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developed a distinctive, tremulous singing style (within the family it was jokingly referred to as ‘the quavering Arab’).³ Maurice was always a minor force as a songwriter, providing additional material for albums and complementary instrumentation and arrangement, such as the crucial piano riff for ‘Spicks and Specks’, their first big Australian hit.

      Part of the Bee Gees’ official story is that Australia did not recognise them until it was too late – that is, until they had decided to return to the UK in 1967. Erroneous claims abound on the sleeve notes of reissues, such as a mid-70s Pickwick cash-in collection of the group’s early 60s material, whose notes assert that ‘I Was a Lover, a Leader of Men’ was a number one hit in Australia in 1965, and in quickie bios, for example that ‘when the Bee Gees left Australia, they’d already gotten three of their songs on the Australian charts in the number one position’.⁴ Tony Brady, a Festival Records employee in the 1960s, opines in the first episode of the series Long Way to the Top that Barry Gibb’s music was ‘so far ahead’ of local artists.⁵ But this is hindsight talking, and he’s wrong (at least, the recorded output does not support his statement). Australians, like mass consumers everywhere, have never lacked a desire to purchase music of remarkably low quality, but nonetheless the story of the Bee Gees being underappreciated in Australia in the 60s glosses over the inferior and derivative nature of much of their early work. Which is to say: the early Bee Gees weren’t a success and didn’t deserve to be. The novelty factor of a weird-looking, fraternal folk-pop threesome who wrote (most of) their own songs – and, in fact, songs for a considerable number of other artists – may have been compelling when it came to filling up the schedules of television and live variety shows, but there are simply very few songs from the Bee Gees’ early years that shine forth as original or interesting. This is true even within the often unexciting framework of early 60s pop music. ‘It is no wonder that the Bee Gees never had a vast send-up [sic] when they left Australia’, wrote ‘Irene’ in a letter to Go-Set magazine:

      Before they left, their music was mediocre to say the least, except their last record ‘Spicks and Specks’ . . . How are newspapers supposed to acclaim a pathetic group? . . . Although the Bee Gees are now an excellent group, they should realize their position when they left us.⁶

      The group’s migration history is relatively well known. The Gibb family had lived both on the Isle of Man and in Manchester in the 1940s and 50s and by the time they relocated to Queensland in the late 1950s, the brothers had already made tentative forays into the field of public performance. Some sources, including the group’s own lighthearted comic-strip story, suggest the family’s relocation was due in part to the desire to avoid reform school punishment for Maurice and Robin, who habitually committed ‘Grand Arson’ in Manchester.⁷ Curious connections extend across the group’s early days: they travelled to Australia on the same ship as Red Symons, later Skyhooks’ lead guitarist,⁸ and they knew Lobby Loyde and Billy Thorpe as teenagers in Brisbane. Loyde and Thorpe were not just friends, but also competitors, as Loyde told the authors of Wild About You:

      We were all buddies when we were young. It was the eternal talent quest thing. Every time you’d walk in, if Gibby and the two little dribblers were there, you were just wasting your time because you knew they’d take [the prize] away. Even if they were rotten, they’d still get the vote, because Barry was about four foot tall and they [Robin and Maurice] were about two foot tall, and they used to get up there and sing harmonies and it’d be all over for everyone else. And if they didn’t win, Thorpe did. So if those two started, you wouldn’t have a shot!⁹

      The number of ‘BGs’ in their life at this time is also peculiar – and was clearly impossible to resist when it came to choosing a name. Local impresario Bill Good had organised a racing meeting at Brisbane’s Redcliffe Speedway and invited the Gibbs to perform, presumably during a break in the main event; disc jockey Bill Gates was driving in a stock car race and was impressed enough to offer his services as manager. Legend has it that the group’s remarkably hokey name emerged from a combination of these two and Barry Gibb, although Glenn A. Baker has countered this with his own claim that the group was already known, very ungrammatically, as the Brother Gibbs.¹⁰ English and Brychta’s suggestion that Gates ‘tried to encourage sister Leslie to join the group as singer’ renders Baker’s assertion problematic.¹¹

