Dig. David Nichols S.

‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (which the Gibbs had recorded for Jacobsen and Joye in 1958)²⁰ and the George Formby-esque forays of Herman’s Hermits. It is also patronising in the way only a bunch of aspirationals like the Gibbs could be: of course, the Gibb boys yearned for stardom, but their family’s move to Australia from England in the 50s is indicative of that immigrant ‘improvement’ spirit. ‘Coalman’ is also lyrically so simplistic that it must surely have been written in minutes, without pause to think of the possible subtexts to a song about a boy who tells his romantic troubles to a young coalman who ‘takes my hand’ and ‘understands’. Of course, this is also an indication of a historical period which was not so much innocent as adept at compartmentalisation and denial: only a few listeners are likely to imagine that the singer was enjoying the coalman’s soothing touch and empathy in itself, and they weren’t going to discuss this openly. But even if one can explain away the gay interpretation – or rather, the way its possibilities were ignored in the 1960s – while acknowledging and enjoying, even admiring, its existence, that still leaves the song’s perverse assertion that the ‘coalman’ is a ‘soul man’. If we assume the coal man is white (the undoubtedly white Burns in fact applied burnt cork to his face for promotional photos), then the melting-pot of ridiculous stereotypes – the simple, working-class, dirty but caring labourer with the heart of an African-American (or Aboriginal?) man – is complete.

      What were the Bee Gees saying about the boy in the song’s relationship with the coalman? They weren’t saying anything, of course. They were merely running together every rhyme for ‘coalman’ (a reasonably rare profession in itself in Australia in the 60s, incidentally) they could think of, fitting the words to a catchy tune, and giving Ronnie Burns a hit single. Like many of their songs from their Australian period, the result was childlike and flippant, the product of three outsider siblings with a knack for attention-getting, whose life experience derived in large part from listening to other people’s music. David N. Meyer, author of a 2013 history of the group, observes insightfully that the Gibbs ‘grew up as performers with no real sense of themselves’. Even truer is this critique: ‘The Bee Gees would forever suffer from not being able to tell their best material from their worst.’²¹

      The Bee Gees released ‘Spicks and Specks’ – a classic pop song of the once-heard-never-forgotten variety, based on Maurice’s bold and resonant keyboard riff played on the St Clair pianola²² – on Barry’s birthday, 1 September, 1966. They performed the song that night at a Sydney Town Hall show at which they shared the bill with a panoply of talents including Vince Melouney. Dinah Lee,²³ who was also performing that night, was offered ‘Spicks and Specks’ by the Gibbs, who were not yet convinced of its value.²⁴ Quite different from the rich, dramatic ballads they would begin to produce in London only six months later, ‘Spicks and Specks’ is charged and rollicking; it was accompanied by a film clip of the group mugging and clowning around a Cessna. The origins of the song’s title are very obscure, though one suggestion at the time was that it had originally been intended as the name for a pop group.²⁵ If this was so, it offers further evidence of cognitive disconnect (‘spick’ is, or was, a charged racial epithet).

      The Gibbs had already decided to leave Australia and return to Britain at the time ‘Spicks and Specks’ was released. There are a number of possible reasons for this decision, not all of them commercial. It has been suggested that the boys’ Murry Wilson-esque father, Hugh Gibb, was worried that Barry would be conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, which Australia had entered in 1965 in support of US involvement.²⁶ The relocation to Britain may have been intended to be temporary; Barry reputedly bid farewell to his friend Colin Stead, Baker later reported, with the words, ‘I’ll see you in 12 months’.²⁷ Other sources also suggest that they did not intend to return to Britain permanently;²⁸ in keeping with the group’s approach to recording, they were probably playing it by ear. There was nothing promising on the horizon, and while ‘Spicks and Specks’ might arguably have been seen as a song with which to conquer the world (it was a hit in some European countries, but was essentially a parting gift for Australia), the Bee Gees’ future was unknowable.

