If you’re mainly familiar with The Bee Gees as the 1970s-era superstars behind the blockbuster “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, there’s a shock that comes with first hearing the band’s wrenching and emotional earlier songs: “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” “I Started a Joke” or “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”
How did the group behind disco’s biggest bangers write some of the saddest songs ever?
“If you do listen to their catalog chronologically, you can join the dots,” says Bob Stanley, author of “The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World,” out now in stores from Pegasus Books. “[But] because there’s a five-year gap between ‘How Can You Mend a Broken Heart’ and ‘You Should Be Dancing,’ I think it’s quite hard to see how they could possibly be the same group.”
Stanley is a music journalist whose previous books include “Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music” and “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” as well as a DJ and co-founder of the long-running British indie pop group Saint Etienne. In his latest book, the U.K.-based author explores the lives and music of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb. Through an incredibly thorough examination of the brothers’ work, as well as the cultural climate and events surrounding their songwriting and recording, he makes sense of a band whose catalog reflects everything from psychedelic pop to country to funk.
“That’s one of the things that I love about them,” says Stanley. “They’re such huge music fans; they’re just absorbing what’s going on around them and then recreating it in their own style, which is quite distinctive.”
The Bee Grees are the subject of a 2024 biography by Bob Stanley entitled, “The Story of the Bee Gees: Children of the World.” (Courtesy of Pegasus)
Stanley notes that he’s been a fan of The Bee Gees for much of his life. He recalls hearing their songs on the K-Tel and Ronco compilations in his parents’ collection and receiving a tape with the band’s 1960s tunes from his uncle.
“The stuff I remember was the ‘60s stuff and the very melancholy stuff, which is really what hooks me and made me a fan,” he recalls. “Once I got into that, “Saturday Night Fever” came out soon after, so I lived through that in real-time.”
The Bee Gees, with their use of the Mellotron and early adoption of drum machines and loops, impacted the music that Stanley made as well. “Pete Wiggs from Saint Etienne was also a fan from way back,” he says. “We grew up together, so we always played each other things from when we were small kids.”
Stanley acknowledges that part of the impetus for writing this book was to both bring together the musicians’ personal stories with their music and to consider the albums that are often overlooked.
“There are plenty of albums that people almost never discuss, which I think are quite remarkable, especially the ones that didn’t sell so well,” he says.
While writing, Stanley listened to “Trafalgar,” the 1971 album that is home to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” alongside 11 other songs that are not as well remembered. He also listened to “Living Eyes,” which is perhaps best known as the ill-fated follow-up to the monster hit album “Spirits Having Flown.”
“It was an incredible fall from grace and it’s a lovely record; it just wasn’t what people wanted to hear in 1981,” Stanley says.
“The Story of The Bee Gees” benefits not just from Stanley’s longtime admiration for the band, but his knack for digging deep into their catalog.
In the acknowledgments, he thanks a friend who helped him obtain some of the band’s Australian 45s. “Finding the Australian singles and seeing how they would have sounded to someone putting them on in Brisbane in 1965 is a real thrill,” he says. “It does get you closer to how it would have felt to hear that record for the first time.”
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From the early singles to the biggest hits – as well as their solo efforts and the music of younger brother Andy Gibb – Stanley presents an eye-opening look into a prolific band who exuded a quiet influence across genres with their idiosyncratic style.
In the book, Stanley brings up a quote from Robin comparing the Gibb brothers to the Brontë sisters insofar as they created their own world. It’s a quote that’s reflected throughout the book.
“I was really pleased to have found that. They’re so much like that, especially with the early records, where they’re doing these character sketches of invented people,” says Stanley. “And the fact that they’re all different characters, like the Brontës as well,” he adds.
“It’s a very good parallel,” he says. “I was pleased that he said that because I hadn’t thought of it.”
