By Graham Reid of the New Zealand Herald
South Beach, Miami where tanned, bodies beautiful in stamp-sized bikinis parade the boardwalk, the sky is permablue and as you lie in the warm ocean watching the sun set over pastel art deco buildings you can hear the distant sound of Cuban
music wafting from a seaside bar in the humid night air.
Miami, USA. A great place for a holiday - and not bad if you have to work here either.
And just off Alton Road which skirts the western shore, is Middle Ear Studios, the improbably hi-tech workplace of the Bee Gees which they bought with their winnings off Saturday Night Fever and christened with the Barbra Streisand album Guilty in 1980.
It's now late afternoon on a typically warm Miami day but the Bee Gees - twins Maurice and Robin, and Barry - are sequestered inside Middle Ear working on their lucrative hobby again, a new album scheduled for February 2000.
Almost 10 years ago in Melbourne I met up with the Bee Gees for the first time, and they were much the same then: personable, enjoyed laughing at their own history and possessing a wickedly self-deprecating sense of humour - probably a necessary survival technique after a decade of derision following disco.
Despite astonishingly good albums such as Spirits Having Flown (which sold a paltry 20 million copies), writing and producing Barbra Streisand's Grammy-garnering Guilty, penning Islands in the Stream for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton (the biggest selling single in RCA history, and that in a record company which has Elvis) and much more besides, they were still living in the shadow of Saturday Night Fever and smarting from the backlash it's success brought.
After their first flush of Beatles-influenced pop in the 60s, black music - progressive r'n'b - has long been the Bee Gee's inspiration. They've always denied they were into disco ("that was Donna Summer," said Maurice sharply back then) and their thing was New York urban dance music.
Curiously however, this past five years we've witnessed black artists borrowing liberally from white acts: Puff Daddy liberated the chorus from the Police's I'll Be Watching You for I'll Be Missing You and the Bee Gees own Islands in the Stream which they wrote for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers has been reinvented as Ghetto Superstar by Pras Michel of the Fugees.
The Bee Gees, despite live shows which recount their past through hit after hit, are contemporary artists.
That said, the past looms large: 20th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever saw sales of the biggest selling soundtrack of all time rocket away again, the Bee Gees name was everywhere with the Grease revival (even though the sole connection was through Barry's penning of the title track) and three telefilms - the biographical Keppel Road and concerts One Night Only and unplugged Story Tellers - put the group back into living rooms across the western world.
In New Zealand their One Night Only was the biggest selling album last year.
Bee Gees statistics are daunting: they are in the top five of most successful recording artists of all time alongside the Beatles, McCartney, Elvis and Michael Jackson, have sold over 110 million albums, have had number one selling singles in the British charts in every decade since the 60s ...
And they were behind six top five singles last year: their own Alone, Stayin Alive covered by the Fugees, Ghetto Superstar, More than A Woman by 911, Tragedy by Steps and they wrote and sang on Celine Dion's Immortality.
A partial list of people who have covered Bee Gees songs makes jaw-dropping reading: Janis Joplin, Al Green, Diana Ross, Celine Dion, Elvis Presley, George Michael, Roberta Flack, Backstreet Boys, Luther Vandross, Rod Stewart ...
As far back as the early 60 Barry was giving his songs to others: he rechristened the band of his cousin Trevor Gordon The Marbles and wrote Only One Woman for them, and renamed Cheryl Gray as Samantha Sang and handed her the hit Love of a Woman.
All up there have been over 500 covers of Bee Gees songs.
And the thread which binds them together? Black music which the Bee Gees have taken into the mainstream.
Mainstream is the dirty word in pop'n'rock culture. Believe the critical reassessment of the past four decades and you'd think it was all the Velvet Underground, the year punk broke and The Grunge Wars.
While no one would deny the influence of the Velvet Underground or the Sex Pistols, it seems unfair to expunge the mainstream from the history books entirely. It's what people, not critics, were listening to.
And people have always listened to the Bee Gees.
Their debut public performance was at the Gaumont Theatre in Manchester in 1955.
From the Isle of Man to Manchester, to pre-teen and pubescent fame in Australia, to London in 67 and the New York Mining Disaster, to Fever and onwards ...
The Bee Gees story is one worthy of a miniseries. As indeed it will be next year.
The Bee Gees have a story to tell, and they seem happy and secure enough to chat, despite not needing to. Their concerts sell with little effort, their albums too - but ask for an interview and you get all three. First up to the plate is MAURICE:
I understand how busy you are and that you don't actually have to do this, so I'd like to thank you for making the time. And you are in the studio at the moment?
