 70s with vibrant disco songs like Staying Alive, You Should Be Dancing, Tragedy… However, now, everything is just a golden memory when the Gibb family band only has one member left, the eldest brother Barry Gibb. The success of this band also goes hand in hand with the tragedies of its members.
Glorious achievements
Bee Gees is an abbreviation for Brothers Gibb, meaning the Gibb brothers. This family band consists of 3 biological brothers: Barry (born in 1946) and twins Robin and Maurice Gibb (both born in 1949). Born on the Isle of Man – an island between England and Ireland, the Gibb brothers followed their family to Australia to settle down when they were young. Starting their singing career in 1958, the three brothers released their first album in 1963.
Coming to London (England) to start a career in 1967, the group made a strong impression with the song To love somebody and for 2 consecutive years reigned at the top with a series of songs such as Holiday, Massachusetts, Words and I started a Joke. Bee Gees music is a blend of pop, soul, disco and sweet soft rock.
Bee Gees has 2 main vocalists, in which the second brother Robin is considered to have a very classy voice, clear vibrato. With a deep and wide range, Robin can vibrate his voice fully, vibrate strongly at the highest notes without running out of breath.
Thanks to vocal training techniques, Robin’s voice is more airy and soaring, singing lead or backing vocals well. He also has a very skillful and catchy way of enunciating words. However, because Robin was not as good-looking as his older brother Barry, on the record covers, Robin was rarely placed in the middle while Barry was pushed to the front, becoming the center of the group. In return, Barry was talented in writing lyrics and composing melodies.
In addition to being good at writing lyrics like his older brother, the youngest brother Maurice was also more knowledgeable about music theory and knew how to play many instruments. Therefore, he often arranged the arrangements, divided the chorus, and then applied harmony to highlight the solo or choral parts. Each person had their own style, but it can be said that the Bee Gees were a monolithic entity, tightly intertwined, and difficult to separate. The proof is that Robin and Barry had a period of solo singing but were not as successful as the group’s period of singing together.
During their brilliant development period in England, the Bee Gees’ hit songs were often recorded by Robin as the lead singer. A few years later, when the disco movement became popular, Barry’s split-voice singing style was fully utilized, and the group’s backing vocals were fully developed, both sophisticated and complex, alternating the main vocals with the backing vocals, juggling very well. All these factors resonated with the sweet melodies, the layered harmonies created the Bee Gees phenomenon. Many people consider this to be the best trio of all time.
From 1974-1975 onwards, the Bee Gees group shifted from pop music to rock music (with Jive Talking). The Bee Gees were also very successful in composing music for movies. They not only set records for the number of records sold but also created a standard in the way of composing melodies. With this band, the level of disco music was also raised to a new level, and the backing vocals were raised to the level of art, with typical examples such as extremely romantic love songs such as How deep is your love or Too much heaven.
In the late 1970s, the Bee Gees reigned supreme in the international music scene. They were the first and only group to have five songs in the Top 10 at the same time thanks to the album they composed for the film Saturday Night Fever released in 1977. They were also the best-selling band for three consecutive years from 1977 to 1980.
From the 1980s onwards, the Bee Gees were also quite successful with composing for many other famous artists, including Barbra Streisand with Woman in Love, Diana Ross with Chain Reaction or more recently Celine Dion with Immortality. By the late 1980s, the group’s career began to decline, although they quickly turned to pop-rock, returning to light music in writing love songs…
The tragedy of being famous too soon
Blooming at the same time as The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Stones; Although they composed great hits, the Bee Gees failed to make a breakthrough like other bands because they had to maintain a fun, relaxed family image in front of the crowd. Above all, they did not have a spiritual leader, causing their image to fade in front of the crowd.
The Gibb trio had ballads for life, with immortal melodies. In their half-century singing career, the Bee Gees won 9 Grammy Awards, including 3 career achievements and 6 awards for best pop album and vocal in 1978-1979. The band also sold about 240 million records worldwide, including studio albums, live music and film soundtracks.
However, the group’s success also came with tragedy. Growing up in poverty in the Australian city of Brisbane, Barry once confided: “We were a poor family. We had to rent 20 houses across Australia, my father couldn’t pay the rent so the family always had to leave at midnight with a pile of luggage. We had to earn money to survive.”
After leaving Australia for England, the group’s career took off like a kite. The halo that came after a series of difficult childhood days really overwhelmed the 3 brothers. Maurice owned 6 Rolls-Royces at the age of 21. However, fame had to be exchanged for personal tragedies. Maurice became an alcoholic at a very young age, Robin was also addicted to amphetamine stimulants.
Another brother in the family, Andy, also died of cocaine addiction at the age of 30. Instead of joining the Bee Gees, Andy went solo and relied on the reputation of his brothers. Barry Gibb was also involved in drugs. Luckier than his brothers, Barry’s partner Linda, a former Miss Edinburgh, helped him overcome his addiction. “I would bring drugs into the house and end up throwing them down the toilet. She never wanted me to go down that rabbit hole. I could have been like my brothers, but I was really lucky,” he once said.
The Bee Gees’ reputation was almost completely lost after Maurice died of a heart attack in 2003. The bad news continued when Robin Gibb was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2011 at the age of 61 and died a year later. The band’s career was effectively over.