      Soon after their arrival, the Gibbs were lucky enough to make a connection in London with Robert Stigwood, a fellow Australian who was at that stage in controversial negotiations to take over the running of Brian Epstein’s NEMS organisation. The Bee Gees were able to sign with Polydor internationally as a result of Stigwood’s intervention, while remaining on the Spin label in Australia. Someone talked them out of jumping on the temporarily popular bandwagon of ‘world’ bands and renaming themselves Rupert’s World (it may have been Stigwood, wanting to avoid confusion with a rockier group from Sydney, Lloyd’s World, which he was briefly interested in; Johnny Young, of whom more anon, had previously named his group Danny’s World).

      The Bee Gees’ third album was entitled Bee Gees 1st. It was an instant hit. The sleevenotes to the album accidentally mentioned that they had spent some time in Australia but firmly ignored the existence of the band’s previous LPs: this was a rebirth. Lillian Roxon neither praised nor derided the group when she described them in her 1969 Rock Encyclopedia as sounding “more like the Beatles than the Beatles ever did.”²⁹ Bee Gees 1st contains some brilliant songs, most notably the superb evergreen ‘To Love Somebody’, the propulsive ‘Red Chair Fade Away’, the plaintive ‘Holiday’, and the completely bizarre, heavy, Gregorian chant-infused ‘Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You’. This last song, as well as the one that follows it on the album, ‘Craise Finton Kirk Royal Academy of Arts’, were singles for Johnny Young; the first of them – released in the UK as ‘Every Christian’ and credited to ‘Johnnie Young’ – was notoriously one of those songs that might have been a hit in Britain if pirate radio hadn’t been scuttled.

      Most important for Bee Gees’ future career was the hit single ‘New York Mining Disaster, 1941’, reportedly inspired by their visit to the Welsh mining village of Aberfan in the company of Ossie Byrne, who remained their producer for Bee Gees First. Aberfan had been the scene of a tragic accident the previous year, when a coal tip collapsed onto houses and a school, killing 116 children and 28 adults:³⁰ certainly, the switching of the date to exactly a quarter century earlier, as well as the relocation to a setting as different from regional Wales as possible without being wilfully obscure, supports this idea. Yet perhaps another story about the song’s origins – that the group were inspired by the claustrophobic feelings induced by a power outage in a demo studio in London – is more in keeping with their common state of detachment from the real world.³¹ In late 1967, Robin and his wife Molly were in a serious rail accident, and bravely assisted in rescuing other passengers from the wreckage.³² This brush with real tragedy – many of the passengers Robin pulled from the wreckage were dead – inspired him to write the ballad ‘Really and Sincerely’ the following day.

      The Bee Gees were still an Australian group, and they hung out with other young Australian men in London in their early days there, as the provenance of the Johnny Young single suggests. Former Aztecs guitarist Vince Melouney – who had played on a few of the Bee Gees’ Sydney recordings on a freelance basis – benefited financially from this cameraderie: having relocated to England at the end of 1966, he first found a job with Simca Motors; then, he told Lee Dillow in 1971, the Easybeats ‘introduced me around to quite a few people, one of whom was Long John Baldry. He had a band together and the guitar player was leaving and I was going to take his place . . . That all fell through, of course . . . Right after the Baldry thing [the Gibbs] arrived in town – I rang them up to say hello and that’s how it started. We did a session that night and from that time I was in the band.’³³

      Melouney has the distinction of being the only Bee Gee not named Gibb to have a song recorded and released by the band (‘Such a Shame’, on Idea). Additionally, his playing was singled out on occasion – for instance, for its ‘slightly subdued Hendrix style’.³⁴ Despite this success and the financial reward, he was frustrated by the incessant touring and the restrictions placed on him by the Gibbs. His account to Dillow of the Bee Gees’ activities in the late 60s is telling:

      We never really got to see or do much. I mean we were there and it was like working