      Gates had a radio show, Midday Platter Chatter, and in the innocently nepotistic spirit of the times, would play Bee Gees songs on his program. The group soon anchored a variety show on local Brisbane television on Friday nights. A new management team – the Jacobsen brothers – tried to get Festival interested, and Jacobsen ‘sacrificed’ one of his recording acts, Judy Cannon, for the sake of the Gibbs (Cannon was leaving the country anyway).

      The Bee Gees grew up in public, and were both outgoing and impulsive. Jacobsen later recalled that mainstream television producers saw them as ‘cheeky little bastards, young upstarts. It was almost impossible to get Bandstand to take them.’¹² They nevertheless had a profile: Jacobsen persuaded Lee Gordon to let them support Chubby Checker.¹³ The group’s (or more accurately, at this early stage, Barry’s) songwriting ability was notable from an early age, even if at this point it manifested itself most notably as a simple capacity for high output, and a ballad by the 17-year-old Barry, ‘They’ll Never Know’, was covered by Wayne Newton. Baker states that over sixty Gibb songs were recorded by Australian artists in the 60s. In an era before it was de rigueur for groups to generate most or all of their own material, this ability to write was very important; the contents of the group’s first album was very clearly spelt out in its title: The Bee Gees Sing and Play 14 Barry Gibb Songs.

      Soon they were being extensively recorded by yet another mentor, Ossie Byrne, in his St Clair Recording Studio, located behind a butcher’s in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville.¹⁴ It is important to note that the Bee Gees might well have been unable to find and utilise a studio in the way they did Byrne’s had they been living anywhere but in Sydney (where the family had moved in early 1963 with the boys’ career in mind). The Bee Gees became a group who could work up their releases, as well as backing tracks for songs intended for others, on tape – as opposed to bringing fully realised songs to the studio. The Gibbs would later joke that their popularity with Byrne was primarily due to a sexual attraction they held for him, though there is no evidence for this, any more than there is regarding their relationship with their manager of the 60s and 70s, Robert Stigwood.

      The group was plainly highly regarded in the pop industry at the time, as is evidenced by the strong support that Fred Marks of Festival Records gave them¹⁵ and by their ongoing relationship with songwriter/entrepreneur Nat Kipner, who co-wrote songs with Maurice and other group members and whose son Steve was also involved in some of their projects. Nat Kipner issued Bee Gees records on his Everybody’s label, which was tied to the well-known gossip/glossy magazine (Lilian Roxon was perhaps its most notable contributor); this later morphed into the Spin label and booking agency, secretly co-owned and operated by Clive Packer (so secret even Packer’s wife was unaware of the connection).¹⁶ The Packers are a powerful media and, more recently, gambling family; Clive was the patriarch Frank’s ‘outsider’ son. Kipner arranged distribution for Spin with Festival, and this company retained rights to the Spin label and held an extended contract for Bee Gees recordings following their international success, a contract that continued into the 70s. Kipner also produced the hit ‘Spicks and Specks’.¹⁷

      Other musical Bee Gee friends of the early-to-mid 60s included Trevor Gordon (a former schoolfriend and TV show host in Brisbane), Colin Stead, Lori Balmer, Ronnie Burns and Cheryl Grey, née Sang. A decade later, after she had reputedly sustained a singing career for some years in Yugoslavia, Stigwood and Barry Gibb renamed the Melbourne-born Cheryl as Samantha Sang (the ‘Samantha’ came from one of Gibb’s cats), and the Gibbs wrote and produced the international hit ‘Emotion’ for her.¹⁸

      The Bee Gees’ abilities as producers and writers were developed in their Hurstville days. Their song ‘Coalman,’ which was a hit for Ronnie Burns,¹⁹

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