BEE GEES: Children Of The World by Bob Stanley

“The Bee Gees didn’t fit in,” observes Bob Stanley at the start of Children Of The World, his new biography of the Gibb brothers. He’s quite right. In my own dealings with them for Melody Maker in the first half of the seventies I felt they were removed from the mainstream of pop life, in a parallel world but somehow apart, somehow cloistered by their familiarity with one another. This created within them an ‘us against the world’ attitude which, coupled with an adolescent, slightly naïve, arrogance, meant they would never be fashionable, never cool, never given the respect their hit-making track record deserved. “In spite of their great success, they seemed somehow easy to mock,” writes Stanley, drawing attention to a lack of self-awareness that invited cynicism, especially from music press staffers who enjoyed bursting balloons.   

    Bob Stanley knows his pop. A founder member of St Etienne and a dedicated convert to all things indie, he writes about music with the air of someone unafraid to offer judgements unlikely to sit well with accepted theory, ever keen to challenge, ever keen to seek out an undiscovered gem. To write a substantial book about The Bee Gees that analyses their music admiringly, most especially dozens of songs that weren’t hits, might be considered courageous – but for me to say that is to slip into the trap that Stanley identifies early in his book, the back-handed compliment, the suggestion that whatever good reviews the Bee Gees received were “distant”. “No other group has had to consistently defend themselves, their approach and their music,” he writes.

    Children Of The World does its best to rectify this. Stanley is clearly a fan but is unafraid to investigate the fault lines in a musical career that began on a Manchester stage in 1957 when Barry was 11 and twins Robin and Maurice eight, and continued until 2003 when Maurice’s death brought the curtain down. In between times they sold more than 250 million records in all kinds of styles, wrote numerous hits for others, filled the world’s biggest stadia on the road and, until Michael Jackson’s Thriller, were the principal contributors to world’ best-selling LP, the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever.

    In 2001 I commissioned and edited Tales of The Brothers Gibb, a 730-page doorstopper whose three authors investigated every facet of the Gibb family to produce what I thought was the definitive Bee Gees book that couldn’t be bettered. What it lacked, however, was the critical nous that Stanley brings to Children Of The World, and also his literary ability to compress the endlessly fascinating biographical details of the Gibb’s life into a book just over half that length. Furthermore, his understanding of the bigger picture enables him to place The Bee Gees into context, comparing their fate with fellow-travellers, to which end he opens each chapter with the top ten for that particular moment, and to draw judicious comparisons with that other group of three brothers, The Beach Boys. 

    We follow the Gibb family from extreme poverty – Barry, Maurice and Robin really were juvenile delinquents – to unimagined wealth that enabled them to sue manager Robert Stigwood for $200 million in 1980, only to be countersued for $300 million. (It was settled out of court.) We learn about their nomadic early life, from Manchester – where the family often did a midnight flight to avoid the rent man – to the Isle of Man to Australia and back to the UK, to London, thence to LA and finally Miami. We learn about their lack of education – Maurice and Robin left school at 13, as did tragic younger brother Andy – and how this contributed to the slightly disjointed lyrics in their songs, which – as with Abba – did them no harm at all. We learn about their brotherly intuition, how they were able to finish one another’s sentences, and the occasional fall outs, usually instigated by Robin’s stubborn diva tendencies, or Barry’s oppressive ‘big brother’ controlling manner, with Maurice often in the role of calming arbitrator. 

    But most of all we learn about their resilience, how they were able to mould their songs to the times, to pick themselves up and start again after setbacks and, most importantly, to fall back on their skills as songwriters to see them through periods when it looked like we’d seen the last of them. “We’re durable, persistent little buggers,” says Robin. 

    It’s an epic tale of highs and lows well told, not without the odd error but a book those slightly strange, deeply sensitive, immensely talented Gibb Brothers deserve. It contains 27 pages of discography but no photographs, for which I’d dock it one star, but this is no doubt due to financial constraints on the part of the publisher.