Barry Gibb

Barry Gibb: The Falsetto That Ate 1978

Some time in 1975, in a studio session for an album called *Main Course*, the producer Arif Mardin asked the three Gibb brothers a question that redirected popular music: could any of them scream — scream in falsetto? Barry Gibb could. Two years later, between 24 December 1977 and 2 September 1978, songs he had written sat at number one on the American charts for twenty-seven of thirty-seven weeks. He had been a professional musician for roughly fifteen years by then, and it had taken him that long to find out what his own voice could do.

Douglas, Manchester, Brisbane

Barry Alan Crompton Gibb was born on 1 September 1946 in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, to Hugh Gibb, a drummer, and Barbara, from Manchester. He had an older sister, Lesley, and — arriving on 22 December 1949 — fraternal twin brothers, Robin and Maurice. A fourth brother, Andy, came later and would matter enormously to the story. At two, Barry suffered a severe scalding accident that left permanent scarring.

The family moved to Manchester in 1955, where the brothers formed a skiffle group called the Rattlesnakes, playing Cliff Richard, Paul Anka and Buddy Holly covers, and later renamed themselves Wee Johnny Hayes and the Blue Cats. In August 1958 the Gibbs emigrated to Australia under an assisted-migration scheme, sailing on the *Fairsea*.

The Long Way Round

Australia is where the group became the Bee Gees, and where they served an apprenticeship considerably less glamorous than the mythology suggests — performing from 1959 at venues including Redcliffe Speedway. By 1963 they were signed to Festival Records, assigned to the Leedon imprint, and released a first single, "The Battle of the Blue and the Grey," written by Barry. He was sixteen.

They sailed back to England in early 1967 and, on 24 February, passed an audition with the manager Robert Stigwood. That single meeting converted a Brisbane covers act into an international recording career.

The Scream in Falsetto

What happened at the *Main Course* sessions is the pivot of Barry Gibb's professional life and, unusually for a career-defining innovation, it was somebody else's idea. Mardin asked for a falsetto scream; Gibb discovered he possessed one of the most far-reaching high registers in commercial music. It became the sound of the late 1970s — and, eventually, one of the most instantly identifiable voices in the history of the pop single. *Q* magazine still placed him at number 38 on its 2007 list of the hundred greatest singers.

Saturday Night Fever and the Monopoly

The *Saturday Night Fever* soundtrack, released in November 1977, became the best-selling soundtrack album ever made. The statistics that followed read like a misprint. Gibb wrote or co-wrote sixteen Billboard Hot 100 number ones. He shares with John Lennon and Paul McCartney the record for the most consecutive Hot 100 chart-toppers, at six. In 1977 he had five songs in the American Top Ten simultaneously — the only songwriter ever to do it — and wrote four of the top five. He holds the record for four consecutive US number ones: "Stayin' Alive," Andy Gibb's "Love Is Thicker Than Water," "Night Fever" (seven weeks at the top), and "If I Can't Have You," recorded by Yvonne Elliman.

The Bee Gees' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame citation notes they have been outsold by only five acts in history: Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Garth Brooks and Paul McCartney. The Kennedy Center puts the group's sales above 220 million records, with twenty-one number ones across the US and UK charts. Guinness World Records ranks Gibb the second most successful songwriter of all time, behind McCartney.

Giving the Songs Away

The stranger and more revealing part of his career is what he did with the songs he did not keep. He produced Barbra Streisand's *Guilty* in 1980, singing the Top Five title duet and taking "What Kind of Fool" to number one on the Adult Contemporary chart. He wrote and produced Dionne Warwick's *Heartbreaker* in 1982, composing every song on it but one. He wrote and produced Kenny Rogers' *Eyes That See in the Dark* in 1983, which contained "Islands in the Stream," the Rogers–Dolly Parton duet that became one of the best-selling country singles ever released. He wrote and produced for his brother Andy, including *After Dark* in 1980, and began work on Diana Ross's *Eaten Alive* in 1985.

The Kennedy Center's official citation identifies this as the distinguishing habit of his career: he was, it says, "unafraid to give away songs most performers wouldn't dare part with." The catalogue has since been covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Snoop Dogg.

His own solo records are the quieter column of the ledger: *Now Voyager* (1984), which produced the Adult Contemporary hit "Shine, Shine"; *In the Now* (2016), co-written with his sons Stephen and Ashley; and *Greenfields* (2021), which reworked Bee Gees songs as country duets with Dolly Parton, Alison Krauss and Little Big Town.

The Last Gibb

Maurice died suddenly on 12 January 2003. Robin died on 20 May 2012, leaving Barry the only surviving Gibb brother. He has said his wife Linda and Paul McCartney helped him through Robin's death. He married Linda Gray on 1 September 1970 — his twenty-fourth birthday — after a first marriage to Maureen Bates ended that year; they have five children, and became US citizens in 2009 while keeping their British nationality.

Why Barry Is Called a Genius

The Kennedy Center, awarding him its Honors in December 2023, called him "among the most prolific, influential, and acclaimed musicians ever to have lived" — about as close to an official use of the word as an institution gets. The specific faculty is melodic: an ability to generate hooks that survive transplantation into any genre and any voice, which is why his songs work as disco, as country, as adult contemporary, as soul, and why they keep getting covered across fifty years and every idiom from Presley to Snoop Dogg.

The second, rarer quality is authorial self-effacement. Most songwriters of his commercial standing write for themselves. Gibb repeatedly wrote in somebody else's register — Streisand's, Rogers', Warwick's, his younger brother's — and produced number ones in voices unlike his own. That requires an unusual detachment from ego for someone with his chart record, and it is the thing the Kennedy Center singled out.

The counter-case deserves airing. Much of the greatest Bee Gees work was made by three brothers in a room, and the harmonic architecture that makes those records distinctive is genuinely collective; isolating "Barry's genius" from Robin's voice and Maurice's arrangements is partly a survivor's accident of attribution. The falsetto — the single element most responsible for his peak — was prompted by a producer, not conceived by him. His solo albums never approached the group's impact. And chart dominance is not the same argument as artistic depth: the disco backlash of 1979 treated his ubiquity as evidence against him. What is not arguable is the craft. Sixteen number ones written across four decades and half a dozen genres is not luck, and it is not a fashion.

Legacy

The honours have accumulated steadily: induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame with his brothers in 1994, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, six competitive Grammy Awards from fifteen nominations plus the Legend Award in 2003 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015, a CBE in 2002, a knighthood in the 2018 New Year Honours, and Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia in January 2022. The Kennedy Center's summary is the one that will probably last: his music is "etched into the very fabric of American life," which is a remarkable thing to say about a boy from Douglas who learned his trade at a speedway outside Brisbane.

Achievements

• Knight Bachelor — 2018
• Worked as singer, composer and songwriter