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Journalism of Courage
There are many ways to mark one’s ageing process. Falling milk teeth, whiskers and girlfriends mark the happy moments. Among the sadder, grimmer milestones are the passing of those we’ve grown up idolising, or simply observing: a cricketer or footballer, a musician or writer, someone whose career has developed before our eyes, whose life becomes, subconsciously but inextricably, linked with ours.
And so, when I got the news that Maurice Gibb had died, I felt the gentle tug of Time. Because Maurice and his brothers were very much part of my growing up. And that of my brother, and so many of our friends and contemporaries. It seems unfashionable to say it (or maybe Maurice’s death will give the Bee Gees phenomenon street cred) but I’ve always been a Bee Gees fan.
Even in those early days when they burst upon India courtesy Saturday Night Fever, when they were called the Heebeejeebees or Bibijis (my father called them the Luton Girls’ Choir).
Yet by then, the late 1970s, the group had been around for a musical lifetime and boasted a classy repertoire.
They were ballads in the truest tradition, though some had a morbid tinge to them: the self-explanatory New York Mining Disaster 1941, the death-row convict of Gotta Get a Message to You. But songs like Words had unmistakable beauty, helped perhaps by the fact that they were sung in the brothers’ natural baritone.
A career spanning five decades (with hits in each) leaves every artiste vulnerable to fast-changing public taste. Some, like U2, reinvent themselves one step ahead of time; the Bee Gees didn’t, and suffered every time the beat changed. So, in the early 1970s, they found themselves balladeers lost in a world looking for something a little more racy.
After three years in the wilderness, they staged one of pop music’s most emphatic, astonishing comebacks. Take any of the band’s greatest hits compilations; Run To Me (1972) is usually followed by Jive Talkin’ (1975).
The few seconds between the last strings of the easybeat ballad and the scratchy, funky guitar intro to the bouncing disco track are a bridge between two disparate musical worlds which few groups have crossed so successfully.
The rest, as they say, is history. Two years down the line was Saturday Night Fever, responsible for the rapid spread of disco from the gay, black nightclubs to a world not entirely sure if it wanted to embrace it (and responsible, too, for Mithun Chakraborty, white suits and Bhappi Lahiri).
When disco died, the brothers went away; then came back in the mid-1980s with a string of hit uptempo ballads. This time, with disco no longer an outcaste in the society of contemporary music, they were back for good. They had, for company, the fast-breeding, stunningly successful boy bands — Take That, Boyzone, Westlife — who took their songs to a new generation. But the Bee Gees were nonpareil. Words were all they had, but they gave us so much more.
