The Bee Gees are underrated as musicians – and yes, it’s a tragedy

What do we hear when we listen to a Bee Gees song?  

Over their four-decade career, the Gibb brothers – Barry, Robin and Maurice – were child stars on Australian television, a London band mistaken for The Beatles, poster boys of the disco phenomenon, and songwriters for superstars including Diana Ross and Barbra Streisand. 

But the band is too often reduced to their falsetto singing style and the backlash they faced. 

While Frank Marshall’s documentary How can you mend a broken heart goes some way to rectifying this, music lovers have repeatedly failed to recognise the importance of this band and the music they made. 

I was interested in researching what made the Bee Gees’ songs so distinctive and wanted to look into their creative process, as told by those who wrote, recorded or performed the music.  

So, what can we learn from the original samples used in the stomps to ‘You win again‘; the unassuming acoustic guitar in ‘Still waters run deep‘; the brotherly feud that formed the basis of ‘How can you mend a broken heart‘; the original drum parts used before the famous loop in ‘Stayin’ alive‘; or the nonsensical lyrics sung in the early demos of ‘Tragedy’? 

Behind every finished song is the intriguing tale of its production.  

Lights out, creativity on

The band was recording at IBC Studios in London in 1967 when the lights and power went out suddenly.  

This prompted the brothers to go to the dark and reverberant foyer. Inspired by their surroundings, they wrote ‘New York mining disaster 1941‘, a song about someone trapped in a mine.  

 Reverb is a common effect used in popular music to artificially create space. In some Bee Gees songs, we can hardly hear it – such as in their 1968 ballad ‘Words’ – while other times, such as in the 1980s synth pop comeback ‘You win again’, we can barely hear anything else. 

While reverb was central to the writing process of ‘New York mining disaster 1941’, with the band’s surroundings during the power outage influencing the song’s sense of space, the finished recording provides little evidence of this.  

Other songs on the same album- such as the Gregorian chant-inspired ‘Every Christian lion-hearted man will show you‘ – make greater use of studio reverb.  

Yet without the use of reverb, ‘New York mining disaster 1941‘ might never have been written.  

The studio commute

One night, while driving from home to Criteria Studios in Miami, Barry Gibb noticed the sound of his car travelling along a bridge.  

The sound of tires crossing the bridge at a specific speed went on to inspire the rhythm of ‘Jive talkin”.   

Yet, we don’t hear this in the end – we hear instruments recorded in a studio.  

A scratchy guitar – produced by the guitar technique ‘palm muting’ – heralds the start of the song, followed by bass and kick drum.  

‘Jive talkin’’ set the tempo and mood for the Bee Gees’ disco years and their relocation to Miami. The song’s sole purpose seemed to be to get people on their feet. It worked.  

While the bridge Barry drove across was central to the writing process it is not what we hear in the actual song. 

The inspiring locales of the bridge and the foyer suggest that sometimes the process of making the song is interesting due to the things we don’t hear in the recording: the instruments, influences and studio effects that were replaced, removed or reduced in prominence along the way.  

In my research, I borrow from other fields, such as psychology, to call these elements of the production process ‘latent elements’. They may appear inconsequential, but they are vital to the creative process. 

Studying pop song production

Our interest in understanding the process of making pop songs often stems from a desire to learn about something novel we can hear in the completed work.  

Latent elements in the Bee Gees’ production, however, invite us to consider the things we can’t hear. 

As musicians, songwriters and producers, the band had huge privilege, seemingly with as much studio time as they wanted. The Bee Gees also used recording technologies to shape the sound they were after. Key elements of their sound would come and go through this process. 

The recently established Society for Music Production Research suggests that academic interest in understanding popular music production is growing.  

Fans have been curious for some time. Documentaries such as Classic albums and biopics like Rocketman show an eagerness to understand the creation of iconic records. The Beatles: get back presents a staggering eight hours of footage of the band’s creative process. 

These stories highlight that the creative process is messy and bumpy, and creative recording technologies allow it to be this way.  

Right now, more people are recording music than ever before in history – using DIY recording technology as minimalist as a smartphone. It’s interesting to think about the latent elements that will emerge from this new process. 

Bee Gees, process and latent elements in music production by Dr Pat O’Grady is available here.