14 MusicWeek 28.06.13 THE BIG INTERVIEW BARRY GIBB
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something or finding a keyboard with 50 sounds on it. It’s no longer that. For me it’s, “Play the song and give me the best take” so I’ve come back full circle.
Were you and Robin planning to write together again and record again? The past few years Robin really wanted to be a solo artist and we were in fact very different people. We were brothers and the same with Mo and Andy. We were very much alike, but we were all very different, too. We all had to come to terms with that in our lives. Robin was very much – I don’t know what the right word is – he had different causes and different reasons for doing what he did and I’m different, too, in that way. I’m not so driven to anything but music and so that was the difference between us. I think it would have been wonderful, but Robin was on a different aeroplane than me.
That’s what made it special because those different ingredients came together to produce something unique. Absolutely. At the right time in our lives we could not have been closer. I really miss [Robin]. I miss the profound humour, his outlook on life was incredibly funny, like Spike Milligan it was incredibly Goonish and hysterical, but a very serious man, too. Maurice was very external. If this was the Marx Brothers Maurice would be the guy who didn’t say much – Harpo – but could play different instruments and did everything from a visual point of view and Robin was very verbal. So there all these little differences and at the right moment and the right time we loved each other dearly and we could not have been closer. Fame is what changes things for everybody, for every group.
There are so many remarkable things about the Bee Gees’ career, but one that stands out for me is that it was never an easy ride. There were so many chapters in the story where it’s all going great and suddenly there’s an obstacle in the road. There’s a fucking brick wall!
ABOVE Lonely Days: Barry Gibb will play his first- ever solo UK dates this autumn
“I got to record a song with Michael [Jackson] a few months before that court case. He was staying with us and we were very close. We would get drunk together. It was that kind of relationship” BARRY GIBB
The amazing thing then is you get over the obstacle and it becomes great again and then there’s another obstacle. That in itself is life. We couldn’t be The Beatles. We couldn’t be Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley or Sinatra. These people, it seems they’re going to be famous no matter what and for us it was like we came out of the Australian pop scene before The Beatles. We were in that grassroots area in Australia that could only listen to American records and didn’t hear much of British records, so we got all kinds of influences that you might not get in England and those are the things that made us what we were. We fell in love with The Hollies and we fell in love with The Fortunes and Go Now [The Moody Blues]. These were amazing records. I Feel Fine, A Hard Day’s Night – these were the records that fired us up. The Hollies I’m Alive and what followed from all those records is what drove us to England. It was all these things that filled us up as kids and made us think that we could do it, too.
One of those big obstacles you had was towards the end of the Seventies and the early Eighties with the Disco Sucks campaign in America. If that hadn’t occurred what do you think would have happened? Would you have just carried on making Bee Gees albums? I don’t even know how to answer that because you tend to fall into what’s going on around you in the moment. When we came out of about 1972 there was really no interest in us, long before what you
would call disco. We couldn’t get on the radio at that point so in 1972 we were out of vogue so we thought, “Well maybe that’s it. Everyone gets five years and that was it. Maybe we’ll go back to Australia.” We didn’t know where we were going so by the time we met Arif Mardin and we did the album Main Course we decided to make a record in America because we loved American music and Eric Clapton said, “Why don’t you rent that house 461?” and the rest has its own course.
There was Jive Talkin’ and off it went. And off it went and it went into the falsetto thing and the love of The Delfonics and The Stylistics and that environment that took us from ’75 up to around ’79. Then came the idea of working with other people, like Barbra [Streisand]. It’s just a path. You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. You just don’t and you play off whatever happens.
We all know those famous collaborations you did in that period. Were there any people you came close to working with or for whatever reason it didn’t quite work out? I got to record a song with Michael [Jackson] a few months before that court case. He was staying with us for a week or two and we were very close. We would get drunk together. It was that kind of relationship. We would sit around and sing and write and that had potential of becoming something amazing, but his head just wasn’t there and he had an awful lot of crisis and stress going on in in his life. That was something that could have panned out, but the song It’s All In Your Name I’ll always remember. We never got to make the actual record. We made the demo.
Are there any contemporary acts that you look at and think, “I’d like to work with them”? I would love to work with Dave Grohl. I love the Foo Fighters. I love Coldplay and Chris Martin. He’s an inspiration for me. I would love to work
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