Oh, not all, good to talk to you. And yeah we're in the studio now and we've just started the new album, putting down the tracks and working out some ideas and it's coming along real good. We've got three down and we're going to continue when we come back from Australia and New Zealand to do the album from then on.
Which studio are you in?
It's our own studio called Middle Ear in South Beach Miami.
I've driven past the very place.
Oh, if you know the area and you're driving past ...
Right, I'll just drop in.
It's the area they've now done up and called South Beach, we christened it with the Barbra Streisand album Guilty in 1980.
And so you are now still writing for this new album, the one to come out in February 2000?
Yeah, we've got 11 ideas now we're working on and we're starting to cut the backtracks now.
I know you have lived in separate places do you guys phone each other like I would phone someone and say 'do you fancy getting together for a beer?' Do you call and say 'you fancy getting together and making another album?'
You hit the nail right on the head, that's exactly what we do. We're very fortunate, the beauty of Fever was to give us the assets to get our own studio so we could create when ever we wanted to and we actually went totally digital in 87 and we've just ordered the new console which will be here while we're in Australia. It'll be the hottest studio in Florida, amazing. We've kept up with everything that's going on and its's like our toy shop. It's where we come to relax. Our work is our hobby as well.
I remember the early days in Australia when we found this guy called Ossie Byrne and he had a converted butcher's shop for a studio and it was all reel to reel, and God did we have fun. It was like our toy shop too.
And that's where Spicks and Specks was recorded. (Laughs)
What a great song! I'm serious. I remember there was a greatest hits package that came out and it didn't have Spicks and Specks on it and I thought that a very northern hemisphere view of your career.
I love that song, when it came out they wanted to put it out with just a picture of my forefinger on the piano. (Laughs) I was learning the piano at the time and I just got that note going and thought, 'oh this is good.'
There was a Spin Records collection that came out last year, a double CD with liner notes by Glenn A Baker. I know Bruce Springsteen went to court recently to stop the release of his very early stuff, were you a bit like that with the Spin one? Or were you happy to see it out there?
Funnily enough some of the stuff was actually backtracks from shows like Sing Sing Sing which were Johnny O'Keefe shows and were done by the ATV orchestra or an orchestra. So we got hold of the tape, apparently Ossie Byrne got hold of the tape and it has songs like Somewhere and You're Nobody Until Somebody Loves You.
You know, in Australia if you asked for strings on your record it was like asking for death. In those days the industry was so young you couldn't ask for string players - so out would come the Farfisa organ. God I used to love that thing!
Anyway what I was saying ... when those tapes arrived we just used to sing on them, some of those tapes weren't made for records except a bunch which came out as Rare Precious and Beautiful with butterflies on the front, and it's basically those albums which came out in the late 60s all compiled onto two CDs. I think some were lost, but they were ones we did for tv shows.
It was crazy, you'd go to Festival [studios] and do the songs then go to the Sing Sing Sing show and mime to them and you never see the songs again. And that's the stuff that's ended up on CD.
But you didn't mind at all, because they are real juvenilia?
Not really, what we loved about it was listening to all the old songs again. Robin was 12 years old and he's going [in a deep voice] 'somewhere, there's a place for us.' Jesus!
It sounds like a lot of fun but what you can hear on it is our growth from the Beatles to the Righteous Brothers to the Seekers type thing. There was a song called Follow the Wind which we wrote with the Seekers in mind. That was very folksy pop, the stuff was quite a retrospective and from my point of view I thought it was fascinating.
You said you wrote for the Seekers and I know you write for other people...
In those days they didn't know where we lived!
Could you write to order, say if Oasis came to you? I'm sure Noel Gallagher is a big fan but if he said 'write us a song' could you do that?
Funnily enough one of their favourite songs is off our second album, it's called Harry Braff. We know what the expression 'braff' means, don't we? So we wrote this song about a non-existent speedcar racer called Harry Fart. It was just one of the Australian expressions that you pick up and we were using so we used them in our songs. So I guess if we wrote something in that vein they'd probably have a ball with it.
When people do cover versions of your songs do you have right of refusal, if say Marilyn Manson came and said I want to do To Kill Somebody.
We'd say no. We would not have the songs desecrated in any way. Al Yankovic is going to do one but it's not a piss take. People have been sampling us for a long time now, Islands in the Stream made it to Ghetto Superstar, things like that. A lot of those things have come along but they're not done to take the piss, they are done out of respect, otherwise they wouldn't have done it if they didn't think it was good enough.
We're very fortunate to have been writers and the Backstreet Boys have got a new song we've just written for them. We wrote this song called Sacred Trust and it's on their new album.
