The Story of the Bee Gees

November 6, 2023
Music journalist Stanley (Let’s Do It!) aims to restore the “misfit” Bee Gees to “their rightful place at the very top of pop’s table” in this rewarding deep dive. “Inventive, shape-shifting, writers of death-haunted melodies, with voices that sounded like no one else,” the Bee Gees kicked off their career early, with English brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb recording their first single, “The Battle of the Blue and the Grey,” in 1963, when Barry was 15 and the twins just 13. After Vince Melouney and Colin Peterson joined the group, the Bee Gees climbed British charts in the late 1960s with such hits as “New York Mining Disaster 1941.” Still, they struggled to sustain their success until producer Arif Mardin repackaged their sound to emphasize Barry’s falsetto in the early 1970s, giving the music a sexier feel. In 1976, “You Should be Dancing” catapulted the group into the disco stratosphere, an ascendancy cemented by their inclusion on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977. With the group considered passé by the early 1980s, the Gibb brothers worked as producers and lyricists for such performers as Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick. The band reunited after younger brother Andy’s 1988 death and hit the charts again in the late 1980s and ’90s. Stanley meticulously investigates the chart-busting Bee Gees’ paradoxical “outsider status,” contending that it partly resulted from a “lack of worldliness” born of their “child-star upbringing,” and gives welcome due to their idiosyncratic lyrics and lush harmonies. The band’s devotees will celebrate this definitive biography.