THE STORY OF THE BEE GEES

A tribute to an epic yet underappreciated group in pop music history.

British music journalist Stanley, author of Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music, offers a comprehensive exploration of the Bee Gees, elevating their public perception from “misfit” group to “major presence on the pop scene for four whole decades.” He chronicles the lives of brothers Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb, from poverty-stricken roots, watching their father struggle to buy food, to first harmonizing together as the Rattlesnakes on stage in 1958. Success began to simmer after the family relocated to Australia and the brothers rebranded themselves as the Bee Gees. Their first single was “The Battle of the Blue and the Grey,” recorded in 1963, when all three were teenagers, and they followed with the hit songs “Massachusetts” and “New York Mining Disaster 1941.” Stardom came calling when Vince Melouney and Colin Petersen joined the group, followed by producer Arif Mardin, whose risky rearrangement of the band’s core sound capitalized on the “heightened excitement” of Barry’s falsetto. Then came their seemingly endless string of disco hits in the late 1970s and ’80s, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, various celebrity collaborations, and the tragic death of brother Andy in 1988. More revivals followed as the group continued to record until their run abruptly ended with the death of Maurice in 2003. Each of these meticulously researched details pops as Stanley puts his seasoned narrative flair to entertaining use, recounting the group’s evolution as a global sensation stemming from the wave of hits they wrote, produced, and performed across every decade. A lengthy discography provides a fitting closer to a fond biography intensively exploring a band who were “inventive, shape-shifting, writers of death-haunted melodies, with voices that sounded like no one else.”

A bright, informative, essential retrospective for Bee Gees fans.