It's right up their alley, we just imagined them doing it when we wrote it for them, just like we did when we wrote for Barbra, Kenny and Dolly for Islands in the Stream, we just imagined their voices because the voice is just another instrument.
We wanted to give them something where they'd never sold records before, get them out of their kind of field and to a wider audience. Like Barbra's Guilty album. She'd hardly ever sold albums in Europe and after Guilty came out it because the biggest selling album she'd ever had. And it broke her in Germany and Holland where she'd never normally sold.
And with Kenny and Dolly it crossed them right over to mainstream. We call that our Tie A Yellow Ribbon because everybody was bloody well performing it.
When I look at the history of pop, say a BBC series, it always seems to me there's whole other unwritten history. It wasn't all Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, or the year that punk broke, there are a whole bunch of other people, like yourselves, who never make it in, yet you are the ones who have created pop music for 30 years if we consider the definition to mean music which is popular.
You do see some people's different perceptions like in The History of Rock'n'Roll and how people perceive things. For instance the one particular group, and I don't mean this in a particularly bad way, but The Doors for instance have been made into some kind of huge cult thing and they were one of the worst bands I've ever heard. They were only known in America but they say they were a worldwide thing because the guy died young unfortunately because he had a very bad drug problem, as most bands did in those days.
But to put them on a pedestal because they were silly enough to do what they did - and not for the music? The most talented man in the band was the keyboard player, he wrote most of them and when poor old Jim couldn't make it to the stage, he took over. I saw them live and wasn't impressed at all, the same night I saw Jimi Hendrix and I was IMPRESSED. That was in the park in New York, Jimi just blew me away but I was terribly disappointed in the Doors, mind you he wasn't quite with us ...
Do you get miffed that you aren't into the written history of pop?
I must admit in the last three years though there has been unbelievable respect.
Four lifetime achievement awards, the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame ... all that in three months? We had no idea, you couldn't have planned it. And the respect we've had! Now all of a sudden people are recognising what you've just said, maybe in future versions of the history of rock'n'roll?
All I know is the people I've spoken to who've had a Fever in their career, like Thriller for Michael [Jackson] and Rumours for Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles for Hotel California, the people who've had these phenomenal albums which have stuck out as a moment in time, are not mentioned either, except for Michael obviously.
But it's people perception of who do the books, if they hate the disco period, they hate us. But we were doing records long before the disco period ...
And long after it would seem.
(Laughs) Exactly! But the actual respect is worth a lot more to us today whether they mention us or not, because you really can't get into that negativity of people. We never even think negatively now, life's too short for all that rubbish and we count our blessings.
People say success is its own reward but you live in the world where your success is measured by record sales and if something doesn't sell and you would want it to - as I'm sure you do - do you then consider that a failure or do you simply think, 'well, we didn't connect with an audience this time'?
I don't know any artists whose had the kind of success where everything they've done has been wonderful and tremendous. We didn't expect Fever to do what it was going to do, nobody did. Other record companies were pressing the damned thing to catch up with sales, that's how incredible it was. But nobody could have predicted that phenomenon, it was a low budget film and we were doing our new album anyway, Robert [Stigwood, the Bee Gees manager] had just nicked half of it and used it on the movie.
I will wind up and thank you for your time, but you say you have 13 working versions of songs? You have a fairly clear idea when you go in?
We'll spend a writing afternoon when we'll get together, or an evening, and if we're all in great moods it's wonderful, if one of us isn't, we don't write. We all become sort of one, if the song is done in the tempo we like that's the way it stays. The demo basically becomes the record, to use an old coining phrase!
But that's often true?
Sure, because the demo is the first thing you hear and the first thing you do is the best one. When we demo the written song we add to that, the colours or whatever it needs, that's what ends up as the finished CD.
Maurice, I should let you go to presumably write another hit.
Alright then. I've got this thing about the Titanic ... ah but it'll never sell.(Laughs)
Thank you for your time
Looking forward to seeing when we come down. I'll just put you on hold - or shall I just put the phone down?
Just put it down and I'll eavesdrop on all the bit in between.
Yeah you don't want to listen to the radio, it's all just rubbish.
Needless to say, and he would know this, the music piped into the phones around Middle Ear is Bee Gees music.
Continued...
Pictured: the Bee Gees.
By Graham Reid of the New Zealand Herald
South Beach, Miami where tanned, bodies beautiful in stamp-sized bikinis parade the boardwalk, the sky is permablue and as you lie in the warm ocean watching the sun set over pastel art deco buildings you can hear the distant sound of Cuban
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