Book review: The Bee Gees: The Biography
The Bee Gees: The Biography is touted as the first narrative biography of the group "with two years of investigative research".
is touted as the first narrative biography of the group "with two years of investigative research".
There's a compelling story to be told about this family act, which sold more than 250 million records, wrote countless multi-genre classics, helped put Miami on the pop music map, and suffered the loss of three of the four brothers: solo artist Andy at age 30 in 1988, Maurice at 53 (2003) and Robin, last year, at 62.
This book, however, is a woeful missed opportunity that rehashes previously published accounts. It spends a chapter reviewing Barry Gibb's first solo concert in 2012 at Hollywood's Hard Rock Live yet fails to detail more significant topics such as the surviving brothers' falling-out after Maurice died in 2003 from a twisted intestine.
Meyer, obviously not a fan of the Bee Gees' music no matter how much he protests otherwise, is entitled to criticise the trio's music: "The Bee Gees' tracks, save one, have not aged well … No late-period Bee Gees track offers a greater conundrum than . A closer listen reveals the core problem. The vocal-only tracks from are hard, ugly and effortful. The harshness of the vocals is a hidden time bomb in the song, making it hard to listen all the way through," he writes.
Meyer's prose reaches a vulgar nadir when his observations curdle into outrageous, crass juvenilia. , a 1975 hit and clearly an innocuous love song to a woman named Fanny, elicits this response: "It's a Robin, one-off dirty joke, either for the benefit of, or at the expense of, their gay audience.