Are the Bee Gees underrated? Such is the premise of Bob Stanley’s loving biography of the brothers Gibb. I’m not totally satisfied that it’s attainable to be underrated in case you’ve bought greater than 220 million information worldwide, scored dozens of traditional hits (together with 9 US Quantity Ones), and are nonetheless a part of the musical cloth over 20 years because you ceased operations. Clearly lots of people price the Bee Gees very extremely – Stanley amongst them.
However what Stanley is basically grappling with in Bee Gees: Kids of the World is a perceived lack of respect for the group’s quixotic skills, signified by an absence of the sort of detailed essential assessments showered on different artists of comparable stature. You might inventory libraries with books about The Beatles, however that is the primary try to position the work of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb below a severe essential highlight.
“The Bee Gees didn’t slot in. They by no means actually made sense,” writes Stanley, who views them as pop’s best misfits, a band whom everybody knew however no-one understood. Himself a songwriter with the indie-pop combo Saint Etienne, Stanley has change into an excellent historian of Twentieth-century well-liked music, writing 2013’s Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Trendy Pop and final yr’s Let’s Do It: The Beginning of Pop Music, encyclopaedic tomes that provide counter-narratives to the notion that rock has been the definitive sound of our instances.
Stanley was 10 years previous when, in 1975, he was given a C-90 cassette of The Better of the Bee Gees by an uncle. “What precisely did ‘Bee Gees’ imply?” he remembers questioning, considering a photograph of an unsmiling trio on a mustard-coloured cowl. “It gave the impression of somebody was attempting to say ‘Seaside Boys’, however they’d misplaced the desire midway via.” What he found inside was “ingenious, shape-shifting writers of death-haunted melodies, with voices that gave the impression of nobody else. They had been deeply odd, and fairly great.”
One issue of considering the Bee Gees’ intensive oeuvre – B for ‘Brothers’, G for ‘Gibb’ – is the sheer size and peculiarity of a profession that got here to embody doo-wop, people, nation, whimsy, psychedelia, mild classical, soul, disco and clattering synth-pop, together with soundtracks, solo albums, collaborations and varied productions for different artists created in varied combos.
