We still hear from the two of them, via archival interviews, but their absence still hangs over the film as much as Gibbs’s introduction to it does. But, unfortunately, they’re no longer here to tell it Maurice died in 2003 following complications from surgery and Robin died in 2012 of cancer.
His bandmates, younger twin brothers Robin and Maurice, “would have a different memory,” he says. He adds that his memories only partially reflect the Bee Gees’ complete experience.
#Bee gees documentary how to#
Speaking in 2019 from his home in Miami, the city where the Bee Gees first figured out how to infuse R&B into their music, the eldest Gibb brother is in his early 70s, his famously lustrous, wavy mane now wispier and whiter.
“I am beginning to recognize the fact that nothing is true,” Barry Gibb says in the doc’s opening moments. It invites its audience to see the band’s success from a deeper, more contextualized point of view. This is a rock documentary that doesn’t just recount a band’s rise, breakup, and successful reunion, though it does do that. Marshall, writer Mark Monroe, and story consultant Cassidy Hartmann actively wrestle with the band’s legacy to explore the true origins and subtexts of their sound.
#Bee gees documentary movie#
But the movie is more than a biography or nostalgia strut down “Stayin’ Alive” lane. Directed by filmmaker and producer Frank Marshall, the compelling, nearly two-hour movie traces the band’s history from British kids finding musical success in Australia to internationally known pop balladeers to one of the most prodigious architects of dance-floor favorites in the history of music. In late 1977 and ’78, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was such a culturally dominating force, one fueled by multiple hits written and recorded by the trio of Gibb brothers, that it has been natural to primarily associate the Bee Gees’ sound with white leisure suits, light-up dance floors, and the image of John Travolta grooving with one hip popped and an index finger pointed toward heaven.īut there is far more depth and breadth to the Bee Gees’ story, their talent, and their influences than the reductive image of them as the kings of disco suggests, as the new HBO documentary, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, airing Saturday night, makes clear. The Bee Gees became, and remain, synonymous with the mainstream popularity of disco. It also smartly notes that disco itself was born long before the Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever, or capitalism caught up to it.
0 kommentar(er)
