The world is full of Bee Gees fans. Yet for a band of such renown, little is known about Barry, Maurice, and Robin Gibb. People tend to have their favorite era of the Bee Gees's career, but many listeners are also conscious that there is more to uncover about the band. This book will provide the solution, by pulling together every fascinating strand to tell the story of a group with the imagination of the Beatles, the pop craft of ABBA, the drama of Fleetwood Mac, and the emotional heft of the Beach Boys.
[A] definitive group biography ... This book, like the others, is both a fanboy’s love letter and a detailed, what-did-they-take-with-their-tea account of the musicians’ daily lives ... By the end, the brothers become a microcosm of everything that happened in the 20th-century pop world.
Stanley makes a strong case for the Bee Gees’ impact on twentieth-century music, but his portrayal also reveals them as harbingers of the global pop of the twenty-first. He repeatedly emphasises that the Bee Gees’ lyrics sound like translationese. In this they anticipate the present era.
Stanley is a wonderful guide, showing us the gems of this vast catalogue with enthusiasm, insight and wit ... It’s a weakness of Stanley’s book that he had no interactions with his heroes – was Barry even approached, I wonder? – and is overly reliant on observations and quotes culled from press clippings. Although he rattles through a complex triple life story at a fair clip, covering 70 years in under 300 pages, he isn’t really interested in their private lives, and I came away feeling I didn’t understand the Gibbs any better as people.
