The Bee Gees’ 1974 album, Mr Natural, and their 1975 album, Main Course, redirected the sibling group (Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb) away from melancholic pop towards R&B, soul and funk. That pop writer/historian Bob Stanley decided to use the title of their 1976 album as the signifier for his comprehensive biography makes sense: Children of the World predated by some months their soundtrack work for the 1977 movie, Saturday Night Fever – after which the Bee Gees never looked back. Not bad going for three brothers born in the late 1940s on the Isle of Man and raised in a drab suburb of Manchester before settling in Australia. Stanley, however, wants to make a point beyond the family background – he aims to explain why, despite “earning enough trophies, gold discs and accolades to fill a museum, they don’t really receive their dues”.
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Chronology exists side by side with perspective and solid critique. The brothers’ very early times in the Isle of Man and Manchester are described in vivid detail (“1950s Manchester felt wet and cold in decline”), while the family’s eventual move to Redcliffe, north of Brisbane, is defined in terms of colour (“bottle greens and battleship greys had been replaced by iridescent yellows, brilliant blues, sparkles of light”). It was here, following a crossing on an ocean liner where they would perform Everly Brothers songs every night, that the die was cast: the brothers Gibb would enter talent contests, they would have their own local television show, and – with Barry aged 12 – would start to write original songs.
The subsequent trajectory – the brothers returning to the UK, signing to Polydor Records, being managed by Robert Stigwood, scoring 14 Top 10 UK hits between 1967 and 1979, further significant fame and success, now with a disco tint, post-Saturday Night Fever, and the ignominy of not being invited to perform at Live Aid – is outlined in Stanley’s signature meticulous fashion. There may be no direct input from the sole surviving brother, Barry, but in his quest to “give them their rightful place at the very top of pop’s table”, there are no Bee Gees stones here that haven’t been upturned.
